CosmicWise

...lighting the candle of personal awareness & becoming ...

Love 2

Question: Why does Love often hurt?

Response: I shall begin my response with passage by Thomas Moore from his book called "Dark Nights of the Soul" (Lovesickness chapter).

"It is as though love always has two parts, or two sides, like the moon, a light one and a dark one. In all our loves we have little idea of what is going on and what is demanded of us. Love has little to do with the ego and is beyond understanding and control. It has its own reasons and its own indirect ways of getting what it wants.

"Robert Burton, who lived in the time of Shakespeare, diagnoses love as a sickness and at one point suggests that it might be better to avoid it if you can. But to choose not to love is to decide not to live. Everyone needs to love and to be loved. You surrender, and then the spell descends, and you get swept away into days and nights of fantasy, memory, longing, and a strange sensation of loss, perhaps the end of freedom and of a comfortable life. Even if you have had many experiences of painful and unsuccessful love, you don't give up on it. The soul so hungers for love that you go after it, even if there is only the slightest chance of succeeding.

"Some people appear to give up on love, and you see the lifelessness in their faces. The soul craves love, and if you give up on love because it is so difficult, the life will seep out of you like air out of a punctured tire. You will go flat. You may wonder why life has no meaning. You may not realize that meaning is love, and it is love that gives life its shape and purpose.

"Clearly, love is not about making you happy. It is a form of initiation that may radically transform you, making you more of who you are but less of who you have been. If you don't realize that you are walking on coals and running the gauntlet and surviving the wilderness in a quest of a vision --all within the confines of a simple human relationship-- you could be undone by it. Love gives you a sense of meaning, but it asks a price. It will make you into the person you are called to be, but only if you endure its pains and allow it to empty you as much as it fills you."

.....

Though love itself is not intended to be a painful condition, most of us have defenses against it. The experience of love is primarily a transformational one, fraught with much internal anxiety, struggle, and adjustment. Hence, happiness in love for many is an occasional visitor rather than the main attraction.

Based on Thomas Moore's passage above, love is clearly not about happiness, but an experience meant to induce a radical transformation in us. How many people, after all, as a general rule of thumb, are completely open and humble enough to experience pure Love without encountering their own resistances to it?? All of our preconceived notions about everything will naturally be challenged. Love is ultimately an all or nothing deal, therefore, we cannot love unconditionally without first undergoing the necessary transformations, during which all our hidden fears about what it means to really love rise-up and confront us.

Pain in our love relationships should therefore be an expected visitor at some point whether the relationship works out in the long-run or not, but especially when love does gain entry with a strong foot-hold in our hearts. Therefore, pain doesn't occur only in relationships that have ended, but in ALL relationships, precisely because all manner of lovers are radically being transformed from its embrace. Love will truly challenge our defenses. In clinging to them, instead of opening ourselves and surrendering to the love experience with humility, we hurt our relationships, but most of all, we hurt ourselves. What we need to understand is:

- The pain we feel at these times is NOT Love, but the suffocation of it.

- The only way to avoid pain is to release the defenses and submit to Love.

As much as we try to avoid real deep encounters with others, sooner or later, no matter how diligent we are in protecting ourselves from heartache, all of us will eventually encounter at least one really juicy Pluto transit that will force us to undergo a painful transformation as a result of Love. As I see it, a true encounter with Love ripens the soul. Since Love fuels every dimension of life, what looks like romance or relationship is often the development of a more widespread passion for life. That is why all our initiations are crucial (ie., many different run-ins with one partner, or the same run-in with many partners). When we begin to work them out, all of life commences to take-on an erotic quality. Ultimately, Love is not about You/Us, but about the world. Eventually, we may discover that the most ordinary loves among our friends and family lead us to experience a more mysterious kind of Love that is essentially religious, so that our love expands to include the world and beyond. As the Sufis say: "human loves form a ladder to the divine".

Demitra M.N.