Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words shall never hurt me.

The rhyme is used as a defense against name-calling and verbal bullying, intended to increase resiliency, avoid physical retaliation and to remain calm.
~~[Wikipedia]

Whatever we may say, unkind words or even words that were not meant unkindly, can often hurt us.

Belonging, approval, and being part of a group or tribe is important to us because it enhances our survival (it is an evolutionary drive). Therefore, we feel good when we get approval from others and feel bad when we get their disapproval. Because of survival, our minds also have a negative bias.

The negative bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events. … In almost any interaction, we are more likely to notice negative things and later remember them more vividly.
~~[VeryWellMind]

To quote Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, “the bad stuff is easier to believe.”

The Bad Stuff Is Easier to Believe

When we hear speech, our mind processes it and categorizes it. From this comes our own perception of what is said. Our perception of what is said is colored by our past memories, learned habits, our current mood, and more. Based on this perception, one or more emotions may arise. We may feel happy at a compliment from a respected friend, or insulted by a perceived cruel remark from a foe.

My mother once told me this – “Your father does not love you and would abandon you to get what he wants.”

Obviously, this affected me greatly and caused me great emotional pain. It caused me great pain and sorrow then, and the memory of it continues to cause me pain, even though my mother has since passed away. Why is that and is there a way to release that continued pain and suffering?

As described previously, there are many causes and conditions that contribute to the arising of an emotion. Once an emotion arises, we have an opportunity to decide on our response. We can let that emotion control our subsequent action, or we can override the prescribed action of that emotion. Our natural state is to be in automatic mode, which is to say that we keep our messy emotions suppressed so that it doesn’t rise to consciousness. In this way, we unconsciously act according to our emotions. This can lead to unwanted consequences like the continuous pain and suffering from the memory of my mother.

A careless or inaccurate statement, if left unchallenged mentally, leads to inaccurate thoughts that cause difficult emotions to arise. This further leads to more inaccurate thoughts, which later become beliefs, that then lead to more difficult emotions and so on, until it snowballs into a lifetime of hurt as well as suffering.

“Your father does not love you and would abandon you to get what he wants,” leads to –

1. Belief that my father does not love me. ➞ Fear of being unloved and emotional pain.
2. Belief that my father could abandon me at any time. ➞ Fear of abandonment and emotional pain.
3. Why does my mother say these things? She must really dislike me. ➞ Belief that I must be a bad daughter or unworthy of her love. ➞ Belief that I am generally not worthy ➞ Fear of failure, being unloved, and emotional pain.
4. Why does my father not love me? ➞ Belief that I am not worthy of love. ➞ Fear of being unloved and emotional pain.
5. My mother is a terrible person for causing me all this pain. ➞ Fear of my mother.
6. What did I ever do to get such bad parents? ➞ Belief that I am not worthy ➞ Fear of failure and emotional pain.

Each thought generates more fear and pain, which generates more negative thoughts and so on. Soon, these thoughts harden into deep beliefs, which corrodes self-esteem and self-love. The process becomes habit and as more and more afflictive emotions arise, it affects our mood and we become hypersensitive to all things that others say. This makes us mistrust people in general, because people say hurtful words, cause painful emotions, and are therefore threats. We reject and withdraw from people, thereby actualizing our fears of being unloved and abandoned.

We feel isolated and very alone. However, no man is an island and we need others to survive. So fear now compels us to seek out support and company. This can sometimes lead to extreme people pleasing or approval seeking behavior.

In this way, our competing fears make us run around in circles. When we are with people, we feel pain and suffering from perceived verbal wounds and other fears that their words activate. To avoid this pain, we isolate ourselves from people and their words. When this occurs, we feel lonely and in need of support. The pain of isolation and abandonment ultimately leads us to seek out company and the cycle continues.

I Don’t Give A F*ck Coping Mechanism

Faced with this seemingly neverending cycle of fear, many of us resort to the “I Don’t Give A F*ck” coping mechanism, which is also known as blame and denial. In short, we blame others for making us feel bad, get angry with them, and then try to convince ourselves that we do not care what people say; but of course we still *do* care because that is how our minds work.

