When you are present and free of inner conflict it is effortless, natural, spontaneous and authentic to relate to your partner lovingly. When you are identified with an image of you, the unconscious automatic way to relate to your lover is with mistrust, careful, and different forms of aggression including being demanding and controlling. Be grateful to your partner for it is through the mirror of intimate relationships that you come to know yourself. There is no clearer mirror to see your greatest virtues and your worse attributes than how you relate to your lover.
When you enter the space of romantic intimacy all of your fears, regrets, shame, guilt and hatred are bound to emerge. Love opens you up and exposes all that you have inside. Loves brings up the unloving parts of you! This is good for in your Soul’s wisdom you are attracted to people that reflect back to you all that you need to face in you. Lovingness welcomes fresh opportunities to integrate your past every day in many ways. The presence of love has an unwavering attitude of allowing, accepting and appreciating your beloved in every expression of their being, this is unconditional love.
Would you like your partner to truly and completely forgive you? Would you like your preferences to have equal value as your partners? Can you imagine being so congruent with your core values and your behavior that you never feel guilty about your actions? Can you imagine you loving yourself unconditionally?
The most difficult task a person can be asked to do is to love unconditionally. The most fulfilling expression of your humanity is to unconditionally love. In childhood you were conditioned, through many repeated experiences, to love with many conditions. This form of love doesn’t love. In fact, conditional love is a transaction that uses and degrades love as a currency to bargain with. It is important to know all the sources that taught you and imprinted in you conditional love: Parents and older family members, teachers, religious upbringing and your culture at large.
Since childhood you were loved conditionally and so now you take it for granted to negotiate lovingness. To love others unconditionally requires that you learn to love you without conditions. The first step towards this is by interrupting your own self-judgments, a form of self-hatred. This inner hostility comes from false beliefs that diminish your Self-worth, how valuable you are. Your childhood wounds and your unhealthy habits to cope with your inner struggles pollute your romantic relationship.
Unconditional love is an expression of the highest stage of human psychological and Spiritual development. Love is a unified state of consciousness in which there is an experience of wholeness out of which connectedness, relatedness, intimacy and togetherness with your partner is shared. Love is a quality of being sustained by an attitude of openness towards your beloved. Love’s openness offers your partner your forgiveness, caring, respect, help, compassion, understanding, tenderness, passion, joy and happiness. Love loves all expressions of your partner. Loving your partner unconditionally is available when you experience them as an extension of you and you choose to love all of you.
The normal functioning of individuals is in a fragmented mental and emotional state of automatic reactivity. Your mind attempts to rule and make decisions based on limited, edited and mostly distorted information. The mind rules at the exclusion of your heart’s wisdom. Your inner fragmentation can be dissolved by Love’s capacity to connect the parts of you in an intelligent and respectful way. Love’s authority is grounded in justice and it is supportive and nurturing. Lovingness promotes wholeness of being.
Love unifies and fear separates. The nature of the mental ego identity is to separate everything into parts. Mind separates in order to understand and relate. Ego identity is constructed in childhood by mentally separating from mother, which is experienced as a love object by the infant. The artificial mental separation ego perceives disconnects it from the wholeness of love in which it exits.
It is easiest to love children unconditionally for two reasons: their innocence and purity opens us and usually we don’t perceive them as a threat. The greatest resistance to being unconditionally loving to your partner is the perception of them as a threat to your core needs and values and losing sight of their innocence.
Your perception of threats to what you need automatically elicits a fear/aggression reaction in you. Once you are convinced that you are threaten, you judge and blame your partner and declare them guilty. The part of you that resist being loving, understanding and forgiving in these circumstances of conflict is your ego identity. Your ego is innocent in attacking your partner when it believes they are somehow dangerous to you. Its job is to fight for survival at all costs! Every one’s ego is genetically wired for survival and greatly misinformed by erroneous beliefs and false self-concepts. You are meant to mature by acquiring a more realistic, flexible and functional identity.
Yes! And you must be willing to choose lovingness over and over until love becomes the only natural response to every situation. To love requires that you give up your psychological defenses of judging, comparing, blaming, denying what is, being irresponsible and unforgiving and the habit of creating negative expectations. Love requires you to take action continually. Every circumstance that arises that requires some action including a simple yes or no, can be an expression of Love.
