“At the root of every relationship problem is a core “wound of the heart” that affects not only our personal relations, but the quality of life in our world as a whole. This wounding shows up as a pervasive mood of unlove, a deep sense that we are not intrinsically lovable just as we are… this shuts down our capacity to trust…we still have difficulty opening to it and letting it circulate freely through us… like the sun in a cloudless sky, this clear and luminous light shines through relationships most brightly in beginnings and endings. When your baby is first born, you feel so graced by the arrival of such an adorable being that you respond to it totally, without reserve, demand, or judgment. Or when you first fall in love, you are so surprised and delighted by the sheer beauty of this person’s presence that it blows your heart wide open. For a while the bright sunlight of all-embracing love pours through full strength, and you may melt into bliss.
Similarly, when a friend or loved one is dying, all your quibbles with that person fall away. You simply appreciate the other for who he or she is, just for having been here with you in this world for a little while. Pure, unconditional love shines through when people put themselves—their own demands and agendas—aside and completely open to one another… it manifests as selfless caring. In relation to ourselves, it shows up as inner confidence and self-acceptance that warms us from within. And in relation to life, it manifests as a sense of well-being, appreciation, and joie de vivre…it provides essential nourishment… allowing us to recognize the beauty and goodness at the core of our nature… allowing us to bring forth the unique gifts that are ours to offer in this life… in our very being. Absolute love is the love of being…
Our being is the dynamic, open presence that we essentially are… when we feel settled, grounded, and connected with ourselves… When two people meet in this quality of open presence, they share a perfect moment of absolute love. However, the human personality is not the source of absolute love. Rather, its light shines through us, from what lies altogether beyond us, the ultimate source of all… every baby instinctively reaches out for it from the moment of birth. We cannot help wanting our own nature… where we are one with life itself because we are fully transparent to life…free from hunger and fear…(need for) anyone else’s approval or validation… you realize you are not wounded, have never been wounded, and cannot be wounded.
Absolute love helps us connect with who we really are. That is why it is indispensable…this heart channel is usually clogged with debris—fearful, defensive patterns that have developed out of not knowing we are truly loved. As a result, … the more two people open to each other, the more this wide-openness also brings to the surface all the obstacles to it: their deepest, darkest wounds, their desperation and mistrust, and their rawest emotional trigger-points… The tight places where we are shut down, where we live in fear and resist love… must come to the surface and be exposed. Love as a healing power can operate only on what presents itself to be healed… You continually move back and forth between being open and closed…When another person is responsive, listens well, or says something pleasing, something in you naturally starts to open. But when the other is not responsive, can’t hear you, or says something threatening, you may quickly tense up and start to contract.
Our ability to feel a wholehearted yes toward another person fluctuates with …how far along we are in our personal development, how much awareness and flexibility we each have, how well we communicate, the situation we find ourselves in, and even how well we have each slept the night before. Relative means dependent on time and circumstance. Ordinary human love is always relative, never consistently absolute. Like the weather, relative love is in continual dynamic flux. It is forever rising and subsiding… We imagine that others—surely someone out there!—should be a source of perfect love by consistently loving us in just the right way… Then when relationships fail to deliver the ideal love we dream of, we imagine something has gone seriously wrong… the first step in healing the wound and freeing ourselves from grievance is to appreciate the important difference between absolute and relative love.
Relationships continually oscillate…. This is a problem only… when we imagine that love should manifest as a steady state. That expectation prevents us from appreciating the special gift that relative love does offer: personal intimacy. Intimacy… can happen only when my partner and I meet as two, when I appreciate the ways she is wholly other, and yet not entirely other at the same time. If we look honestly at our lives, most likely we will see that no one has ever been there for us in a totally reliable, continuous way. We imagine that somebody, somewhere (maybe spiritual people) have an ideal relationship, this is the stuff of fantasy. Looking more closely, we can see that everyone has his or her own fears, blind spots, hidden agendas, insecurities, aggressive and manipulative tendencies, and emotional trigger-points—which block the channels through which great love can freely flow…
Yet our yearning for perfect love and perfect union does have its place and its own beauty. Arising out of an intuitive knowing of the perfection that lies within the heart, it points toward something beyond… We yearn to heal our separation from life, from God, from our own heart. This longing can inspire us to reach beyond ourselves, give ourselves wholeheartedly, or turn toward the life of the spirit. It is a key… through which absolute love can enter fully into us. We fall into trouble, when we transfer this longing onto another person. That is why it’s important to distinguish between absolute and relative love… The only reliable source of perfect love is that which is perfect—the open, awake heart at the core of being. This alone allows us to know perfect union, where all belongs to us because we belong to all. Expecting this from relationships only sets us up to feel betrayed, disheartened, or aggrieved.