Our mind is designed to care because that is how it learns, by absorbing information. The learning capability of our mind is a superpower because it makes us highly adaptable to changing situations. However, it also makes us highly suggestive to learning the wrong things and thus falling prey to afflictive emotions that arise from distorted beliefs of reality.

Of course I care what my mother says. She is my mother and I depended on her for survival for much of my childhood. My evolutionary drive for survival compels me to care about what my mother says, what my boss says, and what others’ say. Denying that I care does not make it so, and more importantly, it does not address the root of the pain and fear.

However, just because my mother says it does not mean it is true. Just because my own mind thinks it in the moment, does not mean it is true either. Many of the things that people say are inaccurate and driven by their own fears, pains, and past. When my mother said my father did not love me and would abandon me, she was projecting her own pain of my father leaving her and not loving her anymore. She was likely also projecting pain from her own difficult childhood and losing her mother at a young age. It had very little to do with me. Yet, my mind created all these thoughts and stories around it.

My mistake was not that I cared what my mother said, but rather that I believed what she said at the surface level. If I had looked deeper, I would have seen what my mother was truly saying, and then I would feel compassion for her, instead of fear, pain, and suffering for my own false perception of unworthiness and abandonment. Now that I see it, I can deal with my own fears of unworthiness and abandonment, so that they have less control over me the next time someone says something that triggers it. This builds emotional resiliency and self-love.

Learning to Listen Deeply

Blame and anger are very tempting tools to use, especially in the midst of fear, because blame abdicates us from responsibility of failure (it is my mother’s fault, not mine) and anger gives us a semblance of control (to avoid suffering, all I need do is avoid my mother). However, blame and anger are maladaptive coping mechanisms because they lead us to avoid the pain and fear rather than face them head-on. By blaming my mother, I avoid facing my own fear of unworthiness and abandonment. By replacing fear with anger I take the wrong action, avoiding my mother, instead of facing my original fears. In this way, my old fears grow and I create new ones – fear of my mother and more generally, fear of verbal harm from everyone around me.

Overusing blame and anger will cause our fears to multiply.

The next time that someone says something hurtful to you, remind yourself that blame and anger are pointless and will only grow our fears. Instead, try to listen below the surface into the heart of the matter. Before believing a thought or an utterance, follow it back to its causes and conditions to see if it is true. You will quickly see that in most cases, hurtful utterances have more to do with the speaker than with you. Once you see this, the utterance and all the thoughts as well as emotions that come from it will lose their power over you.

Soothing Fear with Love

There was a period of almost 10 years where fear seemed to recede in my life. It started when I met my furry soul-mate Shania and ended soon after her death. Looking back, I now see that Shania was so special to me because somehow, without even knowing it, she answered my every fear with love.

The most effective antidote to fear (aversion or withdrawal) is love (engagement). This is why phobias (extreme fears) are effectively addressed with exposure (purposeful decision to engage with that which we fear).

When we learn to understand and love that which we fear, we will no longer fear it.

That happened with my mother. When I faced my fear of my mother, and learned to understand her and her motivations, I developed compassion for her, and for the first time, learned to forgive her. This helped to release a lot of the pain from childhood that has haunted me my whole life. Note that the compassion and forgiveness helped me deal with my issues and were not done for my mother, who had sadly passed away by then.

We truly love the poor, old, sick, and dying, only when we have dealt with our own core existential fears of poverty, aging, illness, and death. When we have faced these fears, then we will be truly free to love ourselves and others unconditionally.

I believe that all of us are born with a limitless store of unconditional love. We start with unconditional love of self or of life (our survival instinct) and unconditional love of our parents. As we go through life, we come in contact with many other souls and may give unconditional love to fellow travelers along the way.

Why Is Unconditional Love So Hard to Achieve?

Given that we all desire to be loved unconditionally and have an endless store of love to give, why then is unconditional love so hard to do? Why is it so rare? Why do many of us madly search for it and never find it?

