Day: May 11, 2013

409: Unconditional and Conditional Love

| Aspergers Girls

( I am writing more because a lot is going on with our extended family. I process to find relief. If you don’t see me around for a bit, I might take a break. Hugs and love ~ Sam)

I have had the opportunity to experience a variety of friendships. In so doing, I have learned a lot about myself and love. For the majority of my life I felt a false-love from others and gave out false-love. Even though I felt the false-love, I didn’t recognize the falsehood for what it was. I was an active participant in the illusion. Most of these friendships were based on need. This desire was masked as possible fulfillment and completion. I know now no one can complete me.

I still hold all of these people in love and light. All of my friends continue to be some of my greatest teachers. I don’t choose to see any wrong in where I have traveled, and hold no one in my life responsible, not even my self. I have forgiven me and all. I place no judgment on any of my past or current friends either. I see them as lovely lights and filled with goodness. I don’t see them based on their actions but based on their hearts.

I was a player in the game of false-love, particularly in relation to men. Most of this telling is based on reflecting back to my behavior in pre-marriage years. I think if I had read what I have written below in my twenties, I never would have seen the ‘truth’ of it, and gone on living in denial. Maybe I even would have been spiteful and angry. I think if I had read this prose in my thirties, I would have thought I already loved unconditionally, and this was a waste of my time. I would have thought the person was preaching or trying to teach what I knew. If I read this last month, I would have thought, interesting, but I know this already. But it wasn’t clear to me until recently. Dynamically clear.

For now when someone claims to love me with a conditional type of love, I don’t feel love from them. I don’t know why, but all falsehoods affect me to a great degree. I don’t even know how I see this false-love, but I do. That’s not to say that people who proclaim to love me don’t love me. I believe they do. I believe a part of them does. But I believe a greater part is in constant battle with an unmasked, unnamed, and unforgiving fear. I believe this fear constantly transforms who I am when interpreted by another. I become what another projects from fear. In rare cases I become the light of love. This, and only this, is when fear is eradicated from its shell of illusion.

There is a struggle for people to find love and claim love, because they haven’t yet found the love inside themselves.

This false-love scares me momentarily, until I dismiss the fear.

It scares me because when another feels the illusion of fear, I feel the separation.

I have those in my life now that love me unconditionally. There is much freedom in this, to be me and be loved for me. I am not loved based on my outcomes or what I do or do not do. But even I, in my relationships with others, slip back into conditional love; this is very evident in my marriage and with my children. I continue to release judgment on self and others, and to learn. I am fortunate to have such experiences available.

When I am loved unconditionally I feel fed and nurtured. When I am loved by someone with conditions, I feel caged and judged. I am learning to not feel caged and judged, and to see this as illusion too, but it is taking some practice.

Lately, I am becoming more of a projection of what another choses to see in me. I can feel this in my depths. I become what another believes he or she sees. I become, in essence what they hold within. I have heard of this happening to other people, as well. So I am not alone in this experience. It is interesting to watch as I transform based on another’s deep level. I do not at this time think I am choosing to still see “fear.” I recognize the beauty and light in all, and see the fear only as illusion, nothing more. I can’t see beyond the beauty into fear, because there is no fear at the foundation.

I know I am still learning and growing.

I no longer choose to buy into another’s pain; especially when their pain is projected onto me, as if I did something or didn’t do something to cause the hurt. I do not have the power to knock down or to build up a person. Only source and a person’s own self can affect the spirit. I do have the power to love, and in this love to bring wholeness to self. Everyone has a choice to accept what he or she thinks I am saying or to reject it. To take in what he or she interprets as my truth or to decline. To say thank you and receive or say thank you, but no thanks. In this way, ultimately it is the receiver’s choice to determine what he or she takes in. I choose to take in all as truth and none as truth. I choose not to pick and choose. Unless someone is speaking from a place of fear, then I typically, when aware, politely decline. I prefer not to take on another’s fear-projection.

I believe there are only two roots: Love or Fear. All truth grows from there. Take a fruit off of the branch and examine it for what the fruit is. Rotten equals Fear. Ripe equals Love. One can tell much from the end product. Take the final outcome and drive backwards to the root. Where there is pain, there was fear to begin with manifested in false-love—illusion. Where there is mutual healing, there is love—the only existence.

Again this is my temporary truth.

My personal interpretation that assists me:

What true friendship is: Unconditional love.

What unconditional love is: Love without want, need, perimeters and/or expectations.

What want and needs are: Self-based, ego-centered desires that one thinks will make him or her happy. Also known as illusions and/or the path to suffering.

What perimeters are: Rigidness and separation; the judge emerging to decide if another has been deemed sufficient in their actions.

What unconditional loving friendship isn’t: All relations not based on unconditional love; in other words, all relations based on conditional, false-love, aka fear.

What unconditional love is not: False-love, also known as fear.

