The Freedom To Love
The Freedom To Love...
changes everything.
It starts with acknowledging that Freedom is not our common currency, but as hard-won a treasure as might be found in this beautiful, terrible, wonder-filled world. Though Freedom is our very nature, at the core of our being, it has long laid buried under the layers of familial and cultural conditioning which color the fabric of our everyday interpretations and responses.
The Freedom to Love is the jewel of great price that transcends the coping mechanisms and habitual reactions of the ego persona, carving us open with its transparent point, exposing the tender humanity beneath. It’s a profound softening of the ego that asserts itself through the habitual actions and reactions that arise from the automatic “stories we tell ourselves.” These stories about life, people, and “the way things are” are universally triggered and accompanied by the involuntary contractions and posturing of the body’s musculature that were long ago developed as a survival strategy to protect what is most vulnerable in us. This is the reflexive union of the body/mind that we must partner with on the journey to Freedom. This is the conditioned machinery of our personality to which we must open the heart, again and again, on the way to Love. These are the habitual re-assertions of the ego that we must cultivate the capacity to embrace, Mercifully, in ourselves and our Beloved, as we open to the Freedom to Love.
Trust and Safety
There is nothing more fundamental to the Freedom to Love than Trust. Where there is trust there is the ease and safety to be ourselves and give unconditionally. In the absence of trust, depth and intimacy are impossible. When we are not trusting, our nervous system is in a state of “passive tension” that informs everything we think, feel, say, and do—even when we are not conscious of the mistrust we are in the grip of. Everybody has been conditioned to trust in different ways, and there are some general styles of trusting that we can discuss later on.
The journey to Freedom is carried forward by our capacity to become conscious of our conditioning around trust, aware of the body’s patterning and sensations related to trust, and to cultivate entrustment. Entrustment: Trust is not merely a passive state, but one that is positively cultivated through acts of entrustment, or choosing to experiment with intimacy or revealing of oneself despite previous tendencies or long-standing habits.
Much of the work that we do on this journey is about repairing our capacity to trust. This includes our inherited patterning, as well as the healing work to be done in our primary relationship.
Cultivating a Practice of Relationship
How many skills have you gained Mastery of without practicing? How many teams have you been on that never practiced, but just got together on game-day and hoped for the best? How successful was that team? Did you only ever practice with the team or could you also do exercises and conditioning on your own that would make you a better player? Did everyone on the team have the same strengths and need to practice the same things? Did your teammates respond better to encouragement or blame?
How often do you practice with your Relationship? What does your conditioning routine look like? How do you define success in this game?
The Freedom to Love is not an inheritance, nor is it truly a prize to be won by hard work… In one sense it is a pilgrimage: a journey we are on that transforms us. In another, less poetic sense, it is a set of attitudes and skills that can be developed to mastery given enough practice and favorable circumstances. Mastery is not necessary on all these dimensions in order to find benefit in these practices. Just a way to put things in perspective. The Journey is not a pill you take before bed that makes everything feel better by the morning. Life is supplying continuous opportunities to practice. Looking at it this way, one might ask, “Well then, what is the GAME we are practicing for?” If I am to be honest, my best answer is: that moment when you finally slip out of your skin and are called upon to surrender all you think you are. Opening to the Beloved is really just a most exquisite opportunity to practice embracing the Mystery.
As Khabir said,
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.
If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten—
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment
in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.
-Kabir
So what is your practice? Please let me know in the comments below, and send me a message if you are ready to take your loving to the next level with Love Synergy Coaching...