While unconditional love may sound perfect on first blush, it has its own challenges.

1. To open ourselves to receiving unconditional love we must also open ourselves to giving unconditional love.
2. To give unconditional love, we must first deal with our fears. If we do not face our fears, they will form fear-motivated desires or love with conditions.
3. To give unconditional love, we must also reconcile love with our rational mind. Our rational mind tells us to act based on reason. When we need to make important decisions we consider the pros and cons of the situation and pick the choice that will give us the best long-term fulfillment. Rational choice is by definition in conflict with unconditional love, which is love without reason.

Conditional Love and Fear

It is natural for us to love and we start with an unconditional love of life or of self. Because life is precious to us, we fear death. Fear, therefore, arises out of love and is part of the human experience. However, if we fear death then we fear getting hurt, getting ill, and aging. These fears, if unaddressed, can make it difficult for us to love life.

Unfortunately, we are taught that fear is bad, is a weakness, is an illness, is the work of the devil. As a result, we suppress our fears and our automatic coping mechanisms kick in to soothe our fragile ego from daunting reality, thereby warping it. We avoid our fear of death by pretending it does not exist, we get Botox injections to hold back aging, and illness is something we only discuss with our doctors in a cold and clinical fashion. God forbid if any one of us should show our emotions or expose our fears. In this way, we deny aging, illness, and death.

When we run away from our fears, they grow and our beliefs keep getting distorted by our automatic soothing system. Instead of accepting fear as a normal human emotion, we deny feeling any fear at all and ironically become controlled by it.

Fear causes us to only love ourselves when we are healthy and young, when we are useful, wealthy, successful, or whatever else. Fear places conditions on love and when fear grows, conditional fear or conditional desires crowd out unconditional love.

On the other hand, if we face our fears, deeply listen to their messages, and understand their true source, then we will see that they are simply a part of life, and something that we can accept and adapt to. We can give up our false belief in having complete control over our lives, our unrealistic goals and wishes, our hubris, and simply let ourselves experience life as it unfolds. When we do this, we actually gain more control of our lives and make better decisions.

We like to think of ourselves as the leaders in the dance of life. However, that is not reality. In reality, life is the leader who graciously lets us twirl, bend, and caper about. But when she decides to lead, we must respect her power and move with her. It is when we forget this fact and struggle that we create unnecessary suffering.

Unconditional Love and Rationality

I am very proud of my rational mind, which has helped me overcome many challenges. It has also gotten me into a thousand kinds of trouble.

We are born with an unconditional love of life and love of self. However, our rational minds balk at this fact, because we are taught that we must have reasons for everything, including love. Because of this, we run around madly searching for the reasons we should love life (meaning of life), as well as the reasons we should love our very own selves. We should love life because life brings us happiness and beauty. This may seem noble, but under this belief, when life brings us anything less than happiness and beauty, for example when it brings us loss, sorrow, and suffering, we get disappointed, we reject life, we reject parts of ourselves, and we suffer even more. This belief in conditional love or love based on reason creates unresolvable conflict within ourselves, and causes unnecessary anxiety and suffering.

There is nothing wrong with having a rational mind. In fact, I am a big proponent of rationality. It is when our rational minds are working off of incorrect facts that our troubles arise and grow. Here are some truths that I am retraining my rational mind to accept –

1. You are not in control of everything and that is ok.
2. You are not in control of many aspects of life and that is ok.
3. You are not in control of emotions and that is ok.
4. You are not in control of love and that is ok.
5. Unconditional love by definition is not based on reason. There is no need to look for any, just stop and relax.

Let yourself love without reason, let yourself love unconditionally. In this daring, you will find unconditional love in return.

Love, Trust, Relationships

Remember though, that feeling unconditional love towards someone is different from the decision of having a relationship with them. Sometimes, we may love a person but decide not to enter into an unhealthy connection. For example, I love my parents unconditionally, but I have only had very limited contact with them in my adult life.

