Many of us have firm ideas about things we love / crave / must have and things we hate / fear / must avoid. Deep down, we fear that unless we control these preferences, we'll have chaos, misery & death.
Of course these are just thoughts, and as such, CAN change.
The wise repeatedly advise:
“We are here to find that dimension within ourselves that is deeper than thought.” Eckhart Tolle
"The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences..." Sengstan
“The whole point of spiritual practice is to discover that we’re already good enough. That we don’t have to prove a thing." Henry Shukman
Nevertheless, some choose to rigidly stick to small, contracted, self-defeating ideas for an entire lifetime. In essence they're saying, 'IF life doesn't give me what I want, THEN I refuse to accept, never mind love myself, others, and life itself.' Their love is kept small, hostage, conditional, and so they unwittingly remain trapped in suffering.
Some - including you I hope - choose to open their minds & hearts, remembering who they really are, the mystery, the love, that is one with everyone & everything, thus accepting & unconditionally loving everyone & everything - the good, the bad & the ugly manifestations of this one mystery.
The resultant, progressively increasing peace & joy is part of a lifelong immersive process, beautifully guided by Helen Hamilton in a valuable (97min) talk “The Pathway of Love” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWkkmLx1G6Y and partially transcribed here:
"This path that we’re following here is a very direct path to self-realization or awakening and everything that I’m sharing in (our meetings) is from my own experience of what really seemed to work for me, after lots of experience of what really didn’t work for me, in terms of not only recognizing who I am, what everything is – the one formless reality, the supreme Self – but also clearly recognizing and being able to step away from who l am not. And, so there is only the real Self, the One being.
And any ideas that we have about ourselves that are coming from the old sense of self, the old sense of a separate self that’s going to be falling away more & more as we progress on the path.
However, that doesn’t mean that that process is automatic. For many of us, we might need a little help. Certainly I did, and most people I meet need a little help to move beyond those old ideas about ourselves. And it’s because of this particular thing, moving beyond these old ideas about who we thought we were, and into a deeper understanding of what we actually are, and an experiential realization of that, I ended up writing a series of books. They just wanted to be expressed. And I felt really called today to read from one of those books (“How to Fall in Love with Yourself” 2021) And as always, it’s a theme that’s been coming up during the week again & again. And I always like to try to speak about something that’s relevant right now for me, and also people have been asking about. So I want to read today from this book, and I’m going to read from the introduction. But just a little background about this book first.
We might call what we really are, I’ve used ‘supreme Self,’ ‘formless reality’ in this satsang already. We could also call it ‘silence’ and ‘consciousness,’ ‘presence,’ ‘Divinity,’ ‘noumenon,’ ‘awakeness.’ We could call it ‘beingness.’ There are so many names for what we could call ourselves - the real Self. But ‘love’ is another name.
And as I began to realize who I was, I began to realize that to live authentically as that, that real Self, I had to be able to fall in love with myself again. And I don’t mean to fall in love with the formlessness, the silence. We’re already there with that, right? We have devotion to the truth, the formless reality. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here in this satsang or on the path.
But how do we fall in love with our body and our mind and our personality quirks and the things we would rather let go of? And of course, I’m not talking about romantic love here, although the love that we are will express itself that way too if it wants to. But how do we love something like fear? How do we love resistance we find inside ourselves?
This whole book was written to try to detail the steps of love that I went through in my own journey. And this book is actually a pathway in itself. If you were to read this book and really take it in and really try to embody what it is explaining and showing, that is, for me, 95% at least of awakening the journey to living as that real self or that real love. At least 95% complete, maybe more. There are only one or two more tiny things to know after that. So it’s a pathway in and of itself. And I thought it might be useful just to read from the beginning in this satsang. Something in my heart wanted to share it, so we will do that.
First of all, just to give a little overview of this, there are several types of love that we experience. And we all begin with conditional love. And conditional love says, ‘I’ll love you if,’ or ‘I’ll love you when,’ or ‘I’ll love me if or when.’ So when I change or let go of this thing that’s not right about me, then I’ll love myself. When I wake up to truth completely & embody it fully, then I will love myself. Or, I’ll love you if you make me feel secure, or worthwhile, or needed, or whatever we’re asking for, unconsciously of course.
Conditional love is not bad. It is simply conditional love. It’s a more limited expression of the real love that we are. When the real love thinks itself to be a separate person, only one body and mind, all it knows is conditional love, love with conditions put upon it.
Then, as we deepen in our journey into awakening, we’ll begin to touch on unconditional love, which is simply I love me as I am and I love you as you are. But there’s still a separate person there even in unconditional love, an apparent separate being loving unconditionally. And again, unconditional love is not better than conditional love. It just is more expansive, less limited.
