Intuitive Healer Katarina Winslow brings us reflections on love.
We are encouraged to see the world through rose-tinted glasses and cherish our loved ones. The pinker the better. When we feel this good, love is natural. In the moments of romance, we feel committed to the wellbeing of our partner, without condition. To be romantic is to be in a position of generosity towards the other. In love, we feel safe in being on the giving and receiving end.
Romantic love is wonderful at its best and painful as its worst. When we embrace love, when we are in the state of love, we see the beauty in feeling united as one. But for love to last you need to also feel like one and united within yourself, with and without the beloved. Otherwise, it won’t be long before the ego of each person starts to feel uncomfortable with the ‘oneness’ that love has created.
After a while, when the first pink clouds start to disperse, people start asking whose ‘oneness’ is it that we have actually created. In love, we go from feeling completely united with the other, abandoning our individual self in the union, often wanting to regain our authentic selves and our own independence and identity. The transition from the first infatuation to lasting love is softer when two people in love are whole within themselves. When you are whole, love is less subject to disappointments and failure as you bring your own unity into the wholeness of love. Love is easier when it comes not from need but from desire to experience more of yourself in the mirror of the other.
But what is love in its essence? Love is just that: wholeness. Love is the unity we feel in the first moments of new love. Love is the absence of fear. Love is the feeling of complete oneness with the other and everything beyond. Love is also the truth of who we are before entering the dual reality of terrestrial life. Love is, to put it simply, an absolute feeling of being whole and united. Looking deeper, we find that love is our essence. Love is the one thing that remains when we remove all the illusions of ourselves. Love is our centre.
Love is where we came from and love is where we will return. Unfortunately, the illusion that keeps us from feeling whole and united has multiple layers. We all probably have at least one thing that we believe about ourselves that can take us out of the state of love in a heartbeat. We all carry illusions about ourselves and about others that we have gathered during our childhood and upbringing, and new ones, throughout life. At the end of the day, we all live our lives from our personal illusionary veil of reality. Everything is an illusion. If you are curious about this idea of illusion, you will find more answers in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.
The illusions that keep us from loving ourselves can be things like ‘I am not good enough’, ‘I am too much’, ‘I am worthless’, ‘I am bad’ or simply ‘I am not allowed to be’. The biggest illusion of all could even be that ‘I am not allowed to exist’. The illusions we might carry about others could be things like others are not trustworthy, others don’t care about me, others think I am awkward or others don’t want me to be here. Of course, if we walk around with these kinds of illusionary beliefs, it is difficult to feel whole.