We get it, the whole love thing is really complicated and covers a lot of territory. It’s easy to get turned around and confused about the difference between loving and giving ourselves away. We’re stuck on this faulty idea that love requires us to change our entire lives for someone else or surrender who we are to get what we think we need. We bend, stretch, and make major life alterations to prove our love, and think that discarding ourselves is somehow done in the name of truly loving another. Then comes the trouble of expecting payback. If we’re willing to make those sacrifices, shouldn’t they be doing the same for us. Deep down we know this is all a game, but somehow we still get caught up in playing it.

When we look a little more closely it all becomes clear, this endless giving away feels forced, like we’re trying to prove something to ourselves or someone else instead of just being honest about who and how we want to love. We hold ourselves hostage to our misconceptions of what love should look like. All of that fussing and forcing only digs us deeper into a hole and this begins to wear on us and drag us down. We know it, we say it, over and over again, this isn’t the kind of love we’re looking for.

The love we’re searching for is another layer down, and a little less familiar. It’s called agape, and its tagline is the love that lets be. It’s the kind of love that just is, no requirements and no contingencies, no need to wrangle, negotiate, get something back, or prove our self-worth. This wellspring of love lives in our deepest center, available at any time, but the trick is we must have it first for ourselves before we are able to start giving it away. And this is where we seem to get tripped up every time. It’s surprisingly difficult loving ourselves just as we are without trying to twist, berate, or bemoan the facts of who we are, how we should be, or what our lives should look like.

Rumi was onto how to get there over seven hundred years ago when he said, Beyond all wrong doing and right doing there is a field, I’ll meet you there.

The field Rumi is talking about is agape, this kind of wide-open love that doesn’t grasp, control, or contort. It’s given and received freely, without an agenda and never expecting reciprocation. It’s the love that simply is. So how do we get to this mystical land of the love that lets be? We enter by practicing that kind of love for ourselves. We put an end to changing ourselves hoping it will change another. We stop using love as leverage to get what we think we want. We love without an endgame and begin loving the parts of ourselves that feel unlovable.

The searching and the giving and the loving always begins within. When we can be at home within ourselves, know who we are at our core, and honor ourselves as we are no matter what, we have found the field that lies beyond and it’s overflowing with compassion, mercy, and unconditional love.

And here we come full circle, because only when we live in this kind of love can we offer it to another. I know, it sounds like a long journey and a lot of hard work. It is. It is the work of a lifetime. But there is no substitute for the riches it rewards us with. It’s time to start walking a different path to a love that’s fully open and expressed and reveled in.

I’ll meet you there.

kb