The Challenge of Being Loved

For the last few weeks I've been re-reading "Grace and Grit", the book that first turned me onto Ken Wilber when I was seventeen. I've been loving re-reading the story and really savoring not only the beautiful life and story of Treya's death and her battle with cancer, but also the amazing way she had with words. She was quite the poet!
 
Anyways, I found myself really strongly resonating with Treya's shadow side. I too have many similar shadow struggles, namely, I have a really hard time asking for help, feeling loved and feeling like I'm good enough. These of coarse are just personality aspects and at some level I also feel my practice opens parts of my being which see through and beyond them, but they still play a relative role in my everyday existence and how I respond and reach out to the world in certain moments.

Treya found the act of letting in others love an extreme challenge and so one of her central practices while going through chemotherapy was to imagine herself in the center of a circle of people who loved her and breathing in their love like white light. When I first read this my reaction was "Oh my god I couldn't do that it is so narcissistic". That was when I knew immediately that I had to do it! 

When I got home I sat down for my usual Tonglen meditation session but began with this visualization. I started placing all the people in my life who love me in a circle around me. Then I found it extending to teachers and leaders, some who were dead, some I'd never met. Then even people who I wasn't that close with started to sit down at my circle and offer this complete unconditional love to me. As each new person sat down I found the tears flowing more swiftly as I struggled with feeling both overwhelmed with unconditional love and also afraid and judgmental of myself for doing the visualization. I continued to just Witness the reactions and keep a clear, empty channel of clarity at the center of my heart. I started to feel more and more how everyone was exuding this unconditional love to me at all times, even when it looked quite the opposite in the relative, conditional world.

I found that day that I no longer felt the same clinging or wishing people to fulfill any criteria or say any specific thing in order to feel loved by them. It was like even if people were unable to listen to me that day or totally oblivious and caught up in their own whirlwind; I still felt their love for me on this totally deep unconditional level. The same love that I could then offer back without saying a word or "doing" anything. 

I was interested in this because I think it will fit in well with this paper I want to write on the Levels of Love (Kierkegaard and Irigaray). For both our ability to give and receive love are developmental. I have often been really good at giving; I've always been the helper at the less developed stages, and in the deeper/higher stages, I've grown more inclined to Tonglen practice,  to being the background which holds suffering with total clarity and compassion. But I've always struggled with the reception of love from others, it always circles around fear of rejection, fear of loosing someone etc. But the highest forms of receiving love from others are not separate from giving... I know most of you know this. I myself don't believe I truly understood this in a real bodily sense until this past week.

Anyways, I highly recommend this practice for anyone who struggles with receiving love or fear of rejection... It is an essential practice for sure and it really illuminates how we truly are loved so intensely at all times that it actually hurts to truly feel it....