“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, Loving with Heart and Soul and Rumi Pearls.
I wrote an article about romance months ago and didn’t publish it. I was not ready for something profound after the ending of a long-term relationship. My perspectives were cynical, mostly complaining about men and superficial modern dating tragedies.
It took a while when something special came along and I finally began to see my pain and the walls I’ve built against love over the past few years. Fortress of defense crumbled and pain from the past dismantled, I became a baby again in the world of romance. I came to realize that self love means more than loving yourself, but accepting and absorbing love through yourself.
When I fell in love as a young teenage girl, I kept that feeling to myself to invite the purest love in my heart. I held dear to the person’s spirit and built a secret garden in my heart so the connection would be intact from the outside world. I hid my emotions deep and locked them up, swearing no one should find out. The young me believed that true love was about myself that had nothing to do with the other party. When love is a secret, I can keep dreaming and watching the flustered butterflies roaming in my garden. The garden I created for me and the person, where all beautiful things could happen with imagination untainted by the changes of the world and the ugliness of society.
Later on I’ve learned that romance means more than imagination. It involves the physical, at least that was the picture for people in their 20s. Kiss, hug, sex, and all sorts of physical intimacy formed expressions of “love” as I shared my secret garden and invited my love in. It was a different experience. Nothing was a secret anymore. Nothing got locked up. Nothing was about me and I felt out of control. I could not hold the space of purity I wanted in my heart. I invited pain, disappointment, and betrayal that broke my heart a few times where I completely lost hope and trust in love. My body became a vessel where I tried to please another in a relationship because that was the only way I could feel. I lost my secret garden as I lost myself.
It took me ten years to reclaim my garden. Thank goodness it is still beautiful. All flowers, bushes, and water fountains are intact. I walked through the twisting trail, smelling the scent of joy and dancing with the breeze of freedom. I scanned through the past where each person I fell for had a special yard, from my younger age all the way to the last marriage. The yards are peacefully rested together with the memories. The flowers are in hibernation most of the time and they would bloom every time I fall in love again, attracting all of the butterflies under the sunlit sky and bringing me back to life.
But then things took an unexpected turn and my relationship ended. This love I shared with the person touched the wound that is still recovering. It brought to light the side of me that I unintentionally hid from the outside world. He revealed the secret in me that I didn’t know about: “You can tell your mind to forget about a relationship but you can’t suppress your heart from the fact that there is still love in there.”
“I don’t need love. I don’t need you. I don’t miss you because that makes me sad…I don’t know why. I am hurting myself.” I responded like a child lost her family and blind folded by pain. I resisted the connection as the dark corner in me came to surface. It created the same cycle in my relationships over and over again: “I am moving on and I never look back. This is how I can be strong and protected. This is how I can avoid the pain that crashed my relationships and my commitment to another person. I failed to build a perfect marriage and a happy family. I’d better carry on this journey by myself, because no one would give me the kind of love I desired. So I kick people out and give that to myself.”
It is important to give myself love, but I didn’t know that self love is not just about myself. It is about what I see from myself: the person I loved, the memories I created, and the world I built for each other. A world where we were the most peaceful being as time was in transience and souls were merged in an oasis beyond the chaos of the world. Self love is tearing down the walls and accepting. Accept yourself as the channel of love and let that in. This is how you create love from within. Absorb first then release.
This relationship uncovered something new in me and reminded me of who I am: a pure and beautiful soul disguised in the mask of pain when it comes to love. This mask has successfully driven people away in the past when I felt hurt, but it did not work this time. The part of me that has been ignored and locked up was exposed, huddling, crying, and curling in the corner of pain. I was vulnerable again.
My yoga friend Yvonne said the yoga teacher training program peeled her open like an onion. I was cracked open like a walnut with no layers in between. When the hard shell is broken, there is nothing left but the vulnerable core inside. It was so uncomfortable that I wanted to run away and hide. But my heart was telling me to trust and give myself a chance, because this will answer my years of confusion when it comes to romance and love: this person and the love you shared cannot hurt you, when you accept and let things unfold naturally.
I am still learning the complexity of life and the intricacy of intimacy, yet I know that I am not alone on this journey as the lessons got shared. I hope you take good care of yourself by opening up to love and making yourself the vessel to exchange love. Only you can manifest that healing energy and the world needs you to see the truth:
Darkness is light in disguise;
Sadness is happiness in hibernation;
Hatred is love in pain;
You are divinity in a human body.