Riding the waves of relationship becomes particularly difficult when the troughs of misunderstanding, disharmony, or separation reactivate our core wound, bringing up old frustration and hurt from childhood. In the first few months of our life, our parents most likely gave us the largest dose of unconditional love and devotion they were capable of. We were so adorable as babies; they probably felt blessed to have such a precious, lovely being come into their lives. We probably had some initial experiences of basking in love’s pure, unfiltered sunshine. Yet this also gives rise to one of the most fundamental of all human illusions: that the source of happiness and well-being lies outside us, in other people’s acceptance, approval, or caring… Even if at the deepest level our parents did love us unconditionally… like all of us, they were imperfect vessels for perfect love.
When children experience love as conditional or unreliable or manipulative, this causes a knot of fear to form in the heart… “I am not truly loved.” This creates a state of panic or “freak-out” that causes the body and mind to freeze up… As Emily Dickinson says, “There is a pain so utter, it swallows Being up.” … Grievance against others serves a defensive function, by hardening us so we don’t have to experience the underlying pain of not feeling fully loved. And so we grow up with an isolated, disconnected ego, at the core of which is a central wound, freak-out, and shutdown. And all of this is covered over with resentment, which becomes a major weapon in our defense arsenal. What keeps the wound from healing is not knowing that we are lovely and lovable just as we are, while imagining that other people hold the key to this… we take it personally… But the imperfect way our parents—or anyone else—loved us… doesn’t have the slightest bearing on who we really are. It is simply a sign of ordinary human limitation, and nothing more. Other people cannot love us any more purely than their character structure allows.
Fortunately, the storminess of our relationships in no way diminishes or undermines the unwavering presence of great love, absolute love, which is ever present in the background… As long as we fixate on what our parents didn’t give us, the ways our friends don’t consistently show up for us, or the ways our lover doesn’t understand us, we will never become rooted in ourselves and heal the wound of the heart… To grow beyond the dependency of a child requires sinking our own taproot into the wellspring of great love… This allows you to connect with others in a more powerful way—”straight up,” confidently rooted in your own ground, rather than leaning over, always trying to get something from “out there.” The less you demand total fulfillment from relationships, the more you can appreciate them for the beautiful tapestries they are, in which absolute and relative, perfect and imperfect, infinite and finite are marvelously interwoven. You can stop fighting the shifting tides of relative love and learn to ride them instead. And you come to appreciate more fully the simple, ordinary heroism involved in opening to another person and forging real intimacy.
Perhaps only saints and buddhas embody absolute love completely… As the child of heaven and earth, you are a mix of infinite openness and finite limitation. This means that you are both wonderful and difficult at the same time. You are flawed, you are stuck in old patterns, you become carried away with yourself. Indeed, you are quite impossible in many ways. And still, you are beautiful beyond measure. For the core of what you are is fashioned out of love, that potent blend of openness, warmth, and clear, transparent presence. Boundless love always manages somehow to sparkle through your limited form. Bringing absolute love into human form involves learning to hold the impossibility of ourselves and others in the way that the vast sky holds clouds—with gentle spaciousness and equanimity… Then we can say, “Yes, everyone has relative weaknesses that cause suffering, yet everyone also possesses absolute beauty… holding them in the warmth of tenderness and mercy.”
Kierkegaard points out “Because of your beloved’s weakness you shall not remove yourself from him or make your relationship more remote; on the contrary, the two of you shall hold together with greater solidarity and inwardness in order to remove the weakness.” The same holds true for loving yourself. When you recognize that the absolute beauty within you cannot be tarnished by your flaws, then this beauty you are can begin to care for the beast you sometimes seem to be. Beauty’s touch begins to soften the beast’s gnarly defenses… The beast is, in fact, nothing other than your wounded beauty. It is the beauty that has lost faith in itself because it has never been fully recognized. Not trusting that you are loved or lovable has given rise to all the most beastly emotional reactions—anger, arrogance, hatred, jealousy, meanness, depression, insecurity, greedy attachment, fear of loss and abandonment.
The first step in freeing the beast from its burden is to acknowledge the hardening around our heart… where the mood of unlove resides. If we can meet this place gently, without judgment or rejection, we will uncover the great tenderness that resides at the very core of our humanness… a long-lost beauty hidden within the belly of the beast. If we can shine warmth and openness into the dark, tender place where we don’t know we’re lovable, this starts to forge a marriage between our beauty and our wounded beast. This is the love we most long for—this embracing of our humanness… As earthly creatures continually subject to relative disappointment, pain, and loss, we cannot avoid feeling vulnerable. Yet as an open channel through which great love enters this world, the human heart remains invincible. Being wholly and genuinely human means standing firmly planted in both dimensions, celebrating that we are both vulnerable and indestructible at the same time.
Here at this crossroads where yes and no, limitless love and human limitation intersect, we discover the essential human calling: progressively unveiling the sun in our heart, that it may embrace the whole of ourselves and the whole of creation within the sphere of its radiant warmth. This love is not the least bit separate from true power. As Rumi sings: 'When we have surrendered totally to that beauty, Then we shall be a mighty kindness.”
~ John Welwood, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist who has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for more than thirty-five years. His books include Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart. John lives in California with his wife, Jennifer, and has a grown son, Bogar Nagaraj, both of whom also teach integrated psychospiritual work.
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