What fear is: An illusion often manifested in various actions and/or emotions that aren’t stemmed from love.

All false-love breeds fear and pain; all true love breeds more love. This true love can lead to spontaneous awakening and healing.

When one does not feel unconditional love, either the giver is loving with false-love or the receiver is misinterpreting the gift of genuine love.

This is not love: Expectations, martyrdom, fear-based desire, giving to receive, condition based giving, imagined selfless-giving, self-projection, owning, self-based desire, deeming one special or above the rest, caring more about self than other or caring more about other than self, blame, self-loathing in the name of love, fearing the future, needs based on outcome.

In love there is no hurt. All pain is self-inflicted.

Indicators of false-love:

Look at what a giving, loving, caring person I am, why can’t you love me like I love you?

I sacrifice for you, why can’t you sacrifice for me?

I am not good enough to be your friend.

You aren’t enough.

You should do this…

You disappointed me.

You won’t/don’t love me.

If you loved me, you would….

If you do this it will all be better.

You are the best person in the world.

You are hurting me.

People can have a mutual loving relationship based on unconditional love with moments of neediness and pain; unconditional love can fluctuate just like the seasons. No one is expected to be a perfect anything. Especially not a perfect lover or perfect friend. To suggest so, would be automatic judgment and separation. However healing happens when one starts to recognize his or her actions based on fear. Then self-healing can begin to take place in the one. After the one self has begun the healing process, the other in the friendship, noting the changes in his/her friend, will either continue in a state of fear, fight the change before also seeking self-understanding, or naturally seek out the friendship to heal in a way reflected in the healed or healing friend. In this way conditional love can bring both parties to pure love based on unconditional love.

If both partners are not ready, strong, and compassionate about growth and self-awareness, blame and jealousy quickly arises and the friendship may end. Yet, being this was a friendship based on false-love the illusion is what ends, not the friendship. This enables both to be free. One to go on to further unconditional love and the other to decide to remain in denial, suffering, and repeated pain or to seek out self-love. No one is right or wrong, better or worse; they are where they are.

In some cases someone who has learned self-love will be in a friendship with someone with conditional-based love. In this instant the person who continues to love unconditionally, despite the other’s projections, demands, and needs, can reflect back the ideal form of love and in this way transform the other trapped in a pain cycle.

True love heals when one capable of unconditional love simply is.

Again my temporary truth.

Strong indicators of conditional false-love:

No desire to celebrate a friend’s successes.

Not wanting to share the friendship with anyone else.

Thinking you are the best and/or only person for that person.

Changing actions or making decisions in an attempt to gain attention.

Obsessing about the person.

Thinking you are responsible for a friend’s growth, success, triumph, or accomplishments.

Thinking you are a person’s savior, teacher, protector, or safety.

Giving self-credit for another’s joy.

Thinking you have the answers another seeks and needs.

Thinking you were used, abused, or mistreated.

Jealousy of other people in the friend’s life.

Judging and putting down a friend’s friends.

Evaluating a friend’s choices, behaviors, mannerisms, and way of being.

Feeling the need to set a friend straight, so he can see your way.

Secretly or overtly harboring feelings of hurt and a sense of abandonment about the relationship.

Talking to someone about a friendship using harmful words about the friend.

How friendship appears:

A reflection of the love a person holds about his or her inner self.

What unconditional love-based friendship feels like:
Coming Home

Day 408: Love, Judge, and Invisible Need

| Aspergers Girls

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I judge when I think another does not ‘see’ me. I am learning to replace my judgment by thinking: “She did understand me; she did see me; she saw exactly what she chose to see.”

When someone says: “Don’t judge me,” they are being contradictory, almost hypocritical, if the negative aspects are removed from the word. For in order to claim someone is judging another, the accuser must first have judged.

To evaluate and categorize another is to judge. To decide another’s behavior is to judge. To place one’s truths on another is to judge. To say my god is the right God is to judge. To say I know a truth is to judge. Whenever a mark is made, a claim, a stake put into the earth, one becomes judger and the other judged. There is no way around this. The judger of the judging is equal to the one accused.

I am releasing my need to judge anything and anyone, and any event. I find only discomfort now in judging. And even more displeasure in defending or clarifying a feasible ‘truth.’ Clarification, unless sought after by a seeker, to me, now feels like a fear-based approach. As if I am saying, “Wait, that’s not what I mean. Please see me so you are not angry and so you will not misinterpret me.”

Now I see. I see this and I laugh.

It’s silliness in the making.

I find myself stumbling from time to time—a toddler learning to walk in all her sweetness.

Whenever I feel discomfort in my body and mind, the pain is non-explicit in its coming. Meaning there isn’t one thing or one someone who brings the pain. It is me. I am the source. Always the source. I see this clearly, and can laugh now at my own accuser: SELF.

