Where is the Love?

I continue to observe that for many of us there’s a whole lot of suffering still going on about not receiving enough love.

Love is the essence of what powers us in each moment. The perception that there’s a lack of love in our lives is one that is both brutal and intensely hurtful too.

In the spirit of teasing this knot apart and looking at some of the individual strands of this mind-virus in the matrix of consciousness, I’d like to make some general observations and also share a personal storyline of my own in order to illustrate what happened to me that allowed for my perception to change about this matter of receiving love, and my painful lack of it.

To begin here, I’d like to say that we’re told that we Are Love, and that Love is the essence of all that exists. This might be accepted intellectually, but then why (in the name of Heaven) can’t I feel it?

My story is about myself as a young woman, barely into adulthood, who became intensely ill from cancer.

My perception at that time was that my world was one without love, and frankly, there was no part of me that wanted to live in this world. I was also afraid to die, but actually, at that time and from that perspective, death was preferable to living in the poisonous place I was in. Without love, there’s nothing to live for in my view.

I held my grief inside me. I didn’t wish for it to be known or shared by anyone, and it was literally eating me up inside.

Bear with me here as this story has two important elements.

The first of these is in my first day in the hospital, I was in a bed curled up in abject terror, certain that I was going to die. I was both afraid of this unknown, and completely over-whelmed with grief and a sense of isolation.

It’s a fact that more of me wished to die than wished to live. My inner dialog was saying that if I died, sure, some would be sad for a bit, but mostly relieved I was gone.

As I lay there weeping and trembling with fear, the Divine Mother, the Goddess of the Universe, appeared. She came out of the wall of the hospital room and was more real that anything I’d ever seen in my life, before or since.

Her face was like a blazing star, and Her navel like a glowing moon. Her breasts were exceedingly beautiful, all of Her was the most extreme measure of beauty and grace. Above/upon Her head, in an indescribable way, was a cornucopia of every kind of earthly and heavenly abundance, rolling down out of Heaven Itself.

Her appearance startled me out of my weeping. This amazing moment wiped my grief away in astonishment. I knew exactly who She was, and to say I was stunned would be a massive understatement.

She communed with me, non-verbally, there was no sound, and yet, She told me this: “You will be healed by Love.”

A feeling of calmness washed over me. I can’t say I felt this love she spoke of, but I can say that the rest of the message was to stop weeping and to know that all was happening as exactly as it was planned. I would not die, but would be healed by love.

I lay back and fell into a deep sleep, the first sleep in months without being in the land of the dead, hanging out with corpses.

As dramatic as this true story is, and as wonderful, this is only the prelude to what I have to share here. What follows here is the point I’d like to make about perception and how a shift in perception can make all the difference in the world.

It was a couple of weeks later, I was still lying in the same hospital bed, closer to death than to life. My mother was in the room with me, sitting near the end of my bed. I’d been sleeping, which was a major blessing, given that in most of my waking time I was being wracked by fevers of about 106 degrees.

I woke and through the slits of my eyelids could see her sitting there. She didn’t know I was awake and her mask was down. I could see all over her, both physically and energetically, the grief of simply knowing that she was losing her only child to cancer. I was not quite 25 years old.

This sight shook me to my core! A series of realizations happened in quick succession. First there was intense remorse that she should suffer so and that this suffering should be caused my me.

What followed was the realization of the complete truth of the situation. This truth was both mind-shattering and freeing at the same time.

I understood perfectly, and with no doubts whatsoever, that my cancer was a form of suicide on my part. Granted it came from deep unconsciousness, but suicide nonetheless.

I was too ill to sustain the lies right then. Only the stripped down and bare-to-the-bones truth could be sustained in that moment. I saw that the whole drama unfolding was about what I created.

My remorse was monumental. How could I be so blind? In my drama of living in a world without love, I’d brought myself into a dire situation, and I’d brought her with me!

The buck stops here! I’m responsible for that look on her face! Oh, my gawd, what could possibly be worth this?

And here is the craziest part… This love I was missing was never missing at all. It was there, all over her, in every fiber of her being. What was it in me that made me miss this, and what was it in me that was refusing to receive this??

The outpouring of love in those dire dangerous days came from everywhere, not only from my mother. Phone calls from family and friends came, visitors came. They had something important to say to me. Would I listen (and receive)? They said, “I love you!” They said, “Please don’t go!”

What crazy and deranged part of me needed this drama to be this intense and this dangerous to understand I am loved?

To say I was embarrassed or mortified and ashamed would be the understatement of my life. But the truth is these moments of self discovery are at the core of my ability to live on and to finally receive, feel, and know love.

At the root of this was a whole lot of self-hatred and abuse, but it would be incorrect to say this could have happened without the attitudes I had that needed to change. They needed to change if my choice was to live.

Where was I not willing to receive? In a nutshell, I can say, after years of digging out the details, that I carried inside me all sorts of notions about what love I needed and exactly how this love should be given.  Either it had to be given just so or I could justify saying to myself, this is not love.

This sounds so crazy and yet I see the evidence of this going on for others too, all the time.

I think anyone may find it easy to understand how offensive this attitude is when they frame from a personal space of giving instead of receiving. It’s always easier to get anyone to admit they have some responsibility in what they give than in what they receive.

This attitude is for the most part operating in unconsciousness and unawareness, and yet it’s so obvious. It says that I will only receive love that matches what I want it to look like. If it doesn’t look just like this, it isn’t love.

Now imagine you’re giving love out in whatever way you do and it isn’t received. Imagine it will only be received if you do it this particular way. How offensive is this?

So, who is responsible for the perception of a lack of love? Is this perception actually true, or is it a refusal to appreciate the love given unless it fits into some contrived and controlling mind set?

Love is literally everywhere, inherent in all things, and yet, who is responsible for the perception of lack of it?

We are, dear lovers.

Shall I tell the Sun to only shine the way I say to? Otherwise the love inherent in the rays of the Sun isn’t love? This makes no sense, and this metaphor can be taken into expansion as far as you would wish to take it.

This is a mind-virus in our collective consciousness that’s insidious and also poisonous.  It has put us all, the whole of humanity, in such a dire and dangerous situation, it defies comprehension.

I’d like to end this share now and leave it to you to understand for yourself what it is that you may carry that is in the way of receiving love. All of Life Itself is begging for this acknowledgement and your open arms and heart to receive Love, like a lover would.

May your path be beauty, and may your life be filled with the love all around you.