LOVE

LOVE

What is love? It is what we are here to learn. It is the main lesson in the reincarnation school for the soul.

When we are dead a question rises up inside ourselves (it is asked by our own Higher Self) and it requires an answer. It is not: “What did I achieve? What did I earn? How much did I own? What fame did I get?” and also not “How often did I go to the church, the mosque, the synagogue…?” It is only one question: “How much love did I live and where did I fail, in love?” Failure in love is what causes most karma…

But what is love? It has so many aspects.

One aspect is important for us therapists: Every true therapy is an act of love… love in action…

True love knows no discrimination! There is no one on this Earth who isn’t our brother or sister, since we all came out of the same light. Who is different in “race”, look, origin, culture, religion, language, sexual orientation or whatever is equal and no less our brother or sister, no matter if he or she is on another level of spiritual development (above us or below).

In the decades of my work I have found that love has three laws of nature. Everyone wants to be loved, but it cannot work unless you respect these laws.

1. LOVE MUST BE SHOWN

If you have love but you don’t show it, it is worth nothing. Love is actually worth only as much as it is shown. Because if you keep it your for yourself, no one has anything from it. Not even you…

But how do you show love? Many try to show their love through giving material things, but that doesn’t really work.

We often give all sorts of toys and games to our children and think that it is a way to show love. Children of course accept them but they don’t really associate this with love. It is our helpless way to try to compensate with replacements for what we cannot really show: our feelings.

So how do you show your feelings? Let us begin with our children. We give them a good home, food, clothes, education and so on and think that this is love. But for the child it isn’t, not really. This is the materialistic duty of the parents and actually only half of their duty. It is only for the body, it isn’t for the soul. The child needs something else. The language of love that the child’s soul understands is expressed through physical contact: touching, hugging, caressing, taking the child on the lap, but also comforting it when it is sad, praising it when it does something good, telling it that we are glad to have it, and so on. That is as much food for the soul as what we eat is for the body. Many, many children are physically well fed but have hungry or even starving souls…

Many parents have a barrier here. They didn’t have love shown to them this way when they were children and now they cannot show it this way themselves. It becomes like a vicious circle turning from one generation to the next. It is a great step of development when we can overcome this!

In partnership relations physical contact is also important: an embrace, a kiss when you or your partner comes home, a caressing touch at suitable occasions, holding hands and so on. This doesn’t in the first place mean sex! But sex certainly also is a part of it (see below).

In many cultures it is natural to hug a friend, but in others it isn’t, which is regrettable. It is more common for a woman to give a (mostly female) friend a kiss or two on the cheeks, yet some cultures shrink back from such healthy expressions.

And so on.

2. THERE MUST BE AN EXCHANGE OF LOVE ENERGY THROUGH GIVING AND RECEIVING, SO THAT LOVE FLOWS BOTH WAYS BETWEEN PERSONS

If love is on one side only, it starves, withers and dies since it has no nutrition.

The worst case is possessive “love”, which is no love at all. It is mere selfishness. Love needs its own free space to survive, thrive and grow. If that freedom is too small, love suffocates and dies. There is hardly a better way to kill love than being possessive…

3. LOVE HAS ITS OWN ECONOMY: YOU DON’T GET MORE LOVE THAN YOU GIVE!

If you give little, you get little. If you give nothing, you will end up empty handed…

It may work only for a short time, but then no more. When after you died you make up a balance for your life, you will find: “I only got as much love as I gave.”

It is logical, isn’t it? How can anyone expect to get what he or she doesn’t give? If we don’t show love we might at most expect duty, respect or even fear, but we will not be loved!

Many wait for the other person to take the first step, and they may wait a few incarnations… You have nothing to loose from taking the first step yourself. What can happen?

The other person usually responds with love. Or not – but in that case: why? The person isn’t really the one we can have a mutual loving relation with, and it is certainly better to know now that it wouldn’t work than much more painfully discover it later. Or the person isn’t mature enough for a loving relationship. In both cases we have tested the situation and know that we will find love somewhere else, instead. We haven’t really lost anything, but instead won understanding.

You can never make someone love you. It just will not work. Or at least it is pretended and not real. But it is quite easy to destroy someone’s love for you.

Power and love are like fire and water

Power kills love. Who wants to have power has to sacrifice love for it. No one is together with the powerful because he or she loves that person, but only because one has to or expects some privilege. Therefore, power makes you alone! The one on the top of the pyramid is the loneliest person.

LOVE AND SEXUALITY

A partnership relation involves sex. If sex is left out it is merely cohabitation. Loving sexuality is the most intense form of physical contact that nurtures love between two persons. It involves an energy exchange between them that increases the energy of both.

I mean sexuality in love and not sex for its own sake.

There are two psychological laws here (cf. John Gray):

For the woman: “If you don’t love me I cannot have sex with you.”

For the man: “If you don’t have sex with me I cannot love you.”

Of course these laws are more expressed in the psychology of one man or woman and less in the psychology of another. It is individually very different.

Many couples with relationship problems have here run into a kind of vicious circle. The man doesn’t understand that the woman needs a lot more than quick sex. She first needs to feel loved! And expressing desire is not yet love. The woman doesn’t understand that willingness to enjoy sex with him is what the man unconsciously most understands as an expression of love for him. As John Gray wrote: The way to the heart of a man doesn’t go though his stomach, but quite a bit below…

When a couple has this problem, what can be done? Meet half ways, understand these laws and learn to act accordingly.

So what about same-sex relations? To me they are perfectly OK, but I have not yet discovered their laws. But since one of the two usually is more male and the other more female, I presume that something similar could often be valid here. And to those who condemn such relations: where is your love for our brothers and sisters in this world?

“You see better with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.”

“To love is not to look at one another. It is to look together in the same direction.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Jan Erik Sigdell (Slovenia)