A love equation

Love. Love is a magic word. Love can manifest in so many ways. Love has survived all centuries and beyond. Love has been present forever. Love morphs into different ways and is expressed in so many unseen alternative ways. Love is a gesture. Love is an action. Love is a thought. Love is a way of being. Love is simply what it is, love.

There is nothing special nor fancy about it. Love is an essential ingredient and essence to all as a way of being. People are love. People do not do love like a task on a checklist. People are love by being who they are. It is that simple. We are love.

It starts with a love of self. It moves on to a love of others, and then it moves into a shared love between each of us and ourselves. Love is the glue, you might say, holding us together.

Hate, the opposite, is what separates us. And so many are easily distracted and tempted into the word hate in so many of its forms. It is more virulent than love because it is so easily injected into everything that we do. We see how insidious some can be, wilfully choosing hate over love.

It is a choice or learned response. It is not who we are. No one person is hate. Every person at the most basic core level is love. In all of us as human beings on this earth, there is the potential for love in every single breath we take on this earth in every single thing that we do. We are all love or potentially love.

At some level we are born into love, we are born from love. We will go through life with love and end in love. Love is constant. Love is always present. Love is always there. Love is not something that disappears and comes back.

What disappears and comes back is our connection to love in all its forms, whether it is kindness, compassion, empathy, giving, caring, self-love, self-care, self-knowing. It is not selfish to look after oneself. That is a loving gesture. It is not martyrdom to care for another. That is another loving gesture. However, some may become perceived as extreme.

A love of self can become one of hate when it transforms into narcissism. And this is easy in our society because there are so many people who are tempted through the media, through the advertising world, through the dangling of ideas, thoughts, and physical objects to be narcissistic, as opposed to being self-loving. There is a really big difference. So let’s start with that as one aspect of love.

Then there is other love. You see that in many forms. Other love often is only described as romantic love in our world. Love is simply, usually transformed and transmitted, in the form of a relationship. You love your partner. You love your parents. You love your child. You don't go beyond that often because those are the relationships that are sanctioned as effectively, okay to be ‘love’ relationships.

When you say you love your neighbour, which you may or may not know, has been written before, many times cited, and many times referenced, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. Well, do you? Do you love your neighbour or do you gossip about them? Do you judge them? Do you make comments about them? Do you ignore them, avoid them? Do you focus on their failings and their differences as opposed to what brings you together and is similar?

Guess what? We are more similar than we are different. We are all human beings. We are all made from DNA that is pretty much the same. We are all walking, breathing, standing up beings on this earth. We will have so much more in common than what may be interpreted otherwise.

So some may not like the same TV show. Others may not like the same expression of who you are in the way you dress even. Many may not practise the same connection to what is deemed spiritual in your world. There are those choose not to acknowledge spirituality. Whereas others may worship a particular way of their choice, because that's how they see spiritual.

Love is not present often in these neighbour relationships because it is not referenced or celebrated in the media, television or movies. Go to any online streaming service or TV programming and look at how many shows are about loving your neighbour. Few likely come to mind. They may be about loving a person for one’s own benefit – eg, romantic entanglement or affair. When we think of ‘other love’ it's about loving your children. It's about loving your family, but there isn't much about loving your neighbour.

And your neighbour is not just the person next door. Your neighbour is beyond that. The words ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is about loving all neighbours, no matter how close in proximity, physically or across the globe. So you can, if you so choose love thy neighbour as thyself.

Now here's the challenge in our world for this love equation to work. You have to love yourself, don't you? To say love thyself misses the fact that so many of us do not. And there's the rub. The start, the problem in our world, is that we do not ‘love thyself’. So we do not see it enough. We do not feel it enough. We do not hear it enough. “I love me.” Why? Because our world implicitly and even explicitly says that is not a nice thing to say. You are not selfish however if you say you love yourself. Because as soon as you can love yourself, you can love your neighbour.

This post is simply looking at these simple words. Whether you practise the religion that shared these words or not, they are attributed to a teacher from many aeons ago and they speak across all peoples, not just one people. Love thyself as thy neighbour requires one to practise both ends of that equation.

So let’s consider a question – ‘what can you do to love thyself?” What do you do when you wake up in the morning? You say to yourself, you love yourself – “I love me”. How do you do that? What practises do you have in your life, in your daily, everyday life as a human being, walking this earth that allow you to love yourself? What are they?

It is not the intention of this writing to prescribe how to do this because we are all different and we wake up differently every day. But one thing we each can do is have a consistent practise.

For example you might stand in front of a mirror and simply say, as you awake in the morning in the bathroom, as you prepare for your day, “I love my self”. A deceptively simple expression depending on where you are at in your personal life.

Break this down and look at the agency of this expression. “I”. That's a powerful place. “I love”. Love is an action and energy. “My”. This is a part of your being. “Self”. You have a sense of who you are in this world, as a human being. Some might even say when you are being human you are not in spirit, or expanded in consciousness, or whatever term you might like to use. Whether you believe that or not the concept of being in spirit is boundless. In spirit you are love. You therefore do not have to love thyself because you already are love. However, when you are earthbound, you are not connected to that all the time, unless you practise such. If you did practise to the full extent then you would not be on earth. But then this is more an esoteric tangent for those who like to go there, so let's look at this from the point of view of reality.

You wake up, how do you love yourself? That is a starting point for every single day of your life. Now, if you can't say that to yourself, that’s normal and ok. It is a hard thing for so many to say. Why? Because sadly many were not loved well as a child or as an adult. Depending on the support and healing of such circumstances some may carry being unloved as a sense of who you are. Those who take this on wear the ‘unloved’ like a dark cloak around their being saying, ‘I am not worthy of love because someone else didn't love me’. Some may also see through their own awareness and growing as a child that others did not show the love that they felt they deserved.

And what may happen then is those affected step into a place of being the victim, the victim of others' unlove. Then all of a sudden a person see’s themselves as not loved. So in such a situation how could one possibly love oneself? This is not the answer. In all of us and who we are there is always love. If one removes that dark cloak willingly, perhaps obviously through help of others, then one can feel the love again.

A start again is to look in the mirror every day and just say one thing you love about yourself. It might be 'I love that my hair looks just right today.' Tomorrow might be. ‘I love that I am smiling’. You might say ‘I love that I woke up refreshed today and I feel good’ or ‘I love that I stand here ready to face my day’. Every day, love something about yourself. Even if it is the smallest thing - from your right thumbnail looks really good - it can be as simple as that - to the whole of your being – ‘I love who I am. Every aspect of who I am’.

Every day you bring this self-love into the world. Because as you do this exercise, this daily practise, you take this love, this microcosm of love, and add to the macrocosm of love in the world. Just imagine if you take that little bit of love in you, and then you share that little bit of love with others, the love thyself, and love thy neighbour begins to expand. Just imagine what it would be like. If you could stand in front of that mirror every single day and say, ‘I love all of me exactly as I am and who I am right now. I am beautiful inside and out.’

If you can really, truly genuinely say that to your whole self in front of yourself, in your embodiment of your human beingness, and then start each day from this perspective, you can send love to everybody else.

As you can see, self-love is but one part of the love equation. The balancing part is about the exercise of how you can actually love your neighbour. But for now, let's just start with this one simple suggestion, love thyself and keep practising loving thyself. It is such a simple suggestion, but all we know so challenging for us all. We put so many barriers in the way. That's why such a simple exercise can be effective at diffusing what gets in the way.

Jenn Shallvey29 July 2020