February 01, 2019
Love, Connection, and Attachment
Love. It is everywhere! It is in the air, the birds, the bees, the trees. It’s the wind riffling through your hair, the rain falling gently on your face. A vast and infinite reserve of care, delight, and support, love is the essence from whence all Creation comes. And yet, we tend to think we can’t have it unless another agrees to give it to us. This leads us into scarcity, dark alleys of soul numbing negotiations for connection, and mistaking our attachments to others, for love.
Many people block love because it makes them feel unsafe. You can bring wheelbarrows of it to their doorsteps and they will continue to bemoan their barren existences, never recognizing that they have created this dearth themselves by shutting it down. The real work starts inside. If you are blocking a connection to love because people you have loved in the past have harmed you, or extracted an unbearable cost from you for it, start with connecting to something safe. Nature loves all her children, no exceptions, and asks nothing in return. Try sending a pulse of goodness out to a tree, for example, and wait. She will respond in kind, but it is up to you open up and let it in!
Love is there for the taking. Many of us blunder around feeling cut off and unloved until we “find someone,” but still may not experience it when we do. Feeling dark and undeserving we can’t let it in. Or perhaps, because we believe ourselves to be unlovable, we choose a person, who through their own feelings of inadequacy, reflects this by withholding their love from us. Either way, we find ourselves making deals. I will give you my power, beauty, money, body, etc. if you will just love me. We believe that without this person we will be unloved and forever alone. Love, however, is everywhere and does not cost a thing. It comes through our openness to receiving it, not at the whims of another.
If you block love because you feel you are unlovable, then there is work to do here too. You cannot be loved by another if you do not love yourself first. This means coming to terms with the parts of yourself you have learned to loathe, and allowing them to be loved. The work is in unearthing these monsters that you have buried. Relationships are great for mirroring them to us. What our significant other seemingly dislikes in us, we usually most dislike about ourselves. When we accept these unowned parts with compassion, as a mother loves her “ugly” child unconditionally, we find that we are actually lovable. Doors open, and others can love us too.
Finally, people stay in unhealthy relationships through the misguided notion that their attachment to them, is love. Attachments are our holding on to who we felt love come though, not love itself. The loss we feel through rejection, or when someone leaves us, or dies, is the loss of their person, security, habits, and familiarity, but it is not the loss of love. They may disappear, but the essence of love is still there, even when we are alone. It comes from beyond the physicality of beings, and it transcends space and time. The Q’ero Indians of Peru call it Munay. Call it what you will, our job is in staying connected to it. When the connection to this source energy is maintained, there is no scarcity, no reason to feel jealous, nor fear abandonment. The work is in allowing it to flow to you, through you, and from you, effortlessly, like breath cycling soulfully through a bass saxophone. It is in establishing a connection to an essence that exists everywhere that we find love, not by holding onto a horn. Try it!
Christina Allen, Shamanic Healer, Teacher, and Founder and Director of the Austin Shamanic Center, combines a strong science (BA Physics, MS Neuroscience) background with decades of applied ancient spiritual wisdom (Master Yogi, Reiki Master, Shamanic Healer based, in part, on Q’ero Indian traditions of Peru). ASC offers profound Shamanic Self Development Workshops, professional trainings, and personal healings. Learn more at www.AustinShamanicCenter.com.
© Austin All Natural, February 2019