Love is a force, not a feeling. Every motivation and reaction comes from only two opposing forces, love and fear. Love does not require trust, it commands it. If trust is not present, fear has taken hold. Learning to trust is the foundation of spiritual liberation. It is not about trusting our partner. It is about trusting to love ourselves enough to know when to say yes and when to say no. It is about trusting God and the universe to allow it to take things away from you and accept those that are being given without question. When we make the choice to trust ourselves and the universe, we stop blaming our partners and we start accepting what we have chosen to experience in life.
Often when we first meet our beloved, our oxytocin soars and we get seduced by the hormones. It can hit us hard and hit us fast. Without thought, we give ourselves over to this person we hardly know. We become entranced with the fantasy that we finally met the one who understands us and our pain. Then when we come down off the high, we meet our differences and it is often with a “Who the hell are you?”
When we truly love a person, we do not judge their rotten parts, nor do we see them as such. We see each wounded part of our lover as a call to love more deeply. And sometimes it means loving ourselves so much that we leave. We have to decide if we want a lover or a savior and which one would we like to be.
We often feel our partner should meet all the needs that others failed to give us. We subconsciously want our lover to be the parent or the teacher or the source of happiness we never had. It’s too much pressure for anyone to bear and it’s devastating when no human being can measure up to be our hero. We must save ourselves instead.
Relationships are the quickest track to enlightenment. Your mirror is your partner reflecting back to you all of your unmet desires and all of your beliefs about love. Change the partner and your next mirror will be even worse, if you haven’t healed the cracks. Unconditional love is deciding not to be wrong or right. If you do not trust your choice to be in the relationship that you are in, then you are not loving someone fully. And most likely that someone is you.
If the past was too painful to forget, then forgive and move on. Learn to love the lesson as much as you did the person and accept a better life for yourself. Sometimes when trust is fractured, only fear can replace it and no time will undo boundaries that should never have been broken. If you should take another leap into the unknown with love again, then do it with complete surrender. Don’t look back. Say goodbye to yesterday and forget about tomorrow. When you learn to trust yourself, you will know you will only choose the highest good for yourself. You will know everything you are experiencing is bringing you to a greater version of you. And you will stop looking to your partner to clean up your own mess. After all it was your choice to forgive them, so that is on you.
If you simply have a fear of love, then you are not in a state of love. You are expecting something to harm you and love can never harm. People will hurt us, especially if we let them in and we must make that okay. We will get hurt again and again. No one is perfect, not even you.
We must invite the pain to arise and say hello, so that it can be healed. However, we must not invite abuse and there is a difference. Your heart will answer that for you. So you must ask yourself is your fear of intimacy worth the potential loss of experiencing bliss? Take the leap and plunge and if you get hurt, stand up and brush yourself off again. When we love past the pain, we open wider to holding even more love. That is the purpose of a soul mate. It isn’t always to get married or be together for a long time. It is to get you to open yourself up more greatly than before. It is to bring awareness to how conditional you are with love. Love isn’t about your needs being met. And we often withhold love when those needs are not met. Love is when you love yourself and the other person’s choice to be exactly who they are and where they are in this moment. You respect their need to be accepted. So if who they are isn’t enough for you, love them anyway, but lovingly say goodbye. It is not about making any one wrong or right. It is about allowing what is currently true in the moment. It is about accepting the complete truth without trying to alter a thing. If you can do that, then you know how to trust in love.