Both my parents have had difficult childhoods themselves and as a result, they are not capable of giving unconditional love or maintaining healthy bonds. My mother is very afraid of love and thus is afraid of life. Because of fear she rejects everyone before they can reject her, she rejects learning, exploring, experiencing, and living. I love her even though I have spent countless years trying to convince myself that I ought not to. However, it is not possible to establish a relationship with one who rejects you with her every breath.

My father equates love with material success and a show of wealth. He liked spending money and he borrowed much of it. During childhood I saw very little of my father and all the times we spent together were based on his terms. He had little interest in discussing my thoughts or desires. Still, I hero-worshipped him all the way into mid-adulthood. The first time he asked me for a large sum of money, I gave it to him. The second time I said I could not. This led to many more money calls, lies, and ultimately he threatened me with his love and his health. I realized then that I could no longer have a relationship with him.

Our self-love demands that we set certain boundaries of respect, kindness, and trust with those we interact with. Sometimes, those we love are unable to return that love in kind. I do not believe that my parents enjoy being the way they are, but unfortunately, they are unable to face their own demons and free themselves to love unconditionally. It is a sadness, but one I have come to accept.

A healthy relationship does have conditions, of a sort: your boundaries. If your partner doesn’t respect your boundaries, the relationship isn’t healthy, no matter how deeply you love them. Moving on from it, then, could be an act of unconditional self-love.
~~[Healthline.com]

Meaning of Life

To paraphrase a wonderful quote …

Ask not what life can do for you — ask what you can do for life.

We already have an unconditional love of life. That is our survival instinct. We do not need to look for reasons to love life, we simply do. When we try to look for reasons, we invariably get disappointed because we are not happy enough, not young enough, not rich enough.

Instead of frantically asking life for reasons why we should love her, we can simply accept the truth that we do. Given that we love life, we can express this love by increasing our understanding of her many everyday miracles, and practicing our love across her many dual aspects, including her joys and sorrows, her gains and losses, her happiness and suffering.

Love is not bound by reason. Do not limit yourself by binding your inborn gift of infinite love to a pros and cons list.

Like a fool I strode forth, seeking to conquer Self-Love so that I may make a gift of her to myself … but she was nowhere to be found.

Everyone agrees that self-love is one of the main keys to happiness and a good life. We should all be kinder to ourselves, build self-esteem, and do deep listening of our inner hearts. Yet most of us end up doing the opposite. We berate ourselves for small mistakes, set up impossible to achieve goals, and never give ourselves a moment’s rest because nothing is ever good enough.

Why is that? Why are we so hard on ourselves?

Self-Love

All of us are born with a deep desire to love and to be loved. Because love is so precious to us we fear not having it, not possessing it. If we do not tend to this very natural fear and instead let it control us, then we develop a hyper-intention to possess love permanently, to own it for all time. Hyper-intentions, which are desires that are motivated by fears are extreme, outcome based, uncompromising, intolerant, and not in-step with reality. When we seek to own love, we push it farther away from us.

I believe that we are born with an unconditional love of self. Self-love motivates us to seek a good and happy life. We all try to listen to our inner hearts and to those around us, so that we may make ourselves happy. Unfortunately, due to lack of awareness, we spend more of our time listening to our demons of fear rather than our angels of love.

Fear says, “What makes you think you can defeat me, I have vanquished your parents and foes more worthy than you.”
Fear, I say, “My wish is not to vanquish you, but to pursue you and listen to your deepest dreams.”
Then Fear fell silent.

Am I Worthy?

One question we all ask ourselves is – Am I worthy (to be loved)?

This is a natural question for our rational minds. Indeed we are trained to search for reasons for everything, and so we need reasons to love. We need reasons to love others, and we need reasons to love ourselves.

My mind asks this question quite often. In the past I would run around searching for answers, and embark on self-improvement quests so that I may provide her with more and more satisfying answers. I am worthy because I was an A-student, I am creative, I am focused, I am curious, and so on. I will be even more worthy when I lose 30 pounds, get married, have two successful children, have 1 million followers, 2 million in the bank, get promoted to partner, can afford a big house, appear on television, and so on.