So, the book takes us through that journey. But most of what I want to say today we can get through in the first two chapters, which lay the foundation. The final stage of love is nondual love, or love before division, or love before separation. Love where there is no person or thing to love. There is just love recognizing itself. So, when love looks at something, that love sees itself in a different disguise. It doesn’t see a person or a thing, only recognizes itself.
What I thought I would do is I would read through these chapters and then, as always, I’ll open it up for any questions ...
So I’ll start with the dedication for the book.
‘This book is dedicated to all humanity in the hope that it helps us to come to love and accept ourselves as we are right now. Only once we may love without limits, expectations and demands upon ourselves will we begin to live and love in our highest potential. May you fall deeply back in love with yourself and may all internal conflict cease. Let there be peace in your heart.’
Because if you fall back in love with yourself, then you’re going to find it impossible to judge yourself or anyone else or anything else. You’re going to find it impossible to resist, reject or dislike yourself. And the deepest part of awakening is a full & rich expression of the love that we are, living like a human being in the world – a living, loving expression, looking like a human being, but not confused anymore.
‘Introduction: This book arose out of a clear calling from students who expressed a deep wish to be able to love without limits and without any boundaries. Over and over again, it was seen that there was a deep desire in each of us to return to the natural state of love that we really are. And yet, time and time again, I saw most of us don’t know how to stop judging ourselves and begin to allow the emergence of love.’
And that was how it was in my own journey too. I knew that the ultimate goal was to love myself. Whatever that meant, I didn’t know. But there was a deep desire for that, and I was endlessly frustrated by not knowing how to actually begin with that. As I said before, the only experience of love I’d had was conditional love and conditional love for myself, which was really my own unique way, as you have your own unique way, I’m sure, to reject or judge yourself.
‘This book is offered then in the wish that it serves as a gateway to allow the love that is already inside each one of us, but perhaps we don’t know how to allow. As you read the chapters that follow and apply them, a deepening sense of acceptance, love, & compassion for your own self and others will begin to emerge. Soon you’ll forget how to judge yourself harshly or negate any part of your existence. Your very presence will inspire the same in others around you.’
Pause there for a moment. What would it be like to forget how to judge yourself harshly or negate any part of your existence? What does that even mean? It means that no matter what arises or what we would like to change about ourselves, we’re not going to use that as a reason for not loving ourselves. We’re not going to put conditions on that love. We love ourselves because we are, because we exist, and we’re not going to treat the continued unfolding evolution of our body & mind as a kind of project or a work in progress that is going from imperfect to perfect.
So not being able to judge yourself, there is only peace. It doesn’t mean that you stop unfolding & evolving. Your mind & body in fact will still evolve and love will emerge even faster. And as it says, ‘you’ll inspire that in others too as they see your living example.
It’s not our fault that perhaps we don’t know how to love ourself as yet, and we must stop blaming ourselves. Simply through coming to understand what love is and how it moves in our lives, we’ll begin to become that love and move away from judging ourselves and others.
'First, we’ll take a look at what love is, and perhaps more importantly, what it is not. Second, we’ll take a look at the stages of love we will move through in our journey. We all start with conditional love before allowing unconditional love to blossom. We can then move even further into an awakening to the truest non-dual love of the real self or reality. Each of these stages will be described and explained so that we may let go of more limited forms of love and move to freer expressions of self-love. Limited is not wrong or bad. It is simply limited.’
It’s important that we can start right now. If we notice that we’re loving ourselves conditionally, that we’re withholding love or approval from ourselves until we measure up to the picture that we have of how we’re supposed to be, then we can really notice that even without judgment. If all that we have been taught is conditional love, how could we possibly know any different? And if those that raised us have only been taught conditional love
and had examples of that, how could they know?
So we can begin to move even into unconditional love now, if we can see our own tendency to withhold love from ourselves without judgment of it just to see it: when this thing happens; or when I feel that emotion; or when I have the same old trigger come up inside again; or when I find that I have spent too much money; or put too much weight on; or said the wrong thing to the person I want to be with. When we find those things happening, even if we notice an immediate rejection of ourselves because of that inside, can we simply just notice that? And of course, we would want to move to a deeper form of love.
But can we blame ourselves, if we don’t know that yet? And what happens if we don’t judge ourselves for not knowing even what love is or what unconditional love would look like? Have we really had many examples of unconditionally loving beings to model ourselves upon? Did we learn it in school? Did we get sat down and told this is how to love yourself unconditionally? Well, I certainly didn’t. So we can start to let go of judging and blaming ourselves for where we’re at. If all we have for ourselves is self-hatred and self-rejection or judgment, so be it. But we don’t need to blame ourselves for that. We’ve all been taught that the way to change into who we think we should be, is by rejecting and blaming ourselves as we are right now. And that has never worked, not ever, not once. So let’s continue reading.
