Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
– Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles, ch. 16 The Forgiveness of Illusions, p. 162.
A beautiful quote, and some reversals are also true.
I find love by inviting my barriers against it to crumble – through inquiry or love.
I find love by inviting it in – through prayer and heart-centered practices. I find love by shifting into it – through prayer and shifting into Big Heart. I find love by noticing it’s already here – through for instance asking myself is it true it’s not already here?
I find love by allowing love to dissolve the barriers against it. Love is the great solvent. Love is what allows barriers against love to dissolve.
Note: This quote is sometimes attributed to Rumi, always without reference to a specific page or text, and it is most certainly found in A Courses of Miracles so that’s the more likely source.
Note 2: Something I have played with around this: What in my field of experience – here and now – is it I love the least? Is it true it is not already loved? Is it true what I exclude and the exclusion itself is not already loved? How is it to shift into love for what was previously excluded and the exclusion itself? The “field of experience” refers to my whole world as it is here and now – including what I may tell myself is me and the wider world. I find that what I exclude from love is whatever I tell myself is wrong or undesirable, often certain thoughts, emotions and sensations, and also certain people, behaviors and situations. I tell myself these experiences are excluded from love, so I experience them as excluded from love. All that’s needed is to see that this is not the case. Without my stories, without taking them as true, I see that these experiences – thoughts, emotions, sensations, people, situations – are already loved. They are love. The most I can do is pretend to myself they are excluded from love, temporarily and out of innocent confusion.