Approaching tomorrow’s final day of Deepak and Oprah’s 21-day meditation, “Manifesting Grace through Gratitude,” I’m moved to share near verbatim what today’s meditation was about: Love.
WAIT! Before you hurl into your morning coffee or cereal bowl, hear me out.
More specifically, they were talking about the responsibility for love, and from there I’ll quote:
Love is my closest experience to the feeling of completeness. On the path of gratitude, I transfer the responsibility for love from another person to myself. This is no small step; it is the very key to transformation.
If a child is asked why it feels safe and taken care of, it will point to its mother and father. This is how we learn to give the responsibility for Love to someone outside ourselves. That’s only natural in childhood when we needed loving, secure parenting. Today, however, when I look for love, looking outside myself is certainly viable, but it’s not transformative.
“WHOA,” is what I wrote in my notes as I dictated what I heard this morning (I write down what they say, because it’s how I learn best).
Whoa, indeed.
“Moving the responsibility for love from another person to myself.” God, that sounds important. God, that sounds hard.
I appreciate this idea that this is how love was modeled and taught and necessary for us to learn and be in childhood. (Though I always smirk a little whenever Deepak mentions the love of one’s parent as wholly beneficent… since it’s a rare human who gets to experience it that way.) What is reassuring to me about this idea is that it means I didn’t f*ck up by depending upon others for love and security — I’ve just used that tool for too long. Especially if we feel that our parenting was imperfect then it makes abiding sense that one would continue to try to get that model completed into adolescence, young adult and adulthood.
Who knew there was an expiration date to human-dependent love, though? No me!
When I think about reigning, pulling, retracting my external claws from my need for others to complete that circuit for me, there becomes so much freedom. Because the responsibility of and for Love is wholly mine. I don’t need to depend upon the unstable ground of others’ emotional availability; I can bring it alll the way back into myself to depend upon the constant of Divine Love.
What a relief! To allow myself to simply love others without needing them to fill or fix me. To love my mom and dad and partner without NEEDING them to make me feel something. What a relief to them, too, huh?
The “very key to transformation,” Deepak calls it.
What growth is there in that.
Owning Voice 