'who?' (all rights reserved danae sinclair 2008)
Actually, when I say you I really mean me - this is about the most important thing I have to learn.
After all, how can anyone else tell you what you should and shouldn't know about love and relationships? Its your life, your destiny and your call.
But having pursued relationships all the way around the world and back again and made it my life's purpose to find my soul mate - I feel I can pass on some of what I've got the gist of so far.
Like, for instance, there is no model for relationships that works for everyone, but there's only one love.
The prevailing attitude, conversely, is monotheistic in its approach to relationships but consists of many ways of measuring love. Romance, it seems to me, is a religion of false idols.
What I mean is that from my observations people are unrealistically expected to conform to certain patterns of behaviour - there are rules about courtship; ideas about 'fidelity' that inform our decisions about 'suitability' and 'commitment'.
There's a tendency to compartmentalise and label our relationships - this one is friendship, that one partnership, another parent-child love, pet-owner affection and so on.
The thing that we are led to believe we really want is that One Magnificent Love, the special Soul Mate, a total and deep immersion in another. Completion. Forever.
"I love you but I'm not in love with you" is what we hear when the heart won't open - when there's some magical ingredient missing from the coupling; "the chemistry's just not there".
The romantic narrative is supposed to go a certain way and if it doesn't its a dud. "He's just not that into you" is how it goes these days.
But apparently the real question is - are you that into you?
Is it fair to expect from someone else to give us what we cannot or will not give ourselves? Hand in hand with romantic love comes 'self esteem' - we must first love ourselves before someone really great can get anything from us.
Low self esteem means we have crappy 'destructive' relationships and high self esteem gets us better (constructive?) ones. There's that hierarchy again; measuring and defining.
Where does all the dogma come from?
Robert A Johnson, in his work on the psychology of romantic love, explains how we in the west have come to muddle human relationships and spiritual discipline - how the urge to merge with the divine and the need for companionship have become fused and distorted.
Somewhere along the line Eros has been caught and caged like a budgerigar. We've literalised love between people just as we've literalised every other mystery and made it into a religion.
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm willing to be, because there's a part of me that still wishes for it to be true - the fairy tale and happily ever after.
Meanwhile, though, what is true of my experience is that all relationships are soul mate relationships.
By this I mean that its the nature of love to call to the soul - 'Eros always leads to Psyche' as alchemy teaches. Likewise, soul draws love to itself and in many forms, without judgement or restriction.
I find the notion of 'self esteem' to be dubious - it seems to be an ego created illusion about 'how I should be', holding oneself separate from others.
Which brings me to this - the most important thing to learn about soul mate love; there's only one soul, its the soul of all of us. So, as Deepak Chopra puts it, 'through the mirror of relationships I find my non-local self'.
In other words, in every 'other' that we relate to we discover a part of our ourselves.
So what's not to love? Therein lies the rub - this means we must unlearn all we know about relating, to drop our ideas of what it all means and be willing to live without judgement or measurement, with forgiveness and with a fearless heart.
This can happen, moment by moment, if we allow it to.
Well, I never said it was an easy lesson.
After all, how can anyone else tell you what you should and shouldn't know about love and relationships? Its your life, your destiny and your call.
But having pursued relationships all the way around the world and back again and made it my life's purpose to find my soul mate - I feel I can pass on some of what I've got the gist of so far.
Like, for instance, there is no model for relationships that works for everyone, but there's only one love.
The prevailing attitude, conversely, is monotheistic in its approach to relationships but consists of many ways of measuring love. Romance, it seems to me, is a religion of false idols.
What I mean is that from my observations people are unrealistically expected to conform to certain patterns of behaviour - there are rules about courtship; ideas about 'fidelity' that inform our decisions about 'suitability' and 'commitment'.
There's a tendency to compartmentalise and label our relationships - this one is friendship, that one partnership, another parent-child love, pet-owner affection and so on.
The thing that we are led to believe we really want is that One Magnificent Love, the special Soul Mate, a total and deep immersion in another. Completion. Forever.
"I love you but I'm not in love with you" is what we hear when the heart won't open - when there's some magical ingredient missing from the coupling; "the chemistry's just not there".
The romantic narrative is supposed to go a certain way and if it doesn't its a dud. "He's just not that into you" is how it goes these days.
But apparently the real question is - are you that into you?
Is it fair to expect from someone else to give us what we cannot or will not give ourselves? Hand in hand with romantic love comes 'self esteem' - we must first love ourselves before someone really great can get anything from us.
Low self esteem means we have crappy 'destructive' relationships and high self esteem gets us better (constructive?) ones. There's that hierarchy again; measuring and defining.
Where does all the dogma come from?
Robert A Johnson, in his work on the psychology of romantic love, explains how we in the west have come to muddle human relationships and spiritual discipline - how the urge to merge with the divine and the need for companionship have become fused and distorted.
