“WHY do we keep choosing to LOVE?”
This is a question many of us ask ourselves sometimes when relationships become emotionally challenging and we reflect on our easier, single, less emotionally complicated years.
The point of LOVE so many of us forget to honour is that it’s primary purpose to motivate us to heal and grow, not to make us immediately happy!
The wise wordsmith Kahil Gibran writes about LOVES lessons so clearly …
“Even as LOVE crowns you, so shall it crucify you. Even as LOVE is for your growth, it is also for your pruning”
This is one of the most confusing elements of LOVE we need to accept, especially when we feel crucified and pruned.
Our ego often gets in the way of our heart’s growth, like strangling vines. On a regular basis in LOVING relationships our ego has to be sacrificed and monitored if LOVES growth is to survive.
LOVE and growth are inseparable.
LOVE stops blossoming and bearing fruit when the desire for growth in a relationship from one or both parties dies.
The challenge for us all is in remembering LOVE and romance start with our ability to LOVE and romance ourselves, whether we’re in a relationship or single.
During my single years as a sole parent of two sons, my LOVE for them was the only thing that kept my desire to keep trying to be a better person going. Watching them grow even when my ego had done its utmost to exhaust me, trying to block me from my heart with its vines of fear, their desire for growth was a blessing.
My past addiction had also fed my obese ego and the desire for instant gratification. I had no patience to wait for growth. So I had a lot of emotional weight to lose. So Mother Nature in her wisdom insisted I learn about patience and she pruned back my ego relentlessly.
In 1995 my heart’s bare, pruned-back state for me was alarming.
So writing, reading about self-care and planting little pretty petunia seedlings became therapeutic. In my tiny rented flat on a single mother’s pension I patiently studied and watered my new seedlings each day, sprinkling a little LOVE on them and my own heart after the boys left for school.
This ritual of patience reminded my weary heart that beautiful things take time and effort to GROW. Eventually their divine frilly pink and white petticoat-like petals rewarded my patience, gifting me with their beauty.
Children, whether ours of someone else’s, our pets and our garden will keep LOVE alive as their growth and LOVE for life helps us remember to be patient, wait and have hope.
The only way we can be truly guaranteed to live happily ever after is to be willing to weather all of LOVES seasons of growth, especially when our relationships get tough, or if we are single.
There is an important season to process our anger, sadness and change and then be brave enough to allow ourselves to enjoy our hard-earnt growth.
All of these seasons include very challenging phases. Life is designed to motivate us to renew our vows to ourselves and prune back our ego so we can prepare for new growth and to honour our own heart’s truth first and foremost.
We’ve gotta create a commitment to love, honour and be true to ourselves in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, not just when we can make time, but every day … as long as we live.
So let’s remember if we desire more LOVE in our life to not kid ourselves about exactly what we’re signing up for.
LOVE does not hide; it stays and fights for the truth. It goes the distance, that is why our LOVE instinct is so strong despite our ego’s arguments that it’s too bloody hard. The desire to LOVE and be LOVED is an inbuilt involuntary human reflex and it is so damned persistent and strong so it can carry us all the way home. Home is where our heart’s truth lives without shame, but in-powered with self-honour.
LOVE requires our willingness to sacrifice and surrender to having our ego consistently pruned back as long as the relationship lives.
Without ego pruning, healthy growth is stunted, and so is our LOVE life.
So my answer to the question WHY LOVE? …
Because we can’t learn to give and enjoy life’s most precious gifts of beauty, growth and hope any other way …
It’s soooo worth sacrificing our prickly ego to gain access to our heart’s garden!
Lotsa love Cynthia xxx
© Copyright 2016 Cynthia J. Morton Emotional Fitness™
