Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. – Rumi
Why would we build barriers to love?
The first time I read Rumi’s quote above, understanding it was almost beyond my emotional intelligence. It seemed so counter-intuitive. Aren’t we all just open receptacles to love?
To answer the above questions, I had to discover what love is . . . and I did so, by virtue of its absence in my life. (To be clear, I’m not referring to the kind of love that is romantic or familial, although those too are subsumed by real love. I’m referring to the highest unconditional, universal experience of connection and peace that penetrates all life.) When we hurt, we’re prompted to question what it means, how it happens, and most importantly, what’s the alternative.
Love doesn’t hurt. Love is a feeling of such purity and constancy that it’s unquestionable. Love is the surest thing in existence, because it exists outside the scope of change. Love is the power that moves all of being towards the most exuberant expression of its life force, which is to personify love in action.
It’s our understanding of love that is flawed and therefore perceives it to be fleeting…
Experience teaches us that things are fleeting. If our only experiences of love are linked and confined to experiences we share with other people, then our perception of love is limited and likely to also be associated with hurting. Hurt people, hurt people . . . and we’re all hurt to some extent or another. So, we equate love with fleeting feelings, relationships, and experiences. And as these experiences of love do not remain constant in our lives, we build barriers to protect ourselves from what we believe to be the inevitable let down and hurt we feel when they come to an end. As these barriers get utilized enough to prevent love’s loss, they begin to insulate love from penetrating as well.
The more we insulate how much love gets in, the more diminished and depleted we become…
What Rumi speaks to above, is the truth that love is actually never fleeting, because it’s our inherent nature. We’ve shut ourselves off from fully embodying and experiencing the fullest expression of love in ourselves. Because we expect love to come from outside sources, we build barriers and grow accustomed to feeling a lack of love. We expect to always be depleted, so we allow ourselves to wallow in the hurt. And because those who are supposed to love us have also cut themselves off from love, what we learn to equate with love is actually a diminished substitute for a fully encompassing, vast experience.
To take down the barriers and open to love, is to permit self-love to be the foundation from which all love stems. To return again to the source and emanation of love itself: the true Self within. We must replace the love we thought we had from outside sources to a real sustaining love of self. Then and only then, can we give and receive love without barriers from others, knowing the love never ends even if the relationships do.