‘Lastly, we will look at how we can love our separate sense of self or ego into dissolution. As our capacity for love deepens, we can stop rejecting any part of ourselves and begin to live as that highest expression of love in which there is no object of love but only love itself – formless, omnipresent love.
One human being, living as this highest expression of love, can change the world and inspire many others to do the same. Isn’t it time you lived your highest and best life?’
We’ve all known examples of great beings who have walked this path right to the end of the path of love, which is what this book is about. It’s a path in itself. Examples of those who are not only unconditionally loving – the great sages, the great teachers – but have the capacity to love all of creation because they know what it really is – that it’s not at all what it looks like.
We’ll move onto chapter 1, called ‘What is Love Anyway?’ because as I was writing this, it reminded me of my own experience. The first thing I had to admit to myself is that I didn’t know what love was. And it was a huge relief when I finally admitted it. This thing that I had been wanting and chasing, trying to get from other beings – please, please, please love me so I’ll feel better about myself; and trying to give to others; trying to love others. And if I was to become this love, or to live as this love that I already am, doesn’t it make sense then that we start by honestly admitting that we might not know what that is? What is love? It’s an endless question, but it’s enough for us to start by just letting go of any blame, again for ourselves, that we might not know what it is. Again, nobody has ever actually sat us down and said, ‘This is what love is in its various expressions.’ So,
‘Chapter 1, What is Love Anyway?
We are here to learn how to love ourselves. And the first step is to realize that it’s not our fault if we don’t already know how to do that. We may have been taught that love is to want to improve ourselves or be better than we are. Whilst this is a noble intention, it will also set us up on a never-ending path of trying to improve what is already here and perfect in this moment.
None of us start out feeling our own perfection. And in fact, we may be highly skilled at noticing our imperfections.’
I certainly was. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was. I was an expert on my own failure and my own imperfections.
‘To begin to love ourselves, we must come to admit that maybe we don’t really know how to do that, and that it is not our fault if we don’t.’
I’m going to repeat that because it’s so important.
‘None of us start out feeling our own perfection. And in fact, we may be highly skilled at noticing our imperfections. To begin to love ourselves, we must come to admit that maybe we don’t really know how to do that, and that it is not our fault if we don’t.’
So can we just take a pause here, and if we’re willing to admit to ourselves inside that maybe we don’t know how to love ourselves, and that that could be a good thing. And it’s only this idea, that we should already know this, that torments us. If we don’t know how to love ourselves and we weren’t supposed to know yet, then how much are we at blame or fault?
‘What if we look at our life as an opportunity to learn how to love rather than a place to prove to ourselves that we are no good at it?’
So let me say that again, because it’s so important.
‘What if we look at our life as an opportunity to learn how to love rather than a place to prove to ourselves that we are no good at it? If you want to learn to drive a car, but you have not yet met anyone that can show you how, would you be berating yourself that you cannot drive before having even a single lesson? No, of course you wouldn’t. Yet each one of us is punishing ourselves deep down inside because we feel we should know how to love our own self and others.’
So we’re beating ourselves up, berating ourselves because we think we should know how to do something we’ve never been shown how to do – to love ourselves. It’s quite strange, isn’t it, the way human beings are when we look at it like this – this idea that I should already know how to fall in love with myself, how to fall in love with all of myself - the formlessness, the silence, the stillness that I deeply love already.
But I might even be loving that to try to get away from the form, which I was doing. You know, if I fall deeply in love with silence enough, somehow it will magically transform this (small self / personality / ego) into what I want it to be. It’s not the fullest form of love, is it? It’s conditional love. I love my mind, my body, my life, my emotions, as long as they change and look completely different, is what I was in effect saying.
So let me just recap that. If you want to learn to drive a car, but you’ve not yet met anyone that can show you how, would you be berating yourself that you can’t drive before having even a single lesson? No. Of course not. You wouldn’t.
‘Yet each one of us is punishing ourselves deep down inside because we feel we should know how to love our own self and others.
Let’s just be honest and say perhaps we don’t know how and that we aren’t supposed to know how. Can we move around in our life in this orientation? Can we begin to be students of love and lovingness and want to find out what that is? Can we let go of judging, hating, and blaming ourselves that we don’t seem to know how to love ourselves?’
There’s an opportunity here. Let’s pause to just launch an intention, not to try hard or anything, but just to launch an intention inside ourselves. I’d like to let go of judging, hating, and blaming myself because I don’t seem to know how to love myself yet. If that feels relevant inside, then let’s just take a moment to let that arise. I’d just like to let go of that, knowing that the arising of that intention is enough. So,
‘Can we let go of judging, hating, and blaming ourselves that we don’t seem to know how to love ourselves? Yes, we can. I would urge you to let go of your ideas about love and instead insist on finding out what that really is. We may have seen many examples of loving beings that seem to radiate that love to all. And we may somehow be trying to measure up to that standard. What we fail to realize is that that great love for all of humanity emerging from these beings has been allowed, recognized, and learned rather than intuitively known.’
