Martin Luther King, Jr., in being asked to publish some of his sermons, wrote in the preface to his book, “. . . a sermon is directed toward the listening ear rather than the reading eye. . . I offer these discourses in the hope that a message may come to life for readers of the printed words.”  This is my hope for you, dear reader. - Rev Linda

February 19,2006

LOVE - WHO NEEDS IT?
FALLING IN LOVE

Love - Who Needs It?  What exactly is Falling in Love anyway?  What does that mean?  Remember your first crush?  Let’s just take a moment right now to bring back that memory, that feeling of love.  So just allow yourself to go within and bring to mind a time when you experienced love and notice how it felt in your body.  Maybe it’s a time when you’re just holding hands with someone you adore, or lying in their arms.  Or maybe it was looking into the eyes of a newborn baby, or even watching your beloved pet sleeping.  Just bring to mind a moment when you felt love, and let that experience flood your body, not focusing on the other, but just within you, and notice how that feels, the sensations of it.  (Pause 30 seconds)

Now notice that you didn’t need anyone else or anything else to have that feeling of love, of falling in love.  You can bring that thought and that feeling back to you any time you want to.

Byron Katie in her book I Need Your Love—Is that True? asks us to consider this thought, “Who would you be without the thought that your happiness depends on someone else?”  (p. 65)

Didn’t you just have a wonderful experience of love by simply going within yourself?

Many years ago, I came to the realization I can “fall in love” with almost anyone—become totally infatuated with them.  And that was really disturbing to me because it went against the grain of all the Snow White stories that someday my prince will come.  MY prince—my one and only, meant just for me.  But somehow I got it that it comes from my own thoughts.  Call it a crush, call it puppy love, call it infatuation, call it what you will, but call it like it is—it comes from within me, within you, not from the other.

Katie says there are 2 basic misconceptions about love:

1.  We have to manipulate others to get it (including from God)

2.  It’s about getting what you want

But love, you see, isn’t about either of these.  Love is really about staying true to yourself, your Real Self, your God-Self, to God.

We have to come to the place where we see that we already have everything we need, including all the love we could ever experience.  When we fall in love, we stop seeking.  And yet we find ourselves trying to impress someone with our “bait,” don’t we?  Throw out this fly and see if I can catch something.  (Demonstrate fly fishing.)  I used to be pretty good with a fly rod. . . in more ways than one. . . .

Katie says, “We all do emotional gymnastics to be seen as wonderful or funny—just to get what we already have.  And because we’re doing the gymnastics, we don’t see what we already have.”  (p. 56)

And let me tell you, dear friends, we cannot find in someone else what we don’t already have within ourselves.  In fact, we must first fall in love with the Self.  We can search the world over for that one special person or child or pet or sunset or piece of the earth to love, but that’s not where it is.  It is within us in That Which Is, the Higher Self of us, the God-Self.  Falling in love is really being in relationship with God in Its many expressions, beginning with us and drawing in others and experiencing our oneness.

Relationship is a practice in unity, oneness.  Being fully in the present—not suffering from the past, not worrying about or planning for the future.  It often is a call for us to live beyond the ego and its hysterics.  And one way we can practice being in the present is by learning to really listen to ourselves and to others.

Bill and I are taking round dance lessons.  If you really want some good practice at listening, try square dancing or round dancing.  In round dancing, the couples form a big circle in the room, and you dance around the circle.  As the music is played in the background, every move, every dance step you do is “called” out by the dance caller one step at a time, so you have to listen to the caller to know what to do.  If you don’t, you could be going the wrong way around the circle!  So you have to really listen and quickly respond in kind to what the caller says.

Now what I’ve noticed is if my ego starts thinking, “Wow, I’m really good, look at me!”  Then I miss the next call.  If I make a mistake and dwell on it, “I’m so stupid, people are watching me screw up,” I miss the next call, and screw up again.  If I start thinking about how or what the couple in front of us is doing, I miss the next call.  If I anticipate what I think the next call will be, I can get fooled and mess up.  It’s only when we’re really listening, that we’re available for what IS.

And we must be available for what IS.  Other people in our lives provide perfect opportunities to practice listening to God.  If we can’t hear people we can see, how are we going to hear God who we can’t see?  God is our dance caller.  If the ego is chattering away, we can’t hear the wisdom within.  The marriage is to God - our Self.

So we must learn to truly be present with and listen to others and to ourselves.  Love is really about staying true to yourself.  And how do we do that?  First we have to listen to ourselves.  Remember our most intimate relationship is with our own thoughts.  Who are we really in relationship with?  Listen to this deep wisdom from Byron Katie.  “The voice within is what I’m married to.  All marriage is a metaphor for that marriage.  My lover is the place inside me where an honest yes or no comes from.  That’s my true partner.  It’s always there.  And to tell you yes when my integrity says no is to divorce that partner.”  (p. 86, 87)

Honesty with yourself is key.  It may even end up in honesty with the other person.  Many years ago a psychologist told me that whenever we do or say things so as “not to hurt the other person’s feelings,” we’re lying to ourselves.  We are simply afraid to speak our truth.

To really fall in love, is to take the risk, to fly on the wings of honesty.  At the Y in the road, when we’re faced with the decision to lie, to put up a facade, or to tell the truth, to be honest, we need take “the road less traveled.”  Turn to the truth and walk through the fear, surrender to the truth, to honesty.

Be honest.  Don’t try to change what is.   Katie says, “Thinking that people are supposed to do or be anything other than what they are is like saying that the tree over there should be the sky.  I investigated that and found freedom.”  (P. 124)  What freedom there is when we stop trying to make the tree the sky.

