Recently I was reading some work by a man called Rory Kilmartin.
And it hit such a deep resonance inside.
All we want as humans is to be loved, but what is this love and what does it look like?
My years of working with people from all backgrounds and situations has taught me one thing; no matter what outer fears come up, our one core fear is that of being ‘abandoned’ by the ones we love or the ‘tribe’.
In order to avoid that abandonment, we will often abandon ourselves instead, putting the preferences, approval or opinion of others before our own. Anything rather than facing the ‘original’ sin, fall from grace.
Prolonged self-abandonment causes us to stop trusting ourself because we feel we can’t. We’re swayed like leaves in the wind and we have left ‘home’. Our selves.
This is what I mean when I say that Self TRUST is self-love.
If at any time you need to refer to what love really is, it can be summed up in a short sentence. The permission to be oneself... unconditionally.
Deep down that is all we really want. To be accepted exactly as we are, right now.
Does that give us free rein to do as we please and trample on others? Not at all. Respect is a natural part of accepting others and ourselves as they are. We still have room to expand, to grow and to become all we can.
Lack of respect comes from fear. Fear of losing ‘something’ or someone. So we make others and their behaviour our ‘property’ in order to feel okay about controlling it. We believe our stories about how we and they should be.
What I loved about Rory’s words when I read them was that we forget what a total privilege it is to be with ANYONE.
I remember coming to that conclusion myself walking down an autumnal country track in 2013 and I was hit by the sense of the privilege of having the experience of another in one's life, rather than expectation.
Kyle Cease once said, ‘Nobody ever broke your heart, they broke your expectations’.
This is not just romantic love I refer to, all relationships can go awry not necessarily through bad communication but through outdated boa constrictor ideas of what 'my relationship with you' should look like.
In essence, if we could all understand and remember that we all as creatures long for these things and to not only be brave enough to move on when we are not experiencing them, but to recognize when we are not offering them wholly to another, life may change so very much.
I will leave you with the powerful words that hit me so hard.
Rory’s study on what constitutes real love came to this beautiful conclusion:-
We want to be seen
To be heard
To be understood
To be unshamed
and to be made welcome.
All else could very well be seen as the mind’s version of love and not the hearts.
With so much love xx
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