Part 2: Continuing to explore a deep, complex and beautiful question.
What does the word LOVE mean to you?
HOW do we love others UNconditionally? And do we WANT to love everyone unconditionally? Is this even possible….
First, let’s go further in Conditional love, by looking briefly at:
Love of Things
The word “things” here - meaning anything that is inanimate, i.e. Toys, cars, jewelry, house, heirlooms etc.
What objects are we attached to in our life - and do we Love them, or want them or need them
What Things do you LOVE? And why?
Nowadays, we tend to throw the word LOVE around quite a lot, particularly when talking about inanimate things. I also put my hands up for this one. I can talk about loving my Mum in one sentence and loving chocolate in the next. Of course I know and my heart knows the dramatic difference in these applications of the word Love, it is just an easy vocabulary to use.
Do I really LOVE chocolate. If it disappeared off the planet would I grieve for it - of course not. Perhaps for a day, to come to terms with not being able to taste melting sweetness again, but I would soon get over it. Perhaps one way of measuring the proportion of Love we have for someone or something, could be by understanding how much we would grieve if we no longer had that person or thing anymore.
Grief is Love turned inside out.
If I LOVE my phone but then a new model comes out and I then desire that new updated version, as soon as I get that, the old Iphone is history, sold or in the bin without a second thought.
What would make that Iphone more precious - what make us more attached to things? Sentimental Value - who an object is from, where an object has been, how long we have had it. Was it a gift, is it attached to a memory, an experience or an emotion?
Then, could the same be said for People. If the ‘others’ that we Love are connected to a Memory, an experience or an emotion - does that make us Love them more?
Is it possible to Love MORE or to Love LESS, anyway?
Why is it that we feel more love for some things or some people than others? Because of time, connection….
What about those people we feel we love more than our oldest friends after meeting them only once?
Back to Things - is it really possible to Truly LOVE an inanimate object, or is it the emotional attachments we have to objects?
Love for objects is almost always conditional - we love objects, food, tools, gadgets and trinkets because they do something for us. Make us feel good, happy, build something for us, fix things, house us, hold us, change us, make us beautiful, powerful, smarter, more efficient, more creative.
Try to think of some object you love that doesn’t serve a purpose for you. Would you love it if it didn’t function any more..?
Having covered the two major sources of EXTERNAL LOVE, it is time to move within. To the realm of the Self and what we Love about us, who we are.
DO YOU LOVE YOURSELF..?
Read Part 3 to find out....
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