To love and to be loved is the deepest longing for every human being on this planet. This longing, and inevitable failure to fulfill this longing, is the core of all of our upsets, problems, confusions.
Our desire for love is our very nature; it is who we are. From the day we are born, we reach out, searching to be received, seen, mirrored, loved, adored. None of us are. All of us, every single one, are furious about this.
We hate because we were not loved perfectly; some of us not at all (or so we believe!). Our anger at not being loved perfectly throws us into an energetic confusion. We want, simultaneously, to be loved and to kill off those who do not fulfill our wishes.
Even at a very young age there is a deep knowing of the incongruity here. We become, at the core, afraid, ashamed, enraged, desperate and terrified. We feel that if we are not loved, we will perish
To a child, not being loved is certain death; after all, we depend on our parents for our very survival. So, we develop strategies to ensure our very lives.
We then grow into these strategies and believe them to be who we are. We consider these ways of being our personalities, and see ourselves in these false, misconceived, damaging images.
We continue to hate and we continue to develop more and more sophisticated ways of hiding our hatred as we grow into adulthood. The part of us that continues to hate, meanwhile, remains in childhood.
A part of us knows this, and is more and more desperate to hide where we know we are mere children emotionally. This is the human dilemma.
What we each do with this is ours to recognize for what it is, a confusion, a mis-understanding, a collapsing of a system created by a child and embraced, unquestioned and unexamined, into adulthood.
Our work is to untie all of our inner knots, piece by messy piece. This painful process is lifelong and life-giving. The deeper we go into the energetic core of our beings and retrieve the part of ourselves that we cut off out of our child’s need, the more of who we really are becomes available.
When we do this work, we find it is safe to love after all. Once we know, understand, and are responsible for the fact that we may or may not be met perfectly by the other, we are free to give our best, our most natural gifts, to life.