•The transformation of your identity from unconscious ego to aware ego to the presence of your Being. The aware ego is the stage of development where you are aware of yours and other’s needs, feelings and preferences. The aware ego is able to sense others inside herself by the willingness to be open to them. Openness is a function of the presence of love. The stage of presence is when reason and logic co-exist in service of lovingness, which has greater capacity for intelligent behavior. To reach the stage of presence requires an unwavering commitment to be responsible for how you feel, to be willing to own the consequences of your choices and, to be willing to be forgiving towards you and everyone else.
•Integrate your past and let it go and resolve conflicts as they arise. In order to maintain your presence in present time be willing to transcend your reactivity. An effective way to be present is Self-inquiry. Learn to question all of your assumptions about what you perceive, moment to moment. Unconscious mind controls your attention most of the time. It perceives the present through the filter of the past. The normal tendency is for your ego to project its story onto your partner. When you care to pay attention, you discover that your relationship arguments are based on the same dysfunctional patterns from each of your childhoods-always. Each of you is involving the other in your childhood painful unresolved emotional wounds. The presence of strong emotional reactions is a signal that attention has been diverted unconsciously and the past is being re-experienced now. Ego identity was constructed in a time before reason and love could join together as common sense therefore ego reactions can’t handle a difficult situation with loving intelligence.
•Transform involvement into alignment by living according to your highest values. The unconscious ego is involved in an almost continual power struggle. The aware ego is aligned with core Being values that support win-win interactions where the relationship’s needs are more important than the needs of each individual. Alignment understands that a win-lose proposition cannot serve love and happiness. Alignment is oriented towards unity and mutual respect and appreciation.
•Discover your core values. Every decision you make and every action that you act on is based on what you value. Your ego values are mostly unconscious and self-serving only- this is how the ego functions. Your Being values are concerned with you and others- this is what you evolve into when you mature and become self-aware. In every argument that you experience with your partner there is a choice to respond lovingly or to just react selfishly, reacting is easy….
•Be willing to pay attention and obey your heart’s wiser perspective. A clear sign of maturity is the capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously and, knowing which one is more inclusive of everyone’s concerns.
•Choose to be responsible and forgiving. The perception of a “problem” simply points to the need for negotiation. When you fail to negotiate win-win solutions you are being irresponsible and insensitive to the value of others. Negotiations require acknowledging equal value and respect for you and your partner. Holding on to resentment from the past maintains power struggles and expectation of new win-lose conflicts.
You live in the house of mirror as long as you are identified with only your ego’s point of view. In the ego world what passes for love is not love. The ego’s idea of love is that love is something you can have and give or take away. In the real world love is a quality of being (instead of an emotion), a state of consciousness that you are. Love is the essence of goodness that appreciates the gift of life and enjoys sharing this gift with a romantic partner. Romantic love is both a celebration of human life and a vehicle for healing our past and discovering your greater potential.
You don’t experience your partner when you are emotional. When you are irrationally emotional you are experiencing you and your internalized version of your partner. When you are less than loving towards your partner you are bringing them into your inner world and using them to play a character from your past.
Conditional love separates individuals. The person who places conditions on their lovingness is agreeing to limit love’s potential and its vast resources. To learn to love requires the willingness to feel deeply and completely what is unresolved in you and own it. Love the parts of you that are hurting, fearing and hating. Only when you allow yourself to open up to accept you and all of your inner negativity can you truly transform and evolve. You can choose to shift your attitude towards you from self-doubt and self-hatred into self-confidence and self care. As you embody this new loving attitude you can see yours and your partner’s innocence again.
Cultivating contact with your innocence, wisdom and common sense is the path to learn to love unconditionally. Your innocence is intact, it is your natural state, and this is great news. You can declare yourself innocent by taking responsibility for your past actions, making the necessary amends, in action if possible and, inwardly for sure. This heartfelt regret is all that is required to reclaim your innocence from your inner judge. Every “mistake and wrong doing” you have ever done you did in a state of ignorance-the ego’s home! People who hurt others are operating under the belief that their actions are somehow good for tem. Your ego is innocent about its selfishness; it is ignorant of how others feel!
Let your regrets and hurts, fears and doubts, anger, rage and hatred melt into the fire of love. Negative emotions create walls that imprison you in the name of protection. Instead, let Love be your guardian and your liberator. Every moment that you say yes to love you grow and fulfill your greater destiny, which is to live your life passionately!
Written by Osiris Montenegro
www.becomeselfware.com
Mobile 936 30640