When I can’t find love for someone or something, is that the whole story?
If I take a closer look, what do I find? What is it I am actually unable to find love for?
There are several answers here, and they are all sides of the same.
The conventional view
On the surface, it can seem that we can’t find love for a person, situation, place, or something else. We perceive and live as if that’s how it is, and it will seem that way to others as well.
What’s actually happening
When I look a little closer, I find something else.
The world is my mirror. The way I relate to a quality or characteristic in the wider world is the way I relate to the same in myself. If I can’t find love for something in the wider world, I can’t find love for it in myself.
When I relate to something in the world, I am actually relating to my mental images and stories about it. I tell myself that someone or something is a particular way, that it doesn’t deserve my love, so I block my love and am unable to find the love that’s already here for it.
When I find myself as capacity for the world, and all my experiences – of anything at all – happening within and as what I am, I find something else. I find that what I am unable to find love for, whatever it is in a more conventional sense, is what I am. I am unable to find love for something happening within and as what I am. I am unable to find love for what I am, and an expression of what I am.
I can also say that I am life unable to find love for myself in that particular form. I am existence unable to find love for myself in a form I take as “other”.
We can also call this the divine or Spirit. What I am unable to find love for is an expression of Spirit or the divine, and Spirit or the divine itself. I am Spirit unable to find love for itself, in a particular form. I am the divine unable to find love for itself.
Seeing this helps me be curious about my lack of love, identify what in me clouds over the love that’s already here and I am, and perhaps open for this love that I am.
In real life
One side of this is finding myself as love and finding love for whatever.
The other side is how I live my life and how I practically relate to what I find love for in the world.
I don’t have to marry everything or everyone I find love for. I can have clear boundaries. I can take action to prevent someone from harming someone else. And so on. I can do all the conventional things to be a good steward of my life and, when necessary, protect and prevent harm.
And if I don’t, that’s another invitation for me to find what in myself – beliefs, identifications, hangups – is stopping me.