Between the Digital Marketing course and the coaching program I’m doing atm, I haven’t had the time to sit down and write a proper article. Instead, here’s a medley of thoughts about Love, The Mind, and Being that have been bouncing around in my head.
What Is Love?
What is love? Baby don’t hurt me don’t hurt me no more, rings a remix of the ‘90s band Haddaway’s single on my Instagram feed.
So, what is love? Is it when a baby doesn’t hurt you?
The love we hear about in songs or see in movies isn’t love. It’s an attachment. Attachment and exploitation of a love object. What can the object give me? Attention, time, sex… but in the real world, we soon find the other person can’t do that for us, and the fear creeps in—the fear of losing the object that provides the illusion of love.
Instead of facing the reality of unfulfilled expectations, we simultaneously try to fix ourselves so that the person finds us loveable and adjusts the person to fit our preferred criteria. If they were just a little more to our liking, then we’d be happy; we would feel loved.
We get tricked into believing love can be outsourced. So, the fear of losing the love object that provides the illusion of love begins to enter. When we don’t love ourselves, looking for love on the outside always gives us anxiety. “Will they like me?” is the focus, whilst the real question is do I like myself?
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Love is a state, not a feeling.
Love is independent of love objects.
Love is free. It is always there, patiently waiting to be uncovered. It’s a state you began in and will die in. Love is an energy that cannot be created or destroyed. You don’t need to generate love, find love, or get love. It can only be gently uncovered behind the layers of conditioning put upon your heart.
The paradox is that no one can give you love - you cannot get love; you can only LOVE. This is an important distinction ❤️
Stuff Like This
Stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like me; your mind whispers when you dare to dream beyond the confines you’ve been placed within. But what if it does happen? What if it’s right there, waiting for you to see through the lies of your mind? What if all sorts of things happen to all sorts of people, including you? Your mind is just telling you a story based on past experiences. It pretends to grasp the entirety of everything: how the world operates, what other people are like, and what you are like. (Seriously, ask your mind anything, and it’ll come up with a response! - how silly is that? It’ll never say, gosh, I don’t know, and leave it at that. It’ll begin wondering and try to figure out a response to soothe itself that it does know everything). It claims to have all the answers when, in reality, it’s barely scratching the surface.
We cling to the illusion of self-knowledge, yet the truth is we don’t fully understand why we are the way we are. Sure, we concoct explanations and reasons—neatly logical delusions—but at the core, we simply exist as we are, inexplicable even to ourselves. And the mind? It can’t accept this mystery.
Here’s another annoying feature of the mind
Have you ever noticed how, when you ignore a certain thought or narrative, your mind scrambles to find something else to occupy you with? It will use anything to reel you back in. When you feel restless, it’s your mind bouncing around, desperate to divert your focus away from the present back to itself. The mind thrives on your attention; it feeds off it. And we feed it generously, distracted from the now, lost in thoughts of past hurts and stories.
The more intense the emotion tied to a particular memory, the more your mind returns to that story. It never goes back to the happiest moment of your life over and over again as much as it revisits the moments of hurt, unfairness, and sadness. These negative experiences have a stronger gravitational pull for evolutionary reasons, but it doesn’t mean we should leave it at that.
Happiness only exists in the present moment. I know it’s such a cliche, but seriously - where is your past, right now? Where is it? It’s in your fucking mind, obstructing you from being here, right now, as you are. The only way these stories stay alive is if you keep feeding them your attention. But I don’t control my attention… Oh, yes, you do. When we say we don’t have control over our attention, what we really mean is that we haven’t trained a skill of controlled attention.
The good news is that attention is a trainable skill, but the bad thing is that it takes considerable effort. It requires overcoming the automaticity of your mind. It’s tough! I’m going through this training right now with the coaching course I’m doing, and it’s painfully obvious how automated every aspect of my being is. One of the practices we’re supposed to do daily is a 15-minute contemplation exercise. I won’t go into the details, but my mind would literally do nothing else but concentrate. It brings stuff I haven’t thought of in years, anything to escape focusing for 15 minutes.
In fact, I sat down to do the exercise but ended up editing this article! This is the state of affairs of my mind, and most minds, I’d argue, is that 15 minutes out of 16 hours that we are awake is too much for the mind to handle. We have close to 0 control of that freak inside our heads. If this isn’t scary, I don’t know what is 🤷♀️
Poem
The happiness of being
I lay on the grass on a sunny Sunday afternoon
Looking at the sky, expecting something new
When a thought suddenly arises
Maybe I’m not supposed to believe in disguises?
The thoughts disguised as the truth
Opinions of others disguised as the glue
that keeps society together and maybe even
predicts the good weather.
But seriously - what is a thought?
A moment captured then repeated in blocks
Built into houses of stories we’re told
Forgetting the essence cannot fit in a mold.
Society is a construct to keep the flock together
But finding happiness requires disconnecting
from the fear of separating from others,
Even in a stormy weather.
The storm inside borne out of separation
Holds the key to the kingdom of creation
Endless moments of being here and now
Forever giving, gifting, leading, leaving
The True Self you were never without.
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Thank you for your time & attention.
Train your mind because life is as good as the quality of your mind.
Also published here.