Contemplations About Romantic Love

Finding unconditional love within self and grappling with the desire to be loved romantically.

This is a radically personal one (and the first of what will be a series)… Let’s discuss love, specifically unconditional love and the desire to be loved romantically.

The Path of the Heart

Let’s lay the groundwork. If you’re looking to expand your understanding of love, I cannot recommend The Path of the Heart, a talk by Ram Dass, enough. It’s powerful and worth revisiting multiple times over the course of your life time.

I offer a few highlights as a framework for this contemplation on love:

We are always seeking love. Ingrained in us is a “hunger to come home, to be at peace, to be at one with the universe,” because love is one with the universe—the universe is love. This hunger is the desire for love, to love and be loved. Since we are seeking love outside of us, we are often starved of love. This leads us to needing love from everything all the time which makes us addicted to the practice of seeking love.

Because we see love as something outside of us and we’ve become addicted to the practice of seeking love, we view others as the key. As in, we can’t access love until we have a person who unlocks the door. Then, we become attached to the special-ness of being loved by that one person who we’ve deemed the key to our door of love. Because we become attached, we’re stuck with that specific method of attaining love. But, all methods are traps, and the method doesn’t work unless you get trapped (this is deeper wisdom that applies to everything, not just love).

Fear of losing the one we love leads to possessiveness and ownership. There’s a beautiful quote that so eloquently states this: “As it crowns you, it crucifies you.” This specifically speaks to the dualism that we experience when limiting our understanding of love—for the first time, we have access to this beautiful energy of love, yet, we now have everything to lose. This attachment shows up in the fear of losing the Beloved, because that would mean that we lose the place of love. There’s a quality of identity in love—we are who we are because we’re loved by X.

To further complicate things, we’re addicted to separateness, me-ness, being different, an island, etc. This leads to closing off the heart to protect ourselves… which circles back to us being starved of love and believing love is only attainable through the Beloved.

Being Love

These are all limiting beliefs. The energy is misplaced—the goal is to be a being of love. You are the key to unlocking love. The door can be opened at any moment with anyone and everywhere. The teaching is to “take you from loving to being love.”

What does that mean? Loving to being love. Transitioning from verb to noun, you no longer access love because you love and are loved by your Beloved, you are love itself. You don’t need another person to feel love, you are love in everything you do. This is the full embodiment of love. I am love.

I’m not saying the Beloved is not important—oh they are! And they unlock doors within you that you never knew you had access to. But, the person you love is simply a mirror to you. As a mirror, they reflect to you the love you already embody. On the more shallow side, you love the version of yourself that you are with that person, you love the way they make you feel, you love being in their presence.

Meeting Love in its Unconditional Form

All this talk is about accessing that place of love through a romantic partner. But, we are not meant to only live in romantic love, rather, love is all around and in everything. And deeper still, the truth is that love is unconditional. But unconditional love seems unattainable… can you unconditionally love yourself? It’s a contradiction.

The trick is to get connected to love in its unconditional form… love is life force energy. I believe that love is the highest vibration of being. Why? Life comes from love, life persists because of love. Esoterically, love is a step above logic. It asks you to lead with the heart. Or more literally, move your consciousness from the head to the heart.

This is really hard and your brain recoils at the mere thought of acquiescing control. To give you a place to start, I offer the following guidance: Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Move your awareness to your heart. Envision it, feel it, what sensations arise in the body? Every time your brain tries to supersede the process, come back to the sensation of your beating heart. Explore that sensation with curiosity. What is the texture of the heart beats? How does it feel to have a heart beating within your body? Feeling from the heart, start to notice other sensations. The blood pumping through your body. The electricity emanating from your body. The quality of the air around you. The flow of the energy in the room. The unseen objects behind you.

Keep practicing holding awareness in your heart, it’s a deeply embodied sensation (and can really help with overthinking).

