It seems frustratingly paradoxical: We spend our lives longing for someone with whom can share intimacy, connection, and love and when we find it and understand that the person isn’t going anywhere, something inside of us wants to run away.
Why is love so scary?
I’ll answer this from two perspectives: the psychological and the spiritual.
On a psychological level, love is scary because what we learned of love early in life wasn’t really love. A pure expression of love feels free and spacious and invites us to grow into who we really are. Instead, we receive “love” that is conditional; “love” that only appears if we behave in the “right” way; “love” that is demanding or punishing, invasive or violating. Of course this isn’t love at all, but how confusing it is for a young child who hears the words “I love you” only to be followed by actions that didn’t feel loving at all. The wires become crossed and the love scripts become ingrained deep in psyche, scripts that say:
Love means loss.
Love means losing myself.
Love doesn’t last.
Love means heartbreak.
Love means betrayal.
It’s safer to be alone.
On a spiritual level, love is scary because when we open our hearts to another human being we not only take the risk of being hurt but we must be willing to dissolve the ego boundaries that protect our fear-based, small selves from what it perceives as a loss of control. This fear of losing control may have its roots in early primary relationships where caregivers usurped your natural and innate self-trust and boundaries, but it may run deeper than that and effect even those raised in the healthiest of environments. Addressing fear seems to be part of the journey of being on this planet, and while early humans faced physical fear and actual danger that threatened their lives, we have evolved to the point where we’re being asked to face spiritual fear and the actual threat to our ego selves.
Fear shows up in two primary ways: through thoughts and through the body. The most common fear-based thoughts that erect a wall around the heart are:
I don’t love him.
I don’t love her enough or in the right way.
I love him but I’m not in love.
Something’s missing.
If I was with the right person, I wouldn’t be feeling anxiety and fear.
Am I settling?
Am I just convincing myself that I love her?
I must be making a mistake.
The body erects walls through pulling away physically, shutting down sexually, tightening in the chest or legs, and a variety of other ways. Once you understand and can name the physical and mental ways that fear manifests, you’ve accomplished the first step to dismantling its power.
Love lives on the other side of fear, which means that if you want to experience love, you have to be willing to walk through fear. This is why I’ve devoted the second week of my new program, “Open Your Heart: A 30 day program to feel more love and attraction for our partner,” to exploring effective ways of working with fear and resistance.
If fear has made an appearance in your relationship, you’re being invited to become a love-warrior. Every warrior knows that the absence of fear is not fearlessness but courage. Growing your love and attraction doesn’t mean eradicating fear; it means finding the courage to dismantle it enough so that it’s not ruling your actions and choosing to move toward love anyway. It means learning to call fear by name and learning to recognize your own personal fear-walls. For it’s when fear is in the driver’s seat of your mind that your perception is altered and instead of seeing your partner’s beautiful heart all you see is fun-house distortion. This is what I’ll be teaching in the Open Your Heart program.
Do you want to learn to be a love warrior?
Do you want to learn how to dismantle fear so that you can grow your love and attraction for your partner?
Do you want to be guided and supported through a 30 day program that will help you grow your courage so that you can grow your love?
“Repeated acts of love diminish the fear response both in ourselves and in others,” writes David Richo in When Love Meets Fear. Acts of love don’t mean that you necessarily feel loving toward your partner to act in loving ways. It means that the commitment of repeatedly showing loving actions, both to yourself and your partner, diminishes fear. This seems logical enough, but if you don’t have the roadmap that will teach you which actions to take, you’ll feel lost in the wilderness of fear. It’s these Love Laws and Loving Actions that I’ll be teaching in my new Open Your Heart program.
There are three spots left in the program and registration closes on Wednesday. If you’re interested in the program but now isn’t the right time, I’ll be offering it again in October/November.
It’s a constellation of events and inner experiences that coalesce to create the perfect emotional storm that can only end in a release of grief, which is what happened a few weeks ago. My husband and I were struggling through a difficult conversation, I was tired, hormonal, and who-knows-what-else, and all of a sudden I felt a great swell of grief sitting in my chest, needing to come out. The next thing I knew I was crying hard. He held me as the grief shook my body. He asked why I was crying and I could only respond with, “I don’t know.” I didn’t know. And It didn’t matter. It had to do with the conversation but it didn’t. It had to do with the anniversary of my grandmother’s death and it didn’t. A gathering of grief had accumulated inside my body and it needed the safe space of my … Click here to continue reading…
One of my Conscious Weddings E-Course members sent me a beautiful article about real love. It was written by a Buddhist nun named Ayya Khema, author of “Being Nobody, Going Nowhere”, and is full of nuggets and gems about the true nature of the heart and what we believe about loving. As she wrote: “If we were aware that we all contain love within us, and that we can foster and develop it, we would certainly give that far more attention than we do. In all developed societies there are institutions to foster the expansion of the mind, from the age of three until death. But we don’t have any institutions to develop the heart, so we have to do it ourselves…. “If we see quite clearly that love is a quality that we all have, then we can start developing that ability. Any skill that we have, we have developed through practice. If we’ve… Click here to continue reading… . . . → Read More: Love is a Skill
Hollywood has done a number on all of us. From the time we’re old enough to ingest information, we’re inundated with images and messages about love, romance, and marriage that are shrouded in a shimmery cloud of fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy; the problems arise when fantasy and reality become blurred and we unconsciously absorb the unrealistic messages of, “You can have it all” and “Your Perfect Partner is waiting for you around the next corner” and “When you meet The One, you’ll ‘just know’”. We watch film after film and read novel after romantic novel that reinforce these damaging messages and then we wonder why our culture is so dysfunctional when it comes to love.
Much of Hollywood films are predicated on the theme that the story ends when the relationship begins. This means that for ninety minutes we’re hooked on characters who are chasing after each other, … Click here to continue reading…
When we moved into this house and I finally had a large plot of land where I could plant a real garden, someone said to me, “It takes seven years to grow a garden.” At the time I had no idea what that meant. I passionately and naively threw myself into planting our garden: a few tomatoes here, a row of peas there, pole beans planted around a bamboo teepee, some peppermint around the borders to deter the pesky mosquitoes, strawberries in the back. I watered and weeded as best I could with an almost four year old underfoot, and for a while it all looked lovely and hopeful. Then, as the heat intensified and my time shrunk, the weeds took over, some plants dried out, the tomatoes sagged and turned black on the bottom, and things didn’t look quite as sweet. By sheer luck, the peas and pole beans … Click here to continue reading…
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It seems frustratingly paradoxical: We spend our lives longing for someone with whom can share intimacy, connection, and love and when we find it and understand that the person isn’t going anywhere, something inside of us wants to run away.
