Hi Cody,

Do you love yourself unconditionally?

Being in love with another is a reflection of your self love shining back to you.

I would say that your being invited to find deeper acceptance of yourself. When you reach a stage where you are not striving for love externally, you may find a relationship happens all by itself.

I can relate to how you feel, I would love to be in a loving relationship, but I feel that the reason I am not is so that I can confront the aspects of myself that become lost and are attached to something or someone external to me. I can see it quite clearly, a neediness, a wanting that only someone that Iam "in love" with can fulfill. Where as if I can uncover the parts of me that are getting lost in the external, and find them in myself, then I won't need the external source to complete me.

I hope this makes sense, it is still work in progress for me.

David

Hi Cody

One of my discoveries is that one of the great myths is that it is another person that makes us feel love. The movies, books and TV always paint the picture that this special person brings love into our lives. Without them there is no love.

This is not true as love flows out of us and the other person is just a catalyst to make it flow. They don't hand to us the feeling of love or drag it out of us, it comes from within us.

What I have discovered is that we have what would seem to be a "Love Tap" within us that we can turn on and let love flow out of us to anyone one or anything we like.

How I learned about this is through a simple gratitude exercise. For 10 minutes or so a day I would walk around saying thank you to everything I saw. It would go something like this, "Thank you coffee for the flavour, thank you cup for holding the coffee, thank you door for keeping the wind out, thank you path for keeping my shoes clean, thank you shoes for keeping my feet safe and warm....". You get the picture.
Well, one day I changed the "thank you" message to "I love you" and something interesting happened. After a few minutes started really feeling the flow of love coming from me out to the objects I was focusing my attention on. After doing this a few times and it feeling good I "took it public". I went to a shopping centre and started saying to myself to the people "I love you interesting man, I love you lady in red, I love you elderly couple...". I was feeling love for many people and from the positive reaction of some I know they were feeling something.

Now when I am in groups I send love out to everyone.

Where it gets really interesting is that the more love you send out the more that gets reflected back to you. People feel the love and want to be around you.
The Universe truly does give you what you send out, so why not send out some love.

Cheers Graham

Totally agree with Graham and David.

That is a very interesting 'exercise' Graham! Yes, more often than not people will mirror you to a certain degree, so if you were to project thoughts of love, it will be reflected upon you. When large amount of people are participating in the act of sending out love, it feels as though the air is filled with it and that you could almost reach out, and grasp it in the air.

There is no point in 'wanting' love for it is already within you! you will find that once you are able to unconditionally love yourself, everything and everyone around you will too.

Similarly to Graham, I always try to consciously project positive emotions and thoughts towards water. Water has memory, and like everything else it reacts to vibrations generated by frequencies. Taking that into consideration, every single organism in this planet is essentially a container of water itself. Based on my understanding, water has structure and it reacts very strongly to human emotions/thoughts. You could imagine then, how profound an impact your emotions/thoughts will have to yourself, and everyone around you.

I find myself saying things like, 'thank you for sustaining and providing life' and 'i love you, water' as often as i could. I'd hold the glass of water in my hands, and kinda bath it in positive emotions, like a prayer of sorts. The interesting thing is when i then drink the water, i could feel it trickling down my throat and activating within me much bliss and love, i could almost feel it rejuvenating me instantly, bringing in renewed force of life and flow of energy.

I'm sorry, i realized that i have went astray with my comment, but i believe it goes hand in hand in the act of love, as you project unto others, so will you receive.

Here is a short excerpt of the documentary on water, it is really interesting!! hope you like it! )

http://youtu.be/ra5PMKA1rBc

p.s. pardon me as i do not know how to post it properly ((

Indeed this is a great exercise - thanks so much for sharing. I'm sure many people would benefit. I've experienced something similar too earlier on the path.

I'd say from personal experience there's just a couple of things to be aware of.

