December 15th, 2017

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to love and be loved. We see love as a magic elixir that can make everything in our lives right. The loss of love can be devastating. We define ourselves, create our identities, around who and what we love and by who loves us. Empires are built and kingdoms crumble from the forces of love. With so much riding on love, it is important that we learn to live with it.

Living with love should be easy. It is the closest thing we have to a magic potion that will make everything right. When we feel love, we feel good. When we don’t feel love, we feel bad. That part is simple. When we try to love ourselves or other people things get more complicated. The problems do not come out of love, they come out of our ideas about how love should be.

Love is always just as it should be. We often think it should be different, which causes problems. We think love should make us feel good. It does. When we think love is making us feel bad, we are not feeling love. We are feeling attachment to an idea of what love should be. We expect people to behave in certain ways to demonstrate their love. They behave differently and we question the love. We expect ourselves to be a certain way to be worthy of love, but we are how we are and we question love.

When we feel sad or anxious or scared because of love, we are putting too much pressure on love. We are trying to confine it to too small of a space. We try to confine it to a specific circumstance, person, place or time. No matter how awful these ideas of love may make us feel, love will eventually be there to make us feel better. Big love, spacious love, is all around us.

Everybody, everywhere, does everything they do for love. Admittedly, in our confusion, we sometimes make a big mess of things as we do what we do for love. When we are feeling the pressure of the love we want, we need to open ourselves up to the love that we have. In every interaction, love is present. To summon love we don’t need to find our soulmate, we can think of people we love. think of things we love, or think of times we felt loved. When we are able to evoke that feeling of love, it works. We love. We feel good. No pressure.

❤️🙏🏻🌼 z m