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Many people ask me what the secret of love is. What does it take to create a truly fabulous loving relationship? Why are so many people unhappy in love, struggling with their partners, stuck in painful conflicts, while so few seem to experience the consistent joy, ease, pleasure and harmony that we all want? Why are so many people longing for love, looking for love in all the wrong places, attracting rejection instead of acceptance? What's the great secret? Well, here it is, the cat's out of the bag. In order to be successful in love, you have to be in love with love! In love with love? What does that mean? Isn't that redundant? Not at all. People who struggle in love tend to be in love with struggle as though the pain it caused them were some old, familiar friend they were not willing to betray.
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People who, on the other hand, long for love, are more in love with the feeling of longing than with love itself. These are the hopeless romantics who are constantly falling in love but never rising in love or being in love. To fall in love is to feel that the hopeless yearning to have someone fill you up and make you whole might finally be fulfilled. This is not being in love with love. It's being in love with hopelessness, emptiness, craving, swooning: that sinking feeling in your gut. When you're in love, you don't sink, you rise. You rise in love with yourself first, then attract someone else who has also thus risen. Then the love you share is not based on need, dependency, or filling gaps, and you are not two half-full cups trying to fill each other up, but rather, two full cups overflowing onto each other. Now that's being in love with love! Many people are addicted to rejection and abandonment. They are not truly happy until they have fallen in love with someone who, for whatever reason, cannot reciprocate. Then they feel worthless and useless, which is their secret feeling about themselves all along, so they get to be right about themselves. This is not being in love with love. This is being in love with your low opinion of yourself, wanting someone to lift you out of this despair, and discovering there is no escape from yourself. There's no Mr. Right or Knight in Shining Armor who will rescue you from yourself. Until you're in love with love and until you're in love with loving yourself, you'll never create the context for anyone else to love you. And if someone tries to love you, you'll just think he's lying and push him away.
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We all have our little addictions. Mental addictions. Thought is creative, and the negative thoughts you cling to most strongly become negative relationship patterns which inhibit your experience of love. Fortunately, you are the thinker and therefore have the power to turn negative thoughts and patterns into positive ones. So whether your pet pattern is struggle, guilt, helplessness, or revenge, you are always in the driver's seat, free to change direction, free to relax, let go of the struggle and let love in; free to remember your innocence, and know that you deserve love; free to acknowledge that you are a capable, competent person and that you do have the power to create what you want; free to forgive the past completely and thereby let go of your defenses that keep love out.
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Love wants to heal you completely. And if you are in love with love, you are in love with the healing process. The way that love heals is by bringing up anything unlike itself for the purpose of release. So the more you attract love, the more your "response column", i.e. your history of negative associations with love, will come up for release. It is at this very point that you get to exercise your freedom, to choose between your addiction to the negativity of your past and your love of the love that would heal you.
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What is love? A powerful, healing energy that flows through you when you surrender. Yes, it can be frightening. To surrender, to release control, to surpass your intimacy threshold. But this fear is a green light, not a red one. It is an invitation to be safer with more energy.
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Yes, it's treading on unknown territory, but the ground is friendly and will support you beyond your wildest dreams. The choice is clear. The choice is yours. The great secret of love is love itself. Go for it and God be with you!!!