Today I am inspired to share with you a particular poem from Khalil Gibran. As I have been letting go of past relationships, and truly understanding myself as a woman and a fully realized human, I have been knowing that a lot of what we consider love is not love at all.
Love is not an attachment to someone. You don’t love someone when they make you happy. Love is a state of being. From this state of being arises compassion. There is no such thing as love versus unconditional love. There is only unconditional love, or there is no love.
Love is about being in the moment. It is not a thing of the past, born from past actions. It is not a thing of the future, born from a feeling of security for the future.
A lot of people fall into this trap when they enter a romantic relationship… they assume this role of giving their power away to their partner, expecting their partner to make them happy. They expect to feel secure in their relationship, to know that in the future their relationship will still be there. There is nothing wrong with these feelings, indeed we are only human. Contrary to common belief, it is an embracing our humanness that we realized our divinity as spiritual beings in human body.
We form expectations and attachments on our love. We look to the other person to create something for us that is unique and special. We miss that all that we want is truly within us. Sometimes it’s too painful to look inside, so we look outside, and in doing so, we avoid the inside.
When we have beautiful divine exciting experiences in our relationships with others, we seek to re-create these experiences. And in seeking to re-create these experiences, we often get attached. We form expectations. This is the doom and gloom story of every relationship. We miss out on being ourselves and fully being in our bodies. The more we step out of ourselves and step into our relationship, the more we live as shallow shells of who we really are. We can never be content in a relationship so long as we look at other people to fulfill our needs for us. Our partner cannot possibly love us for who we really are if we do not allow ourselves to be who we really are.
And so, with that note, I let Khalil Gibran do the rest. Thank you, Khalil, for such a beautiful poem.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread, but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone.
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together.
For the pillars of the temple stand apart.
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Khalil Gibran
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