What’s Holding You Back from Love?
My guess is that there's no one else actively holding you back.
When I was a rebellious teenager, it seemed obvious that the opposite of love was hate. As I grew up and my reflections of what love is and isn’t expanded, I’ve come to accept that the opposite of love is, in fact, indifference.
Mentally speaking, it makes sense. It is not that hard for us to shout at a loved one in full rage. But what a devastating thing to get nothing back but a blank face that couldn’t care less. Yet, as I grew even older, what I started experiencing in my body was something else.
When I want to open up more and love more, I feel a fight in my chest. This battle, however, is one of love against fear.
Love Against Fear
When we think about love, we tend to think about romantic relationships and kinship. No wonder we often refer to hate and indifference: in such relationships, we can go from love to hate in a blink of an eye.
We often aim at not caring about things, so we can go on with our lives without being so impacted by heated emotions. We wonder why we can’t let things go. Who knows how many times I’ve wanted to kill my little brother, my mother, and every single man I’ve ever dated.
But love is much bigger than that. Self-love, love for humanity, love for nature.
What is this feeling? Love is an energy of expansion. It wants to open our chest wide, to reach out and hold hands, to nurture life. Love believes that there’s enough for everyone, and says “let’s share the pie” and “we are in this together.”
True love is unconditional because it doesn’t need a reason to be; it just is.
Fear is a Bitch
When I think about what is holding me back from love, the answer is always myself. Or, more specifically, my fears. My fears of rejection, of not belonging, of not being loved back, of failing, of committing to something fully, of not being good enough, of being betrayed, of not having enough to share. The list goes on and on.
If love expands us, then fear contracts us. If love believes in abundance, fear believes in scarcity.
In fear’s eyes, there’s not enough for everyone.
Envy tells me that if someone has what I want, there’s less of it left for me. Stinginess tells me that there’s not enough money to share. Jealousy tells me love is limited, and I won’t get as much love if the one I am in love with gives some of his honey to someone else. Attention seeking tells me there’s not enough space for everyone. Judging others tells me not everyone gets to belong and be accepted.
In fear, we believe there’s not enough of anything; I have to take care of mine, or I won’t have enough (thank you, Charles Eisenstein, for the beautiful lesson on scarcity).
But What About Indifference?
Indifference can be a coping mechanism of fear. Sometimes love is not going the way we expect it to be, for we often expect things in return.
Unconditional love is hard stuff. In my teenage years, I’ve done terrible things to my mother, from accusing her of not being present to stealing from her, and here she is decades later, still standing tall and supportive, without ever mentioning anything bad I’ve ever done. I often wonder if I would have the same strength of heart as she does.
We go through great lengths to avoid pain. The suspicion that something might hurt us may cause us to wish we didn’t care, so it wouldn’t hurt.
Our longing for indifference comes from the fear of getting hurt. Or maybe we truly don’t care about something. In a way, that is how we have been wired. We are in a society that thrives on disconnecting us from each other.
I probably wouldn’t buy a shirt at Primark if I felt connected to the people who made it, given their terrible working conditions. If only we had a connection, love instead of indifference, things wouldn’t ‘work out so well’ as they do now in our market economy society.
Indifference becomes a coping mechanism that enables us to make it through the day, to deal with social inequality and the exploitation of people and of the environment. What if I cared, would it be too much for me to handle, would I get overwhelmed? We choose to cope with indifference instead of fixing it with love as if the former was less painful.
As a result, we become numb, sad, anxious, stressed, selfish. What’s worse? We’ve managed to normalize these feelings.
What’s the Significance of the Opposite of Love?
We say we live in duality, but opposites are not different entities as much as the extreme points of the same spectrum. By acting on one side, what we get is to move closer to the other side of the spectrum. By reducing fear, we move closer to love.
A loving society is a society that isn’t based on fear. Given how much the media and government work to amplify our fears, fighting for love is nothing ordinary. On a collective level, that battle is clear. But what does that mean on an individual level? After all, the only person who suffers from this daily is ourselves. The result is that we have less love in our lives than we could.
All structural problems aside, what is holding us back from love is ourselves.
What Can We Do?
We can work on self-love, for if there’s one thing we all deserve it’s being our own best friend.
We can choose to do things out of joy and not out of fear. If we devour the news out of fear of not being updated instead of feeling joy (or at least intrigued and moved) as we read it, maybe we shouldn’t read it.
We can reprogram ourselves to see love instead of fear. Take a minute here and there and focus on happy memories and on the feeling of love that they bring. Feel them expanding from your chest, breathe through them, and let them expand throughout our bodies.
We can also focus on something we are grateful for — no matter how bad things are, there’s always something good, something beautiful, be it a person who has been important in our lives or a stunning tree.
We can cut the stories we tell ourselves: I am like that because my parents did not do this or that. A person who almost drowned as a child could become forever afraid of swimming again or become a professional swimmer to beat that episode. We create our own stories.
We can be present, in the here and now, and look people in the eye and let them know that they are seen and heard. That we all belong here and have the same right to take up space.
We can say no and set boundaries when things hurt us or others. Non-conformity and honesty to our truth are acts of love and respect.
We get to choose where we put our attention, and we can choose love instead of fear. The path of fear is a path of contraction and victimization. The path of love is the path of expansion and empowerment; of sovereignty, and synergy.
Hi, I am Aline Ra M, spiritual guide, energy worker, and tea lover.
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