So, back to the business of unconditional love. Connecting to the heart is key because the heart is the internal guide to fulfillment. In one sense, your heart knows what your dreams and desires are (what does a life of love and living life to the fullest look like?). Biologically, your heart has its own set of neurons, a heart brain in a sense with a fully functioning nervous system of its own (FYI, so does your stomach, hence gut feelings).

For your entire life, your heart never stops beating. It’s always working away in service to your life. Your heart is the gateway to life force energy, to unconditional love. Through thick and thin, your heart keeps pumping your life force energy. The heart is a manifestation of unconditional love.

And it’s not just you, it’s in everything. The ecosystem of nature, animals, and plants (molecular pump and phloem working to photosynthesize), they don’t live half lives, they live to the fullest extent, doing whatever is necessary to keep living. This life force energy gives and give and gives—unconditionally while it’s alive within you. It’s ruthless, the condition is death… matter is the housing unit of unconditional love. Matter is the housing unit for energy and electricity. Matter and energy never disappear, they just change composition.

You embody unconditional love, you just don’t realize it because your brain distracts you and limits your perception of what is. Love is abundant because you are it. You can always tap into it once your remember it’s inside of you. You can hold the power of love because you are rightfully claiming yourself a being of love.

You can watch the sunrise and taste the love of nature, of all, of the Beloved. When we choose to live the path of our heart, we are choosing to live in the love of the universe, which requires us to go all in with our energy and intentions. This is why the universe is always conspiring in your favor. Understanding this is just one reason to seek integrity with your soul.

Back to the Beloved

As a case study, romantic love is soooo interesting to me. For one, it’s clearly prioritized in the West, to the deficit of pursing platonic, familial, and community love among others. There is a perceived hierarchy to love and romantic love tops it all. With some reason, romantic love is typically the catalyst for new life.

Without getting too wrapped into the nuances of the different types of love (eight according to the Ancient Greeks), romantic love that leads to partnership is mostly Eros (sexual passion) sprinkled with Philia (deep friendship), Ludus (playful love), and Pragma (longstanding love). According to Ram Dass, romantic love is the desire to be loved specially, and even collecting the other person. To be in romantic love is to feel more at home with the universe.

Romantic love is just another flavor of love. And what a beautiful flavor it is. There’s no denying it’s an integral part of the human experience. And an experience that most of us crave to experience.

Knowing that I am love, that we all are love, I still desire to be loved specially. I want to be the special object in love… all the while, knowing I am already that love contained in self. See the trap I’m setting for myself? This is one of my heart’s deepest desires, and probably yours too. Because it is a deeply human experience to experience.

The path of enlightenment teaches non-attachment. There is so much beauty in non-attachment, it’s a paradigm shifting perspective to integrate, but it seems to be at odds with the desire for romantic love, which in a sense is choosing to be deeply attached to another. As I walk this path, I’ve grappled with my desire to be deeply attached.

A Side Step to Rant About Enlightenment

Enlightenment is an interesting concept, especially in the modern age when we have access to sooooo many different schools of thought. I’ve noticed that many walking the spiritual path have all their focus on attaining the next level, that which transcends the human experience.

But I think they’re missing the point. They’re placing all the importance on the external rather than the internal. I.e., using objects outside themselves to taste enlightenment rather than turning inward and rediscovering enlightenment. Enlightenment isn’t a destination, a place to get to, it’s a state of being, a state of blissful acceptance for what is now.

Life is not something to escape from—to seek enlightenment, so that you don’t have to live life as it is—life is to be lived… fully. I see so many people trying to escape, whether that be through alcohol and drugs and TV on the unconscious side, or plant medicine and out of body experiences on the conscious side… None of these are inherently bad and they all serve healing purposes when used intentionally. But overconsumption leads to seeking that which is outside to fill the void inside.

We are incarnated to fully experience the human experience. While we are here for our soul’s evolution, our soul evolves by experiencing. Experiencing the experiences so deeply it’s both painful and blissful. This means falling deeply and irrevocably in love… with self, with others, with nature, with that which you train your eyes on. This is living life to the fullest, living the path of the heart.