I can accept the gift of another’s words or I can say thank you, but no thanks: Keep your gift for yourself. Not needed here.

Prior to this spring, I wanted to be understood because I longed to be seen and loved. Now that I know I am love, I am loved, and I love, the need-base has shifted.

Where I longed to be understood (loved) before. Now I long to be seen as love. But in longing to be seen as love, I recognize a desire. For there is no purpose in wanting, except to try to erase the illusion of loneliness.

I have moved beyond the need for validation, praise, and being ‘enough’ in someone else’s eyes. Usually–that is. In my harder moments of pain, I want nothing but to be held and comforted, reminded of my beauty.

However, it is in my pain now that I celebrate my ability to be human. My ability to transition into deeper wisdom. I see all as a gift. No goods and no bads. The world doesn’t hurt once the bad is removed. Even through the times of extreme anguish, an observer steps back and applauds the journey, the courage, the ever-full heart of love and praise of love.

What I still desire is for another to say: “I see you in your fullness and beauty and light. That is all I see.”

I want to be seen through eyes of love.

Which ultimately means I wish others to heal to a level where they love themselves unconditionally, and in doing so, love others the same. I have grown tired of assumptions, and guesses, and conclusions others reach about me. It’s really a waste of energy.

But I see the confusion of some—how they think they love me or another unconditionally, when in fact there are huge needs attached. (Outcome based needs. Wanting someone to be a certain way. Loving because of qualities or features, instead of loving for no reason but to love.)

I only want to be loved because I am a reflection of the good in another. That’s the only love that feels real. The only love I can feel.

In seeing this, the fact that attachment to outcome or desire implies a degree of false love and the absence of unconditional love, then I realize my very own need to be seen through the eyes of another as love is conditional, and in that way false-love. And so I practice release of even the desire to be seen as love.

I know the more I release the more I feel the love of the ALL and in this I am free.

Still the joy of being seen beyond judgment, deciphering, classifying, guesses, fingering, figuring, and dissecting is pure brilliance. And when I cross paths with a friend or another who loves this way, who loves purely, the healing is phenomenal.

I recognize the light in you, so many say, but do they really?

I want my voice to be a healing vibration of love and nothing else. Yet, when I open my mouth, or type on a screen, I am faced with the reality of others’ interpretation. The only remedy is not to speak. And here I am thinking might be where I am headed.

The more I speak or write, the more I hurt. MY soul knows no one can hear me unless he or she wants to hear me; and those that don’t hear, will turn me into any fantasy they choose. And thusly, I am writing for the few that will see me; the ones able to move beyond the judgment and analysis and pondering. The rest who don’t love unconditionally, will judge me.

And to me, this is my sacrifice for love: To be judged over and over, and made into someone I am not.

Someday I will give up this sacrifice and give up the thought of sacrifice, and just be at peace. I will be that person who barely speaks unless approached by genuine seeker. For I no longer desire to speak a truth to people who are not hearing my truth. And it seems entirely silly to profess an ever-changing truth to an ever-shifting audience. I am wondering too, as I write, if that my main suffering is of the separation, the falselove, the falsehood, the fear.

It is the separation that hurts.

I grow weary of being placed into another’s expectations. Of being made to fit another’s comfort zone. I am comfort; I am love; I am freedom; and if another cannot see that, they do not see me.

I see them. I see them as love. Beyond the fear, I see only love.

I have absolutely no desire to prove a point or to debate or to establish a truth. And the strongest desire, I cannot disrobe, is the want of others to do the same. To enter with me in the space of no doubt, no fear, no cause.

I don’t even forgive anymore, because I don’t ever get to the point of anger or resentment in which I need to forgive. The anger can’t slip in long enough for me to make up lies about another. If anger comes again another day, I shall dismiss it. And if I let it linger, then I shall forgive all readily. I also don’t judge myself. If I did, I would naturally judge others. If one judges self, he undoubtedly applies this to all.

I don’t even give the benefit of the doubt to people, because I don’t doubt people. To doubt is to judge and to deem unworthy or not enough to some degree. And that is all based on the past and interpretations.

Still, as of late, I get this awful sensation from many people that I am being probed and needled, hooked upon and latched onto with their microscopic lenses to find my potential fault or meaning or wrongdoings. I get the feeling sometimes that others are searching for the ugliness in me to justify that they are better or to justify their own ugliness that they believe exists.

This makes me wonder why.

If I write with no intention but to share my truth and to love (without want of fame, recognition, love, attention, debate, profit, etc.) and only with the ‘want’ of understanding self fuller, so I can be a more loving and giving being, then what about my truth is there to dissect?

And isn’t it the most fearful who would fear my love and proclaim their truth as only truth?

Why do people want to make me into something?

I desire to be more invisible than visible now. I long to just hold you from where I am, speechless, the words all erased. And if I am selfish, it is in my desire to have someone do the same—to just love for the love we are.

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