True love, however, is unconditional and not in our direct control. We cannot force someone to love us no matter what our internal or external achievements. Similarly, we cannot force ourselves to love someone based on their internal or external achievements. The good news is that we are all born with a gift of unconditional love for ourselves and our lives. Unfortunately, this gift gets covered up by our many hereditary fears and learned fears, leading us to doubt ourselves and to pursue paths that are motivated by fear rather than by love. It is fear or doubt that places conditions on our love of self and of others.

Self-Doubt – Why We Are So Hard on Ourselves

Self-doubt causes us to be uncertain and not believe in ourselves. Self-doubt is frequently an excuse that our mind creates in order to avoid facing our many fears.

I lost all three of my beloved dogs in the past 4 years. Needless to say, so much loss in such a short time was very traumatic. After I lost Shania, I started to really doubt myself. I did not know whether I was strong enough to handle life without her, I blamed myself for not doing more, not knowing more, I was not sure if I could take care of my other dogs properly, I was not sure if I could handle my grief and other emotions. When JJ passed away from cancer, my self-doubt and fear grew to such profound levels that I could hardly manage to live my life.

All this self-doubt comes from a fear of not being able to handle the tremendous grief and pain from the death of loved ones. Rather than facing this fear and this pain, my mind came up with many excuses for avoiding it. I am not capable of handling my emotions so let me binge watch Netflix instead. I cannot tolerate the emptiness of life so let me exercise until I fall into an exhausted sleep. Unfortunately, filling my days with doing this or that only worked in the very short term. Every time I avoided the pain, my fear grew and my self-doubt along with it.

The way to quiet self-doubts and to clear away the mud that covers our gift of unconditional self-love is to face our fears. I had to face my fear of grief, fear of emotional pain, fear of feeling bad, fear of suffering. To do this, I leaned into the fear instead of running away from it, which meant leaning into the pain. Every time I thought of Shania or JJ, I purposefully brought my awareness back again and again to the associated emotional pain. I did this by training myself on mindfulness and various self-soothing techniques including using the observer position (meta moment), CBT, analysis of self, journaling, and more.

Now whenever I have any self-doubts, I call them out for what they are, which are excuses for not facing fears. I tell myself that whatever excuses my mind comes up with, I will continue to face my fears. Then I analyze each fear, face it, and repeat until the pattern weakens.

Self-Doubt and Childhood

All of us have self-doubts but some of us have more doubt than others. Self-doubt is a coping mechanism for fear and I believe that this became a deep habit for me during childhood mainly because of my mother.

I grew up in an invalidating and often traumatic environment for the first 17 years of my life. My mother had a very difficult childhood herself and was filled with fears and self-doubts. When I was about 9 years old my parents got divorced and my mother’s condition worsened. She did not know how to deal with her difficult emotions and projected much of her own self-doubt, self-loathing, and fears onto me. She taught me that I could not do most things right, and needed her to do them for me. I cannot remember any positive memory with my mother after the divorce, but there are many painful ones.

Growing up in such an environment made me develop many fears including a deep fear of abandonment as well as the incorrect core beliefs that I cannot manage on my own and that I am not worthy. I also became hypersensitive to my emotions, especially to fear. Very likely I started to develop a fear of fear, which is a fear of the physical symptoms of anxiety (e.g. tiredness, insomnia, digestive issues, food sensitivities, and more).

Childhood is an important part of our lives because many of our habits or brain pathways are formed in our early years. We mimic or mirror the actions of adults around us and may also inherit brain wiring from our parents. This too occurred with our parents, so problem behaviors may accumulate and get passed down across multiple generations.

As a result, using self-doubt as an excuse became a deep habit with me, as it did for my mother. With awareness and understanding, however, I now see self-doubt for what it is, an expression of fear. It can therefore be addressed by facing my fears.

