23 Mar It’s Up to Me Whether I Love You or Not; It’s Not Up to You
It’s all up to me if I love you or not; it’s not up to you. It actually has nothing to do with you whatsoever. It has everything to do with whether my heart’s open to love or not. So when I’m sitting across from you at a coffee date and we’re meeting for the first time or the tenth time, it’s not about whatever characteristics and traits you may or may not have. I decide to love or not love. Not the other person.
It’s a great spiritual exercise to sit and watch your ego try to convince you why it’s not possible to love this person. Your ego will say, “well, she’s wearing a watch like that — we can’t love a person who wears that brand.” That’s me and not the watch-wearer, right? The type of watch she’s wearing and whether that makes her loveable to me has nothing to do with her — it has to do with my prejudices. If you’re brave you can also use it to show you how unloving you are, because your fantasy is that you’re this great loving person, and you can’t even love a simple being who’s sitting with you.
Watching oneself this way on dates can be used as a spiritual discipline to see “what in me is in the way of love,” because if I’m not meeting anybody through the dating process, it’s about me, not the supposedly-deficient other people. Osho once said, “If you are alone and lonely it’s because there are too many conditions on your love.”
We can develop within ourselves a tantric approach that there are many ways to love “you,” the “you” who is in front of me in this moment. In this moment I really can’t think of any reason why not to love you. I don’t know how long we’re going to know each other– maybe for twenty more minutes and maybe two years and maybe the rest of our lives, but right now in this moment it’s up to me, so I choose love.
© 2017 Catherine Auman This article is an excerpt from Catherine’s book Tantric Dating: Bringing Love and Awareness to the Dating Process
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.