I’ve always been a romantic. I believe I have a relentless hunger for experience and stimulation; all kinds of adventures beckon to my personality. I have always enjoyed the extremes of emotions. I love the films I make for myself where I can act. I always thought love was something you earned. Love was something that was only given to those who deserved it, and my standards were simply impossible.
As I practiced truthful contemplation and meditation, my personal relationship with this great idea called love began to change
transform. Slowly I discovered that Love must be given freely. Love is vast and limitless if I let it. When I find the courage to give love without fear, I feel inner peace. When I can give without the fear of not getting anything in return, I find myself receiving more than I ever thought possible.
The universe responds to the vibrations I radiate, and when I let go of my personal idea of how things should be, an awesome harmony begins to develop in reality. However, how do we do this? How do we really live in this state? How do we actively move forward to this point? How can we even see that this is a better way? Because, to be honest, if I had read something like this four years ago, I would have cursed at the cheesiness and seemingly blindly optimistic words of this piece.
As my meditation practice progressed, so did my level of self-awareness. I looked at myself with great tenacity. I started entertaining the thoughts in my head without necessarily accepting them. “I woke up from the hell of unquestioned thinking,” as Byron Katie says. By taking the time to focus my energy inward, I began to notice patterns and conditioning that were not serving me. Every time I withheld Love, my ego grinned and enjoyed some kind of immature pleasure. This satisfaction never lasted and with it came a feeling of longing afterwards. A feeling
of the desire for more would often arise after such actions.
Even when I felt like I was right, a void followed. Justice is a golden chain. I am not one to demonize the ego because it serves a purpose. However, the more I practiced meditation, the more I resonated with a desire to unfold myself from the petty uncertainties of such a false center of thought and action. Meditation gave me the strength to explore this idea of Love without surrender and without limitation.
As I polished and cultivated my personal lenses of perception, I began to see love in a mandalic way. Love was no longer on a spectrum. It was not the opposite of fear, hatred or even indifference. Love was an ever-expanding mandala of life force that formed the basis of our existence. I saw that the universe loved me in a very transcendent way. The world gives me the freedom and abundance to believe whatever I want. If I wanted to create an abundance of lack, judgment, and insecurity, that’s what I got.
Love started to blossom in my life. Love for the sick. Love for dementia patients. Love of evil. Love for the unjust. Love for both the malicious and the ignorant. Brief flashes of insight and clarity illustrated that Love was an ever-expanding sphere of energy that I could empower if I so desired.
It wasn’t easy. I fell often. But if I fell seven times, I promised I would get up eight. I wanted nothing more than to fully explore and dive into this idea of love. How sacred is it? How transcendent is it? How transformative can this power be? Step by step, breath by breath, intention by intention, thought by thought, moment by moment, I want to find out.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”