Life itself is the psychedelic experience. There’s no need to search outside ourselves for anything, we contain the universe within ourselves. Life is the game we are playing, so play it to the fullest with an open heart. This is the taste of enlightenment we are all seeking, this is accessing the bliss state.

If you’ve never been embodied, being in the body is scary and painful and it doesn’t feel safe, so we seek distractions. I know, I speak from experience. But, we are meant to be so deeply human. We are meant to experience the full spectrum that all of life has to offer. We are meant to fall in love with, and be deluded by, the melodrama of life, and then transcend it to embody the creator we were born to be. Once we transcend, we are able to rise in love with a partner.

Romantic Love and Sacred Union

Without delving into too many personal details, I’ve been dancing with the deep yearning for romantic love while being completely full with all the love in my life. By just being me and living life’s experiences, I energetically fulfill all my needs for love, but I still deeply desire partnership, actually, more than partnership, sacred union.

Some nuance… falling and rising in love. Falling means to rapidly decrease without control, succumbing to the gravitational pull downward. While rising means upward motion. To transcend means to go beyond the limits; visually, we imagine upward motion, literally rising if you will. So, out of control in love vs. transcending the limitations of the human experience through love. Which type of romantic love do you want?

Falling in love furthers the endless cycles of possession, everything or nothing, collection of another to give further identity to self. Rising in love is walking each other home. Rising in love is being so dedicated to your own soul’s evolution, that you are choosing to walk the path with another to reflect back to you the depths of your soul. Rising in love is not only seeing the union as sacred, but the paths of both partners as sacred as well.

Romantic love that rises in love lives at the crux of deeply human and transcendent soul. It shakes both hands and takes no prisoners. It’s nakedly vulnerable—in full acceptance of I and us.

The desire for this type of love does not deter from the universal truth that love is all around in everything and everyone. The woven tapestry of life has many threads of meaning, love, and expression. Some threads are more prominent… significant to the daily vibration of the being. Romantic love is brightly colored thread. Of this significance, I humanly desire my Beloved.

Oftentimes when talking to someone who is in love, they feel that their partner is their other half, that their Beloved completes them. Simply by the phrasing, this is operating from a place of lack, from a place of being “half” a being.

I offer this reframe on romantic love that leads to sacred union. It’s not 1/2 + 1/2 = 1… The truth is 1 + 1 = 3… But Madi, the math isn’t mathing. Young padawan, but it is. When two whole beings come together in love from a place of being love, they create and reside in a third entity of shared love, divine love. This is love that’s bigger than self, this is the love of the divine, the love of creation, yielded by creators. Energetically, it’s on another level and literally gives the power to do anything (if this sounds interesting, I highly recommend reading The Magdalene Manuscript).

As we walk the conscious path, everything changes. When we access the unconditional love within self, base level attraction and compatibility are no longer enough to reside “in love” with someone. Standards aren’t just high, they’re astronomical. Why? When you follow the path of your heart and soul, you will find everything you ever need within yourself. Being love means that you’re no longer seeking love. There’s no longer the need to complete self or the experience, rather, the desire is solely to enhance the experience and access deeper depths and higher frequencies of love energy.

Now, you can operate from the space of calling in and creating more of the love you reside in.

Personally, this deep desire and yearning for romantic love and the energy of intimacy has been coming up a lot recently. Funny enough, this has been a shared experience among many of my friends, who’ve been happily pursing their own endeavors, knowing it will come when the time is right. Life plays with contrast. The deep yearning is necessary—this is the depth of human desire, to show the contrast of experience. To feel desire so strongly and loneliness so pointedly, seeking a balm to sooth the heart, we’re feeling the depth to adequately appreciate the height.

Calling in this type of connection isn’t all rainbows and butterflies. Remember the doors you didn’t know you had access too? Your Beloved will swing them open in the most triggering ways… yet, it’s all in service to your growth. If the doors aren’t opened, they still have an unconscious influence on you.

The love you desire is here for the taking. Rediscover it within self, cultivate it, radiate it from your soul, and those on the same frequency will seek out that kindred energy.

XO