Love from the Divine

Image by KS Kyung on Unsplash

“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

You may have heard or read this quote by the Sufi poet, Rumi. I’d heard it for years and would nod my head in agreement when someone repeated it, thinking I knew what the sentence meant. But in truth, I didn’t fully understand it until I started seeing—really seeing—my own thoughts.

How are our thoughts and Love from the Divine connected?

Many of us on a spiritual path lived in difficult environments growing up and into adulthood. I did. I was envious of friends who had easier lives and didn’t understand why mine happened the way it did.  But as I moved further and further along the spiritual path, I came to see that the challenges were purposeful; they pushed me to seek love beyond my daily circumstances. I started going deep inside, beyond where others’ words or actions could reach, because no place else made sense to me. And it was deep inside where I found the Divine.

At first I could only sustain the internal connection for a few seconds. But it was long enough for me to trust this connection and so I continued. For years, every morning I’d get up before kids and work and sit in silence to touch home base. Bit by bit, the Divine within became more and more accessible to me.

And yet, for all the spiritual work, I hit a wall that I just couldn’t seem to get over.  Yes, I could feel love from the Divine when in meditation, but in my daily life I still struggled with self-doubt, self-judgement and fears.

This all changed when I started looking at my own thoughts, specifically the thoughts I had about myself. I was incredibly rough on myself, even mean.  I’d proclaim things about me I’d never do about another person.  

There are a slew of teachers who offer wise words on self-recrimination—Byron Katie, Michael Neill, and Eckart Tolle to name a few.  I read everything I could, watched videos, listened to lectures and podcasts, and took workshops around seeing my own thoughts.  I came to understand that my thoughts about myself were MY thoughts, and were 100% my responsibility. They weren’t automatic, as I believed. Nor were they the truth.  They were an opinion, my opinion.

It’s simple, but it’s not easy.  I could keep beating myself up or I could appreciate myself.  I could hate my life or I could love my life.  I could feel fear or I could not feel fear.  It really all does came down to this.

We are given free will, that’s the deal with being here.  We are free to choose our thoughts.  

When we choose to release our thoughts of self-recrimination, we are actually choosing to release some of our self-imposed bonds and limitations. And when we start releasing these belief overlays, we come to see who we really are underneath all that crap we load on top of ourselves.  

We see that we really are good people.

We see that self-respect and self-love are the highest currencies available to us.

We see that we are indeed fractals of Source.  How cool is that.