Positive Self-Image

For much of my adult life I was quite angry with my mother for her constant guilt trips, invalidation, and verbal abuse. I was also in deep fear of her, and every time she called I would almost have a panic attack. I later realized that all of this came from a fear of my own emotions. In particular, interacting with and thinking about my mother always brings up a lot of emotional pain, sadness, self-doubt, and fear. I feared those feelings and I feared that my childhood had messed me up so badly that I would not be able to cope with life’s stresses (more self-doubt).

Many self-help gurus and websites suggest that we can build a positive self-image by using happy talk or replacing negative emotions with positive ones. “Just believe that you are awesome”, they proclaim. This never worked for me.

To build a positive self-image, I needed to face my fears and look at myself with total honesty.

I needed to look at my past, my pain, my fears, my incorrect beliefs, my correct beliefs, my weaknesses, my strengths, my mistakes, my failures, my successes, everything, from a non-judgmental perspective. I cannot change my past and I cannot change my parents. My parents are not capable of giving me unconditional love because of their own neuroses, and I have to accept that. They are human. I will likely have a greater hypersensitivity to fear and I have to accept that as well.

Reality is flawed and imperfect, so is being human. By facing myself and accepting my perceived “flaws”, I can start to look past them and develop ways to adapt and perhaps even convert them into strengths. By facing my fears, I can start to dismantle negative ways of thinking and start to respond to my emotions in a more healthy and positive manner. By weakening fear patterns I start to clear away the mud that covers my unconditional self-love, so that it shines through again. This unconditional self-love is the root of a positive self-image.

I was only able to get at that unconditional self-love by clearing away the accumulated fears that plagued me. This requires time, practice, repetition, hard-work, mental discipline, and some necessary suffering, but the rewards are deep and plentiful. Facing my fears and my pain allowed me to uncover my inborn gift of unconditional love, reengage with life more fully, be more authentic with myself and others, as well as be free to explore my entire mental landscape.

I looked into my mind and saw myself for the first time,
I shouted in anger, shook in fear, wept in sorrow, and collapsed in pain,
There is no longer any need for self-blame or self-doubt,
For the first time in forever I am in-love, happy, and free.

Most of us romanticize love. Love is joy, happiness, deep affection, kindness, generosity, gratitude, sugar and spice and everything nice. We want to believe that there is a purity to love. It transcends the calamities and suffering of this Earth, and lets us soar into the vastness of the heavens. Love is our reward for suffering.

Similarly, we vilify fear and pain. They are the tools of the devil, to be avoided at all costs for the monstrosities that they are. In purity there is certainty, and in certainty there is a kind of peace.

Unfortunately for us, reality is not pure, neither is love, nor fear or suffering. When we aspire to a love that is pure, we inflict more pain and more hurt on ourselves.

Purity of Love

Our search for a pure love or a perfect love comes from a desire to escape the impure and imperfect. Impurity and imperfection are seen as failures, weaknesses, something less than divine. Our fear of failure or of weakness drives us toward a hyper-desire of success, which leads to a need for purity and perfection.

There is nothing wrong with aspiring to success. It is only when this need is fueled by fear, leading to an intolerance of failure that we run into problems.

In reality, love is not pure. When we love, we fear and we suffer. When we love someone or something, they become precious to us and we naturally fear their loss. The deeper the love, the deeper the fear. Since nature is impermanent that loss will one day occur, at which time we will feel pain and suffering. The deeper the love, the deeper the suffering. Those are the rules of life, the way we humans are wired, and the way our reality works.

Love and Addiction

What is addiction and how does it relate to love?

Addiction is “the state of being compulsively committed to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.”
~~[Dictionary.com]

Addiction can be seen as a condition of loving too much or loving compulsively. Life gurus commonly advise us to “not love too much”, as if love can be measured out in tablespoons, cups, and ounces. We have no more control of whom or what we love than the measure of that love.

But does addiction really originate from love?

I would argue that addiction originates from fear. When we love deeply, we fear loss. Because we fear the pain of loss, we develop an intense desire to permanently hold onto the object of our deep affection. This hyper-desire can become an addiction. We become clingy, quick to jealousy, and cannot let our love out of our sight.

