Love and Attachment, Part 1: Love Is Love

I write these posts as much for myself as for anyone else, because when I ask a question of my Self, it’s like opening a tap. The water of deeper understanding pours through.

Recently, a friend told me he was trying to understand the difference between perseverance and obsession. Similarly, I sometimes ask myself when I’m persevering and when I’m being just plain stubborn.

The immediate answer that came to me was that perseverance is based on the energy of expansion, and applies in situations in which there is opportunity for growth, change or fulfillment. We sometimes need to keep trying, or simply wait, for the fulfillment to happen.

Obsession, on the other hand, is based on the energy of contraction. It’s hanging onto the past, to a situation that is over and where no opportunity for further growth exists. Stubbornness and resistance also fit that description. They are just refusing to accept, let go, and allow our feelings or our life to be transformed.

Love and Attachment

That’s a pretty good start, but it’s a little abstract. The next morning I was sitting on my balcony
when a more complete answer started coming to me. I took pen and paper and did what I call a writing meditation: I hear the language in my mind and write it down. Sometimes I write a question, and then write the answer as it comes to me. I’ll transcribe the meditation here so you can receive exactly what I did:

The difference between obsession and perseverance is the difference between love and attachment. Between faithfulness and fear. Human relationships contain both.

How do we know which is which?

Love expands. It makes our hearts feel bigger. It opens new worlds. It frees the beloved from our needs, our desires, to seek the fulfillment of his or her own.

Love wants the best for everyone involved. That includes the lover, and it includes the beloved.
To desire to be the Beloved of the one we love is natural. It is normal to seek love from those we love. But the lover rises above, goes beyond this desire – not annihilating it, but seeing it for what it is: human attachment.

In our souls, we love selflessly. We have so much love within us at all times that we don’t need anything else.

Ultimately, that state of endlessly abundant love is what we all seek to recreate here on Earth. When we encounter someone who draws that love out of us, we feel closer to our own source of love. We think it is because of the other person, but it’s not. It’s our own abundant energy of love that we feel as it flows out through our heart chakra toward the other.

You can experience this by thinking of anyone you love – not just as a lover, but as parent, child, or friend – and noticing the feeling in your body. Only our thoughts about the nature of our relationship with that person change our experience of love.

In its most pure essence, love is love is love.

Then I asked, “So if that is love, what is attachment?”

But this is long enough, so the answer will have to wait for the next post.

Keep reading!

Love, Light and Blessings,
Susan