Notice the times when you reject what’s happening.  You’ll recognize them by the four-letter words you may use to describe them.  “Oh, sh. . . oot!”  Notice the judgments you put on yourself at these times—“I’m so stupid;  No one could ever love me; I don’t know anything;  Why can’t he do it the way I want him to.”  We think that we can control the events and situations and other people in our lives, or even ourselves.  When we feel the frustration of that lie, that’s when our plan and reality parted ways.

Byron Katie writes, “I am a lover of what is, not because I’m a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.  No thinking in the world can change it.  What is is.  Everything I need is already here now.  How do I know I don’t need what I think I need?  I don’t have it.  So everything I need is always supplied.”  (p. 190)

Honesty is unconditional love, even when we’re not in agreement with the other, especially when we’re not in agreement with the other.  It’s being okay with saying “no” when “no” is our honest response.  “Thank you for asking, and no; I understand, and no; I care about you, and no; I can see that it works for you, and no; I want to please you, and no.”  (p. 82)

It’s being willing to risk asking first what we want, then asking for what we want with no strings attached, no bargains, no excuses, no apologies.  Can you see the freedom in that?  Love is freedom, it’s wings to fly with, not chains to bind.

So if it’s true that falling in love comes from within ourselves, then what about falling out of love?  Again, we think it’s about someone else—they’re not as exciting as they were.  They’re doing things that irritate me, even though a few months ago were so endearing.  And I’m not talking here just about a spouse or partner or sweetheart.  The same thing happens with our children, our friends, our coworkers.  They obviously haven’t changed.  What changed?  What was cute is now disgusting.  What happened?

What changed was our perception of it.  The way we think about it.  Our expectations.  Our attachments.  It’s always up to us how we choose to interpret and thus experience the others in our lives.

Falling in love is surrendering.  Surrendering our blame of the other person and being willing to see “where is that in me?”  What am I making up now that’s causing me this pain?  It’s a willingness to question the statements about the other person that we’re playing over and over in our heads that make them wrong.  Is it true?  I hope you’re making use of the inquiry exercise we did a couple weeks ago.  If you missed that, there are some purple worksheets on the A&E table you can pick up.  Try it.  You may be very surprised at the results.

We think we can lose love.  Writing of marriage partners, but of course, it can be applied to any situation, Katie says, “Nothing can cost you someone you love.  The only thing that can cost you your lover, your partner or your friend is if you believe a thought.  That’s how you move away from them.  That’s how the marriage ends.  You are one with your husband [and I would add your spouse, your partner, your friend, even your children] until you believe the thought that he should look a certain way, he should give you something, he should be something other than what he is.  That’s how you divorce him.  Right then and there you have lost your marriage.”  (p. 145)   You’ve separated yourself.

We must learn to love what is.

A couple weeks ago someone here reminded me that pottery is more valuable with flaws.  If it’s too perfect people don’t want it because it looks like it was made from a mold, not by the loving hands of a person.  The perfect human would be a robot.  Is that what we want?  It’s only a flaw in our own vision.

We’re all doing the best we can.  Katie says, “. . . every single human being is trying his best. . . . .  But when we believe what we think, we have to live out those thoughts.  When there’s chaos in our heads, there’s chaos in our lives.  When there’s hurt in our thinking, there’s hurt in our lives.  Love thy neighbor as thyself?  I always have.  When I hated me, I hated you.  That’s how it works.  If I hate someone, I’m mistaking them for me. . .”  (p. 170)

What we are really questioning is our relationship with our self.  So when we have stressful thoughts about ourselves, we can question them the same way.  My mother always used to tell me not to believe everything other people tell me.  I’d add to that, don’t believe everything you tell yourself!  Question it.

Lastly, I share these words of wisdom from Byron Katie.  “Once we begin to question our thoughts, our partners, alive, dead, or divorced, are always our greatest teachers.  There’s no mistake about the person you’re with; he or she is the perfect teacher for you, whether or not the relationship works out, and once you enter inquiry [ask is what I’m thinking really true?], you come to see that clearly.  There’s never a mistake in the universe.

“So if your partner is angry, good.  If there are things about him that you consider flaws, good, because these flaws are your own, you’re projecting them, and you can write them down, inquire [question them], and set yourself free.  People go to India to find a guru, but you don’t have to:  You’re living with one.  Your partner will give you everything you need for your own freedom.”  (p. 90)

“Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be caused by another person.  No one outside me can hurt me.  That’s not a possibility.  It’s only when I believe a stressful thought that I get hurt.  And I’m the one who’s hurting me by believing what I think.  This is very good news, because it means that I don’t have to get someone else to stop hurting me.  I’m the one who can stop hurting me.  It’s within my power.”  (p.  96)

In closing I share these words from our founder Dr. Ernest Holmes, "If we make ourselves receptive to the idea of love, we become lovable; to the degree that we embody love, we are love.  This is why people who love are loved; it does not pay to hate, hate is a human idea; love is a divine verity.  [When] we make ourselves receptive to the ideas of peace, poise and calm, calling upon these divine realities, we find them flowing through us and we become peaceful, poised and calm . . ."      (The Ebell Lectures, Dr. Ernest S. Holmes)

Byron Katie says, “It only takes one clear person to have a good relationship.”  (P. 104)  Because it’s always with yourself.  And being in the moment is receiving God’s grace.  You don’t have to earn it or do anything to receive it.  Fall in love with You, the Real You, the God-You, God within you.  That will reflect into your life mirror and however it does will be perfect for you.