This world is ripe and full with the yearning for love. We see it at every turn, every step, every defeat, every celebration. One of the greatest quests humans have is to reconcile and understand the essence of love.
We seem to have narrowed down our understanding to conditional and unconditional love. Conditional love, or attached love, comes from the experience of being attached or connected. Humans bond biologically; that is part of our nature. We are wired for survival to attach to other humans. These are close in relationships, ones we have cultivated over time.
Unconditional love is something we humans also strive for. This is a little more challenging—to love simply what is—without wanting to change it. It is a way of loving that is unattached, not entwined with the other, yet still large and full of benevolence. It’s an incredibly generous love from our human side. It is love that simply Is. Unconditional love is unchanging. It is always there; it doesn’t fluctuate or dissolve depending on situations or experience. It simply Is.
Our experience of Love has changed over our years of maturing. Like everything else we experience, our understanding of love is expanding, because our experience of love is expanding. As human beings, we are in a constant quest for love. I would posture that is our only real quest.
As we have grown over our lifetime, we eventually found this concept of unconditional love, and boy did that seem like the bomb. To be loved unequivocally with all our flaws and idiosyncrasies…now that would make us feel whole. Imagine being loved like that! And once we knew that kind of love, then we could actually find the way to be at peace with our self.
Earthly Love
Our human love, because it is finite, whether through death or another dissolution, will most certainly end. If we have truly loved, it will undeniably hurt. I would argue it will hurt undeniably every single time, no matter how much practice we have with knowing our unlimited or non-physical self. It will hurt because it ends an experience. We will grieve our lost loves. We should grieve our lost loves. It is part of the process of unwinding our physical, familiar connections.
Loss of love hurts because we are human and our particles are entwined with the other. When our love departs, a part of us departs as well. When we can expand our view wide enough, like zooming out on an image, we can feel how we really aren’t separated from these other particles. They have simply moved to a space that is no longer close in to our immediate human experience. We cannot touch them in the same way. Or talk to them. Or see their smile. Or feel the way their eyes caress us. We are no longer able to relate to their human self in our field.
The pain of the loss of earthly love is actually very close to the loss and separation we perceive when we incarnate here on the planet. Intellectually some of us have already reconciled this separation. We understand that we have twisted or sparked off from unity or source consciousness. Yet, we often feel like we are missing something or are longing for something…Even with all of our understanding of the cosmos, even when we understand about the Absolute and changeable energy, even then, the feel of longing and seeking for something still fills us.
Even with all of our learning and our strategic mind understanding, only an embodied experience of awakening to the both/and nature of our existence will reconcile the heartache of our perceived first loss of love—our perceived loss of our connection to our soul, divine or source self.
And still, this felt-sense knowing and experience of our source-self will not keep us from feeling our human/earthly loss when our loved one departs our life (or this physical plane). There is a paradoxical, magnetical pull that is part of our human experience here.
While we are experiencing these earthly, human qualities of finiteness, there is simultaneously a part of Us that is holding every single experience (the good, the bad, and even the ugly) in a state of unified and loving existence. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine yourself as this, too? Can you imagine yourelf feeling both your heart-aching pain, AND feeling the wider essence of something embracing, encompassing or surrounidng you with unconditional, never-wavering love? Both/And simultaneously? This and That, miraculously and invisibly woven together?
Our True Nature
This is our true nature. This and more. While this embodied awakening to our unseen world does not absolve us from our earthly or human heartache, it does open us up to more. It allows the spaces of ‘not enough’, missing a piece, and finite love to be held, if not filled. We still grow through experience and repetition. The more we agree it is ok to feel and lose earthly love, all the while knowing a felt-sense of a broader, undying expression of love and connection, the more we are able to hold both.
As humans, we have a history of needed tribal cooperation for survival. We evolved this into our earthly experience of love. We were (and are) dependent on more than our physical self here on this planet. We are shifting to the remembrance that we are connected to a part of our self that does not require this planet for its existence. We are uniting. We are learning to hold our flaws as beautiful pieces of our expression. We are learning to love another fully, while staying in deep connection to our wider and deeper soul.
We are evolving Love. And that, my friends, is worthy of the utmost of rejoicing. And the highest of celebration.