Somewhere along the line Eros has been caught and caged like a budgerigar. We've literalised love between people just as we've literalised every other mystery and made it into a religion.
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm willing to be, because there's a part of me that still wishes for it to be true - the fairy tale and happily ever after.
Meanwhile, though, what is true of my experience is that all relationships are soul mate relationships.
By this I mean that its the nature of love to call to the soul - 'Eros always leads to Psyche' as alchemy teaches. Likewise, soul draws love to itself and in many forms, without judgement or restriction.
I find the notion of 'self esteem' to be dubious - it seems to be an ego created illusion about 'how I should be', holding oneself separate from others.
Which brings me to this - the most important thing to learn about soul mate love; there's only one soul, its the soul of all of us. So, as Deepak Chopra puts it, 'through the mirror of relationships I find my non-local self'.
In other words, in every 'other' that we relate to we discover a part of our ourselves.
So what's not to love? Therein lies the rub - this means we must unlearn all we know about relating, to drop our ideas of what it all means and be willing to live without judgement or measurement, with forgiveness and with a fearless heart.
This can happen, moment by moment, if we allow it to.
Well, I never said it was an easy lesson.
It is very true what you write - about needing to love your self, first and foremost. I remember being young, wounded and desperately looking for love. I would find men to pour into the void within, and think that I would be happy that way. Their love would fill me up. And the men that I chose were elements of myself always, though elements I didn't recognise as me. It's said that you are drawn to people who have qualities tht you desire to have ... but I'd prefer to see it as small and large lessons that need to learnt along the way.
ReplyDeleteFrom 1996-99 I lived in a horrible relationship - a meeting of two human beings who honestly brought out the absolute worst in each other. Followed by a man who lived on the opposite side of the world to me; who I loved without reason, , with all my heart and soul - but he was married and it wasn't to be.
Between the two of these relationships, I came up with a two page list of things i did not want in a man or in a relationship.
It took my counsellor at the time to point out that I needed to write a list of 'what I did want' ... and I started to find ways to accept who I was, and love who I was. I stopped expecting other people to fix what I felt was broke, to salve my wounds, to save me! And not long after that Dave stepped into my life.
For the first time in my adult life there was no void to entrust to him to fill up. I loved myself, I was happy with who I was and what I was doing ... and he was a pleasent suprise.
And I love what you write about soul love ... because the term "soul mate" has been so over used that it really doesn't mean anything anymore ... unless you use it in your context ... which makes every relationship a soul merging.
Very poignant and thought provoking (as usual!) I hope your computer gets fixed soon. I'm going to be offline for three weeks while we are away in Tasmania and Victoria (now there's a challenge for me!).. but we don't leave until Thursday so hopefully I'll be able to catch up with you before then.
My perceptions of love have been reshuffled a lot over the last 10 years.I've had lots of different ideas in regards to man/woman interactions developing and over the last couple of years especially the love of family and expectations, and self...
ReplyDeleteI have found it does all come back to love of self, with the understanding that self is still part of the whole...which means to me when I find the company of my younger sister truly objectionable, I take a step back and remember that she is part of the whole, and while I may not particulary like being around her, she is lovable...as I mentioned to Jodi on the weekend, lovable in the way that I love anyone as part of humanity, past present future...not in a wanting to draw someone into a intimate soul connection, more into the happenschance way of seeing parts of behaviour through anothers...the reflect part of ourselves.
As my sister and I are both adopted, there is not a close cell level connection. We're both cuckoos in the nest. I've battled with the love I've been told I should/must feel for her for years until it became a point where I needed to recognise if I loved myself, I needed to see her as part of the whole, not the whole, as she demands to be seen. In this way I've lessened her ability to drain my energy. Looking back I see how many times I compromised myself to not hurt my parents idea of what we should be, their idea of loving sisters, to be the nice person.
So in some ways to be loving to me in regards to my sister, I need to keep detaching and expanding my understanding of her, and there is a sense that if I provide the impetuous I need, the dynamic between us will shift and some of the irritation in our interactions will lessen even further and the sudden appearance of her will not instinctively have me brace myself ..as I regain my trust in me more and more again...
hmm acceptance, self, yep big lessons Ms Danae.
Catherine
dear Jodi and Catherine, I love what you've both written.
ReplyDeleteI'm planning to write some more on this because although I don't subscibe to the 'self esteem' model of relationships there's something to it, as you say Catherine, loving and understanding oneself is key. There's no outer event which is not also happening within.
but we have an eternal 'non local self' so we are always, on one level (the quantum level?), in a state of self love. So when it comes the story of self esteem I ask - is it really true? Is it possible that I don't love myself and I'm still here?
still thinking on this :)
joy to you both!
d