Treatise on Love- Part II - Finding Love Outside of Ourselves

Almost all of my life i have looked for Love outside of myself.
Yep. Looking for validation and completion from someone or something outside of myself. That doesn't seem like a difficult thing, but i've learned that it didn't complete me the way i thought it would.

As a child, i looked for love from my parents, teachers, friends, siblings and pets, too. Sometimes the most comforting love was from my grandparents or my pets. Somehow, my grandparents didn't have many ideas of how i was supposed to be. They seemed to love me no matter what, and always had or made time for me.

As a child and young teen, i had friends, loved music and singing, art and still spend a lot of time with my grandparents. As an older teen, i looked for love more from friends, and made the switch from friendship-type love to sexual, boyfriend-type love. This was harder to manage. I had expectations, and it seemed that everyone had their own agenda. There seemed to be more rules, especially about giving and receiving love. There was a fairy-tale notion of love that i had read about growing up, and for some reason, thought was real and true. Now that i've studied that, perhaps it's not a very healthy notion to take into adolescence. The old Hans Christen Andersen tales of princesses and happy-ever-after seemed to have taken hold of my thought process. There was a fantasy that i wanted to play out.

In Women Who Run With The Wolves, fairy-tales are taken to another level, and the ideas of moving through stages of development (maiden, adult, crone), and looking at characters as archetypes, seems more realistic and healthy.

As i grew older, love took on another meaning. In my twenties, i wanted to get married and have children. Love then, was finding someone with the same interests and objectives, and perhaps more materialistic or ego-centric. Creating a space in my life for that type of love has been a very interesting and on-going, unfoldment of life. There is a place where i have had to be the unconditional giver...and i still found that i had expectations - that my children would love me back if i loved them.

Divorce, and the end of a loving relationship was devastating for me. I had built my life and persona around an ideal - one i realized came from the outside, based upon ideas and objectives that society had put into place for me. After that, i really began delving into what love was (or wasn't) through study, observation and experience. This has moved me from a place love from an external source to a place where i can find love inside myself as well.

There was a time in childhood and recently, when i looked to the Divine for love. I seem to find the best expression of this in nature, now.

The essence of love as an energy instead of an emotion is the most recent aspect of love that i have been addressing in my personal life. Part of this has been seeing energy, or Chi, as a loving energy available in everything. Also, finding myself in a place of empowerment to make decisions based in self-love - or finding love inside one's self, which will be another post.