EXPERIENCE THE SOURCE OF LOVE WITHIN
Many wonder, "How can I get more love in my life?" The problem with this question is that it assumes you don't have enough love right now and that you have to do something to get it. It also assumes that love is something we get from other people. If you believe these assumptions, you will get busy trying to do something to get love, and you will be doing those things from a sense of lack, which is not particularly attractive. When we believe we lack love, we create a sense of lack within ourselves, and that sense of lack becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophesy, as people sense that we want something from them.
When we are looking to get something from people, even love, it's coming from the ego, which is a place of selfcenteredness, tension, and discontentment: "What can you do for me?" Other egos are also looking for what someone else can do for them. Those who are looking for something or someone to fulfill them from the outside aren't likely to find it, not only because other people don't necessarily want to fill that role, but also, more importantly, because we can never get enough love from outside ourselves to fulfill the ego's sense of lack.
The only solution to wanting more love is realizing the truth about love: It is our nature to love, and each of us has an unlimited supply of it, but we must choose to activate this supply of love by giving it away. The way to have the experience of love is to give love. When love is flowing from us, we experience love. It doesn't come from others. This becomes apparent when someone is in love with us, but we aren't in love with him or her. Someone loving us isn't enough to get us to feel love. Love isn't something someone can give us. What we really want is to feel the love that we are. The source of love is inside of us, and we experience love when we choose to give it to others.
We are used to thinking of love as an emotion, a feeling that sweeps over us, like when we fall in love. Falling in love is the most wonderful feeling, and yet, the feeling of falling in love isn't true love, and it doesn't last. We long for that feeling to be our ongoing experience, but it can't be. Falling in love is a feeling that comes and eventually goes. True love is not so much a feeling as a way of being. It's a state of acceptance, openness, kindness, and receptivity to another. We experience love as a result of being open and attentive to and accepting of whomever is in front of us.
Love also flows when we are simply open to and accepting of life and whatever experience we are having. Love flows from us (and is experienced by us) whenever we are fully present and accepting of how life is showing up, whether a relationship is part of that moment or not. Love flows whenever we aren't complaining about life, wanting something different, or judging and evaluating whatever is going on.
Love is our natural state. It's the state we drop into whenever we are simply saying yes to how life is showing up in the moment. The only thing that can interfere with this yes is the egoic mind saying no to life. So the only thing that can interfere with love is a thought! No person or circumstance can interfere with our ability to feel love unless we allow it to. And no person can make us feel love unless we allow it either. The really good news is that love is a possibility in every moment. It's in our control. It's our choice: We can choose to love whatever and whomever we are experiencing or not.
Our default position as humans seems to be to reject and find fault with our experience and with the people we encounter. But that doesn't have to be our response to life. We have the power to ignore the judgments and negativity of our minds and to open our hearts in acceptance to whatever happens to be showing up. When we do that, we discover that there's no shortage of love.
When we are very present to whatever experience we are having instead of involved in our thoughts about life, love flows outward from within us to whatever and whomever we are experiencing. We also find that love from others is the natural response to this outward flow. But the love that's returned to us is not the source of our love, as nice as that love might be.
You are the source of love, and you have the power to feel love. In any moment, you can choose love instead of following your train of thoughts about what you want and how you'd like things to be. You are the creator of your experience because you can choose how you respond to life. We may not be able to control what comes our way and whether we are in a relationship with someone at a particular time. But we can control how we choose to see and respond to whatever life brings us. Once we've learned that we are masters of our experience in this way, life can be full of love whether we have someone special returning our love or not.
From Living in the Now