After we suffer a loss, we can also become addicted to drugs, narcotics, or some other substance, person, or activity to numb or redirect our emotions from the fear and pain of loss.

My grandmother was a gambler. She lost much of her money and the family’s money due to her gambling habit. Ultimately, she was only given a fixed allowance because she could not control her addiction. I believe that she was addicted to gambling not because she loved playing cards but because she feared not having money and thus not having any value or love in life. As many of us are taught, she equated money with self-value and self-love.

Such gamblers often lose everything because they fear failing and losing their money so much that they play not based on skill but based on emotion. They make risky big bets and strategy goes out the window because fear is frequently in total control. They do not enjoy playing the game, and experience only brief enjoyment in the winning of a hand. Even the pleasure of winning quickly disappears as fear once again takes the helm and induces the gambler to win the next one and the next. Most of the time she is in terrible agony, anticipating an upcoming loss.

Love and Suffering

When we love deeply, everywhere we see love,
When love dies, everywhere we see loss and pain,
There is no escape, even for our agile consciousness.
We cannot travel to the past,
We cannot stay in the present,
We cannot go to the future,
Everywhere there is suffering.

Suffering is a human condition because love is a human condition. We are born to love and from love comes fear and suffering. When we try to deny this fact of life, we fear and suffer more. This was what happened to me when I lost my two beloved Huskies.

We are naturally wired to avoid or fear pain and suffering. However, if we overly fear suffering, then we develop a deep fear of loss, which can in turn cause us to reject love. Love can be very painful when we lose a loved one and that pain stays with us for as long as we love, which in many cases is for the rest of our lives.

Unfortunately, every time we reject love, we feed our fear of loss. As our fear gets stronger, we reject more and more, thereby leading to a very narrow and isolated life. My mother led such a life and it was not a happy one. In her quest to avoid suffering, she ended up creating a lot more unnecessary suffering for herself. She spent her life rejecting everyone and everything so she ended up alone, depressed, and full of fear.

After my dogs died, I was well on my way down that dangerous path. Luckily, an open minded doctor pointed me in the right general direction and I have since realized that the best way to deal with the fear and pain of loss is to face it head-on.

Facing fear and pain is difficult because I have to override my natural body’s inclination for protection. However, it is a very worthy endeavor because by facing fear we free ourselves to truly live and truly love. I never knew how much I let fear control my life and make decisions for me until I stopped running away from her. When I started really listening to fear, I saw that she permeated every aspect and most moments of my life.

Fear and suffering are often seen as terrible things that must be avoided at all costs. As we go through life, this fear grows. It is no coincidence that Hell is seen as a place of eternal pain and suffering.

However, when we start tending to our fear and pain, we see that they are not as monstrous as our fear and society may lead us believe. In fact, fear can be exciting, which is why many people ride roller coasters or go bungee jumping and sky diving. Fear can also enhance attraction as has been shown in many experiments. This is why scary movie date-nights are popular with the young. Emotional pain or suffering can also evoke deeper feelings of love. James Cameron’s Titanic was particularly moving because the pain of loss added a poignancy to the love.

When I let myself feel the pain of loss fully, I also feel a very deep love. Just as the dark makes the light seem brighter, fear and pain can make love more powerful. Frequently, we feel many different emotions simultaneously. Some may dominate at certain times but there is usually a mix. Love can be achingly beautiful and memories can be bittersweet. This is the reality of being human.

Unconditional Love

After facing my fears I finally understand that many of the things I thought I loved, didn’t come from love at all but from fear. I had to be perfectly successful, beautiful, youthful, happy, and productive in order to be loved. Love came with conditions … conditions set by fear. I feared failure, aging, suffering, pain, and not being useful. Most of all I feared not being loved.

I never received unconditional love from my parents and didn’t really know what it was until I met Shania and JJ. I love Shania and JJ no matter what. I love them through good and bad times, through aging and illness, and also through death. It did not matter whether they loved me in return. Every day with them was a song because I love them.