Firstly I don't believe we're actually 'sending love' to anyone. There's a bit of a trap here in that it can make another feel they're dependent on something outside of themselves rather than what's inside. In this, I totally agree with what you said early on in your post Graham...

"the other person is just a catalyst to make it flow. They don't hand to us the feeling of love or drag it out of us, it comes from within us."

The same applies to them of course. We're not giving them love, we're being a catalyst, holding a frequency inside of ourselves, showing the light, and thereby inviting them to do the same.

The second thing to be aware of is that if 'giving love' becomes a mantra we apply all the time, it can overwrite what we truly feel inside with some kind of spiritual identity.

Here at Openhand we've observed that love and compassion is an inherent thing to all of us. When it's truly active, we don't need a mantra to cause it to flow. It just flows. As Rumi is so often quoted as saying...

"We don't need to seek for love,
we simply have to remove all the internal obstacles to it."

The internal obstacles are blockages, distortions and karma. And to remove those is not to deny them but rather go right into the very heart of the them. It is to honour the feelings, even if they seem heavy and dark. Only then can we truly relinquish our soul's attachment to them and dissolve them from our lives.

So to us, love is really about being authentic. And yes, certainly when we feel love reflected in the outside world, why not cherish it.

Chris

Thanks Chris & Vinnyestar

Vinnyestar - The video on water and the vibes we send it made me thankful that I always appreciated a hot shower.

Chris - I am always in the flow of love, except when I am not.
When I am floating around with like minded people love does just flow but a mantra is handy for those other times when my awareness lets me know that I am not in that space.

I liked your description that we are just holding a love vibration and that others pick up on that vibration and then they can feel that vibration within themselves.

Cheers Graham

How interesting that I am exploring these things recently too.

So far:

Concerning sending love - I can't impose anything, so mantras never work for me. Instead I just sink into awareness and mindfullness about everything that is around me and I sink deeper and deeper until I realise there is nothing separate from me.

I don't call pleasant blissful waves accompanied by nice emotions love. To me love is connection and it may have various forms and be accompanied by various sensations.

Example: Today I felt love to earth and I felt pain in my chest, I was sad and crying about what happened and is happening. But it was love.

About the partner - I understand you so well, Cody.

But then I see too many people that I would want to get close to. I would think I am crazy if I didn't know it is actually my twin flame reflections all around. And I realise that it is me I want to be with. Then if I realise it, I feel locally complete. This is part of the process, as I see it, each time I discover my lost part, it feels as if I want to be in love with somebody, but it's just the integration process, accompanied by self love.

Also sometimes I feel like I want to be kissed. This is when I feel I AM kissed, by TF. So it is just reprogramming the mind, that is mistaking some sensations with what we are conditioned to feel/want.

But I do disagree a bit about the general pull to be with somebody. We are in the body, we are human, and it is natural for the body to touch, being touched, interact, share, etc etc It is since we are babies, part of our development totally demands physical and sensory contact. It doesn't mean we need a boy/girlfriend for that. Simply hugging or getting/giving a massage can be just what the body needs and we can misinterpret it as something totally different.

And also wanting a partner is natural, there IS a truth in it, I believe, in parallel with the yearning of the soul to unite back with the source.

It is true to me too, that anything outside is a mirror, but it doesn't mean that I must be alone until I am enlightened (in my view). There is a risk to get caught in some "I love myself and I am good alone" bubble. Partners are the most intense and challenging mirrors ALWAYS. This is when we open most and get to see all our stuff. But it is better not to get lost and definitely not to get attached and get caught in a habit or a comfy zone. And no illusions: relationships are a very tough teacher

So I would say - there is a place to watch misinterpretations of the feelings and sensations. Maybe some softness, self acceptance and self-love are on the way?

And all those 'dreams' - welcome to the club. I am talking to my own 'monsters' almost every day. And under the scary masks usually a rather fragile, hurt and scared child is hidden

Hugs,
Yulia

Hi Yulia

Part of what makes life so interesting is the different versions of reality that we all have.

