The Source of Love
tajmahalo
Most of us have forgotten that we are pure love and so we seek love outside ourselves. This longing is very useful because it activates your quest for love. Ultimately this search leads you to the realization that you feel love when you are being loving, not when you are being loved by another.
Exercise: This simple but powerful exercise came to me through Adyashanti. Try it and see what happens! The next time you feel that yearning for love, feel backwards into it. Feel it going in, even as it’s going out. Feel back, trace it back to its root and see if you don’t already possess what you seek. Take it as a question. Is it true that love is absent? Welcome the longing for love as an opportunity to do this practice until you find the love inside.
Access: Public
beliefs
August 2008 
Brilliant! I love this post… it resonates so closely with work that I've been doing over the past few years and it is a confirmation of sorts… so thank you! And I will definitely do this exercise practice when that feeling occurs again… I think I could “go there” quite quickly… it makes sense to me! Huge kudos on this post!
Truly fantastic, I adore this one. Thank you, Tajamhalo, for these wonderful words of wisdom along with a big thanks to the firey super lady for leading me here.
I love exercises and thought-experiments! Thanks for this one!
You are all very welcome! Would love to hear how that inquiry works for you. I notice that I don't always feel motivated or remember to use it when I most need to, but when I do, it is very powerful. So reminders are great!
What's usually easier for me is the piece about BEING loving instead of waiting or hoping for someone else to do it for me.
BTW - if you like this post there is more where it came from, namely my book The Seven Natural Laws of Love.
That was beautiful!
When we touch that Source that is within all of us, we touch its boundlessness. Interestingly, that experience sometimes comes by staying with the disappointment of 'not being loved back' which is actually the failure of our expectation of being looked after emotionally by someone else. That's when we realise that the source of love is within. But sadly, it's so difficult to stay with that realization……
Great post Taj! Om namah. I know this experience well and your post inspires me to do some new exporing. I have had deep spiritual practices for years that fill me with love, that bring my awareness to being love and I give of that easily. I have been in a relationship where new depths of shared experience were reached and now I find my self continuing to mourn the loss of that depth of shared experience. I have found that place of wholeness and fulllness of self again but find that I now have a new standard of what I want to be experiencing. Your words inspire me to think I just need to bring my awareness to that level in my self. That the dyadic experience lifted me to a new height for a view and now I need to make that ascent my self. But there remains that doubt and wonder about whether the same level can be lived in solo. I have lived a sanyassin's life in the past and know fullness from that perspective but it does not appear to be my path. I wonder if no matter how much I can be love that there is always more in relationship to another (another me ~ tat tvam asi) or more (poly) and that regardless of the love that I am, having known and knowing by nature of a greater love in relationship that there will always be that longing until there is a relationship or relationships that fulfill that. On the other hand I have this solo experience of an absolute all pervading non-dual love. But then there you have it. Non-dual and dual. Other and relationship is duality that longs for union and going back home to mother non-dual. Cosmic lovers looking for each other so they can go home. MA! I'm going to meditate for an infusion of boundlessness and unbounded love. When the longing and mouring the lack comes up I hope to be aware to step into it and find that place in my self. Ascend to that summit and see what next summit comes into view. Beauty-full. Walk in Beauty and love.
Mmmm, yes. I keep bumping into the idea of Feel Back, trace inward, go within… It is the mirror I keep finding myself looking in but it is so fascinating at how hard my mind tells me it is to do. “It's so difficult,” it says. HA! What a farce! Nothing could be more natural. I've been unnatural for a while. Learning is fun, though. I rather like the challenge of feeling back, falling inward.
Love is All there is and it comes from inside. So far glimpses, only glimpses, but enough to see the reality of it.
Thank you Tajmahalo.
Love One Another
is it possible that you are confusing love and companionship, skyojos? love is inside us but we humans are social animals and we enjoy outside connections whether with a lover, a friend, a four legged, or nature in all her glorious forms.
osho said that until you embrace aloneness you cannot love unconditionally, but i think you can have fellow travelers on the journey.
i so see a lot of people putting all of their relating time and energy into One Special Person and blowing off friends, community, family and even their own connection to Source. it's so tempting to do this when the love that you feel with The One seems so much more powerful than anything else but this is usually a set up for a hard time later on.
this is when literally looking in the mirror can be your salvation! turn that passionate, intense love that you feel for another onto yourself. it's a good beginning.
This entire blog and comments together are so rich. Taj, your last addition makes me thiink of the word compassion…. WITH Passion. We act what we are.
What you write Taj reminds me of the revelation: All Longing is Divine Longing: Divine is Longing for US. Longing, and its companion, Desire, are Divine communication, revealing our gifts, our service, our purpose, and our Divine Nature.
It's real easy in the flow of all that Orgasmic Cosmic juiciness to short circuit by thinking this feeling is embodied in another person, a beloved known or yet unknown. I like this reflexive exercise you offer. It could help me now, as I desire to be truly unconditional in my loving of another, to know myself complete in Divine Longing.