True love is unconditional love.

Many of us go through life busily looking for unconditional love, but in our mad striving we are never able to find it or even give it to ourselves. In our grasping for love we fail to recognize that true love cannot be directly pursued but ensues from us giving it to others and ourselves. Shania was especially easy to love. Whatever love I gave her she mirrored back to me many times over. Even though she is no longer with me, I will forever be grateful for sharing ten wonderful years with her.

Loving my mother is much harder. She rejected me my whole life so there are few positive memories and many painful ones. Yet, bitterness and anger of her and my difficult childhood has only created additional and prolonged suffering for myself. When we hold onto grudges and reject our natural state of loving-kindness, we hurt ourselves most of all.

In life, we often dole out love in little miserly bits as if it were a scarce resource. Love is highly valued by all, we have limitless amounts to give, and yet we selfishly hold onto it. We have silly rules and silly games that we play with each other because we fear rejection.

We are so hung up with conditions on love that we even made God’s love be conditional. There are God’s rules that must be followed, sins to avoid, karma to be accrued. We cannot enter Heaven’s gates until our ledger is properly balanced in the right way.

How to Find Love?

Since we have boundless love to give, should we give unconditional love to all? Should our love extend to even the vilest figures of history?

I do not think it is possible to give unconditional love to all. We are, after all, limited by time, and like all things we want to grow, love needs tending. Part of life is choosing which loves we wish to nourish.

The tragedy of life is that we frequently spend so much of it running away from fear that we have little time left over to tend to love. Therefore, the first step to finding love is to face our fears. If we tend to our fears, do deep listening, and weaken its hold on us, we will leave a lot of room for love to expand.

By recognizing the nature of fear, we can also start to recognize those who are filled with and controlled by fear. Sadly, both my parents fall into this category. It is important to remember that all of us have fear. It can neither be wished away nor trained into extinction. Fear will always be part of us. The trick is to tend to it properly and not be controlled by it. We can start tending to our fears at any time of our choosing. However, we have no control over the chosen time of another.

Your happiness and suffering depend on your actions and not on my wishes for you.
~~[Jack Kornfield]

It would be marvelous if my parents were able to give unconditional love but they are too beset by inherited and self-made fears to do so. It would be fantastic if they decided to change, but they have thus far chosen not to. Still, my inner child loves them in an unconditional way, and that is ok.

I was in conflict with myself for a long time over loving my parents. My adult self did not want to love people who continued to hurt and reject me, parents or no. But there is nothing wrong and in fact much good in letting a part of myself continue to love them. However, I am not on speaking terms with my father because it is only possible to have a one-sided relationship with him. Him dictating and demanding large sums of money, and everybody else following his dictates and giving him what he wants. If he ever decides to change I will happily accept him with open arms, but in the meantime, I am not holding my breath.

Memories of my childhood will always be painful and I have accepted that. My parents are not capable of giving unconditional love and I have accepted that as well. I am not sure if this is true forgiveness but this is the closest I have ever come to it.

Many life gurus advise us to practice forgiveness as if it were the easiest thing in the world. I believe that real forgiveness can only come after facing our fears and pain, going through them, and reaching a true understanding of those who have harmed us. It is this real forgiveness that is earned through pain, which can ultimately bring us to a place of peace and love.

Meaning of Life

All of us want happiness and to be loved. So we rush this way and that way looking for both. But the urgency and mad grasping comes from fear and not from love. When we realize that and stop running, when we face our suffering and stop feeding it, unconditional love will naturally emerge because it was there all along.

When we give unconditional love, it will come back to us many times over. There is no need to hurry, true love is everywhere and always within us. We only need to open our eyes and see it, through our fear and pain.

No one knows the true meaning of life, if there is one to be known. But not knowing is the essence of freedom, and freedom is a very good thing. With this freedom we can listen to the stories of others, decide for ourselves what is good and honest, and come up with our own stories to warm our hearts and fill our souls with love.