One of my spiritual adventures was when I was shown the difference between emotional love and unconditional love. They are quite separate although some of the feelings are similar.
Emotional love comes from the emotional body and comes as a package containing all the emotions.
What happened to me was I was thinking about a person then all of a sudden over a two minute period all the emotions in the emotional love package washed through me. I went from happy to lonely to joyousness to jealously to blissful to guilt to happy again to hate to peace to worry. I felt them all strongly one after another for the couple of minutes.
That was followed by a voice in my mind that was not one I recognized that said, "that is emotional love. If you want emotional love expect all the emotions".
Unconditional love is unconditional, it just loves. This I believe is what is coming from the Soul.

The real value of a partner to me, is as Chris says, is that if they hold a love frequency or vibration then it makes it easy for us experience and match that vibration. They are a catalyst for it to occur in us. So, anyone with this vibration can help us experience it. That is why I like hanging out with like minded spiritually aware people who shine love and light. I have many friends I share unconditional love with and they all arrived after I started sending love out to people and things in the Universe.

Just as a side thought, "In your meditations have you spoken to the rather fragile, hurt and scared child and asked why is it so?".

As I mentioned in a previous email I still believe that at some point you will be a great up-lifter of energy, vibration and love of the people around you.

Cheers Graham

One of my other roles on Earth at this time seems to be that of a part-time messenger.

This song found its way to me to pass onto you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw3oxJvSRj0

Cheers Graham

Hi, Graham

I again say that I don't feel that the universe should be one-sided - love expressed only as 'love and light'.

Sometimes expressing love and uplifting others is to mirror back their distortions, which often are not experienced by those who are looking in the mirror as 'light', but as a darkness from which the light will shine if they look really well and deal with the distorted reflection.

So how rosy it would be if our partners would only show us our rosy sides, but the thing is that except the aligned and open fragments we also have the distorted and blocked ones and so I don't see how a partner would only reflect the love and light in me back, but also all the other aspects of me so I can transcend them into light.

Actually, I don't see any other purpose of getting in contact with other people, but looking in all those mirrors and see it all, the myriads of forms and expressions, and not only the 'positive' ones.

As I already shared, I see this experience as a sphere, built from the opposites with the center, so if I am at the center, I don't care anymore what I experience, lightness or darkness, as long as I am connected and present.

I find that it is a common thing in spiritual circles to say "I want only the light, pleasant and rosy part, and get rid of the other one", and also get lost in it. Like I will identify only with the fun part and reject all the rest. And also to define well what love is.

In my view,love is undefinable, because it is coming from a place where no judgment can take place. It is just everything, it is the universe itself with all it has. This is the closest way to describe how I experience love.

To me, what the universe is actually giving me is EVERYTHING! Absolutely everything. Who then chooses only the positive side of the sphere? And why would I identify with any of the sides? I don;t want anything for myself and I don't prefer anything. I just want to align and serve, whatever it is.

And my child is getting its attention, no worries

Thanks Yulia

Your very Australian "no worries" reminded me of a great Australian song that I sometimes find myself singing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIO9sw1w9vI

And in the light of Love:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EEFSB0zyE0&feature=related

Cheers Graham

HiCody

Have just read your posting and can relate to what you have been experiencing.What I am hearing from you is feelings of loneliness and longing together with a feeling of desperation that this will continue for some time into the future.
Would you consider Cody that you are right where you are meant to be,on this important exploration of Love.By accepting everything exactly as it is and taking this process moment by moment,you will find exactly want is needed to feel fulfilled.
Perhaps a change of scene or a change in daily routine would shift your energy if you are feeling very despondant--only you know whats best for you.I have also found walking in nature very helpful for calming my emotions and allowing me to focus on whats important.
Acceptance,being in the moment,and being an observer of my experiences, are tools that work for me.
You have important lessons to learn Cody;as have all of us.Trust that all your experiences are leading you ultimately to Bliss.
I wish you well on your journey.

Breda