That’s important! If we’re trying to emulate some being who’s really, really loving of all creation, including themselves, can we recognize that they’ve been through their own process already that we’re going through right now, to allow love to emerge? And what would it be like if we simply were students of love, and viewed our life, as we were saying before, as a place for love to emerge?
‘Perhaps it’s wiser to say that a lot of both has occurred.’
So, ‘a lot of both’ being that we’ve learned, allowed, and recognized and also intuitively known about love.
‘Sages, avatars, and teachers of truth and love have had to do this exact same opening up and admittance of “I don’t know what love is, nor how to get it or be it” too. We all start from the same honest place of truth. Love is to begin to admit the truth that maybe I don’t know how to love myself, and maybe I’m not supposed to know already.’
I’ll read that last sentence again,
‘Love is to begin to admit the truth that maybe I don’t know how to love myself, and maybe I’m not supposed to know already.’
What if that is the very first act of love that you can really give yourself – unconditional expression of love? Maybe I don’t know how to love and I’m not supposed to. I’m finding out as I go.
‘Can the capacity for love be viewed as an art, science or an emerging skill? Yes, indeed it can. All of us have been taught to love conditionally and that’s where we all start. Even the great sages started from their ideas about what love is, and how to do it or be it. We can finally begin to love ourselves more in this moment by accepting that we can love what love actually is, rather than loving our ideas and preconceptions about it.’
I’ll say that again,
‘We can finally begin to love ourselves more in this moment by accepting that we can love what love actually is, rather than loving our ideas and preconceptions about it. Perhaps even this simple thing is to be love itself already. Perhaps in admitting we don’t know what love is, and have been following what we think it is, is how to love ourselves more.’
So if we can recognize that we maybe have been in love with our ideas about what we think love is and should be, and now we’re drawing a line underneath that and saying, ‘I don’t know what love is,’ then we’re wide open for some revelation to appear, to actually love love itself, rather than to love what we think it is. To love ourselves, rather than to love who we think we are, which is usually some very distorted self-image that has nothing to do with who we actually are. And perhaps just doing this one thing is actually beginning to be the love that we want to be.
I don’t know what love is. I’ve perhaps only experienced my ideas about it. And I’m beginning to explore what love actually is. How I actually love myself might be very different than how I think I should go about loving myself. That’s a huge difference.
We can make that shift now. We can make that shift now in this moment. I want to know what love is. I have all kinds of songs going around in my head at the moment from various artists (laughs) – ‘All You Need is Love’ and ‘I Want to Know What Love Is.’
‘What happens when we throw out all ideas that we should already know how to be love, to give or to receive love, or how to love others more? We will immediately be starting from the truest place of all by knowing that we don’t know how and that is totally okay right now.
Love yourself enough to admit right now, with me, that you don’t know. I don’t know how to love either because I don’t know what love is. I am in a constant and never-ending unfolding and discovery of what love is. Each and every moment love is revealing another face of itself to me. And I love that I don’t know what it is. It was a huge relief to admit I didn’t actually know, nor was I supposed to know. Try that on for size and see if it feels good.’
I’ll conclude by saying, I still don’t know what love is. This satsang for me, and hopefully for you, is an unfolding discovery and exploration of love – also known as 'silence' or 'consciousness' or 'presence' or 'divinity.'
And I hope there’s been something said here, as I’ve read through these chapters, some movement inside of you, that if all you get from this one thing that maybe we’re not supposed to know how to love ourselves yet, and how could we know, if nobody has shown us. Just that one thing is life-changing in itself. And then we can begin to be students of love and students of lovingness, as it says in the previous chapter. So hopefully then there is a deepening within us all from sharing this time together, this love together and I really sincerely really hope that something has moved inside your heart and a deeper love for yourself is emerging just by being here, just by listening, just by absorbing what this is and what this means.
Just to recap, there were the first two chapters of the book, ‘How to Fall In Love with Yourself.’ And you might see that it came from my own journey of having absolutely no idea how to love myself at all, and yet somehow really, really wanting to. And now there is this falling away of any end point to that. What if it was a never-ending deepening of love for myself, and somehow, 'myself' has grown to encompass all of manifestation, and the unmanifest?
I hope that that was helpful.”
Helen Hamilton, first 36 minutes of her valuable (97min) talk: “The Pathway of Love” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWkkmLx1G6Y
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from "Awake Awhile" by Hafiz |
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