My friend Sam said, "Work on having your love be like a snail, always and consistently slow and steady..."
Throughout this post, when I say love, what I mean is just having an open heart. To me, love is simply having an open heart, being open, and letting down your walls. This is universal love.... It is not just romantic love. It is self-love. It is love for your family, love for your coworkers, love for all living things, love for life, just love, period.
Sam inspired me with this sentence. In a sense, he woke me up. I have spent much of my adult life creating pain for myself, opening and closing my heart, going up and down with my emotions, being hurt one moment, then loving another, then angry another, then feeling rejected, then feeling forgiving, then feeling disappointed, then feeling excited, then feeling compassionate, then understanding, then confused... and on and on. It is a painful cycle we all experience. Up one minute, then down the next. It causes us intense amounts of suffering. We are feeling happy and calm and at peace, or love, towards ourselves or towards someone else, or towards our life, and then one little thing knocks us right off balance, and we are upset and we shut down and our walls go up. And then somehow we get back to love again, but then are knocked off again and put our walls up again. On and on and on.
But what if we don't have to live like that? What if we could be in a constant state of love? How would that feel? To me, it is what I am striving for. It is what I have been working on. I don't want to live a life of emotional ups and downs... I don't want to live a life of constant push/pull and open/shut of my heart... I want to be a steady, constant source of open-hearted love towards myself and towards others. If someone does something I don't like, or I do something that I don't like, or life or someone throws me a curve ball, I want to remain constantly loving and calm and at peace, like that snail. I want to feel loving towards myself, and not judge myself, or the other person, or the situation. I want to just see it as what it is and not let it knock me off my slow, steady snail course of love.
Think about how often you experience this cycle of up and down. How often you open your heart and then close it up very quickly with steel walls that no one can break through. Open shut. Open shut. Open shut. Think about it... it may be many many times a day. Human nature wants to love. Wants to open our hearts to other people, to ourselves... but life has created pain for us, and our fear of getting hurt and rejected has become stronger than our soul's innate desire to open our hearts to share and receive love. Our walls actually disconnect us from each other. They keep us alone. I say, I'm sick of the walls! I'm sick of the constant battle in my heart; my heart wants to share love with myself, with other people, with the world, but it quickly shuts at first signs of the possibility of being hurt. I'm sick of it. The open shut, back and forth, up and down, is causing me too much pain. We always risk the love not being reciprocated but if we never try, then we will never get to experience the greatest of human gifts which, actually, is sharing love. It's not receiving it, it is sharing it. How amazing do you feel when you find the perfect gift for someone, or you do something completely selflessly for someone because you know it will make them happy, and you expect nothing in return. Those are the moments. That is the love, the sharing... and that is what we risk not getting the chance to experience when we decide to shut down and disconnect. You are keeping your love, your gift, your light from the world when you cover your heart with walls.
This is what I personally am working on right now - knocking down my walls and keeping my heart open at all times. And, honestly, it is not easy. But I want to share with you the process I am using to do it, so perhaps it can help you too. At the first moment when I feel myself completely starting to shut down, and I feel the walls start to come up, I take a breath and say to myself - "I AM love." I say it as many times as I need to until I actually start to believe it. And I visualize that little snail calmly, consistently, peacefully chugging along, not letting anything throw him off his steady, constant course of love. I know it sounds silly, but just give it a try. What you're doing now isn't working, so it doesn't hurt to just give it a try it, does it...? Let those walls come crumbling down and share the love... it's really the only thing that life is all about!
Follow Holly Sidell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HolisticHolly
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