YOUR LOVE COMFORT ZONE
Some helpful strategies about how to open your heart to love.
Think of the waterfall as love and then the image makes sense. Love abounds. We are all awash in it and yet most people stand before its gushing flow with a thimble. I was one of those poor, love impoverished souls. When love arrived, my thimble became absurd.
Nothing helps a man or woman recognize how resistant they can be to love, as love itself. It has recently become impossible for me to deny or avoid how much I am loved. It has also been impossible for me to deny my periodic difficulties with that love. Sometimes, I soak it up like a towel dipped into a pond. I allow it to fill every cell of my being and for a few moments I forget my years of stony loneliness. Then without any discernible provocation, I turn my back on that pond. It’s as if I turn and look out into a dry and dusty land of rock and stone where love cannot reach. I have not moved away. I am still within a step of love, but I am blind to her presence. Gone, empty and horribly alone.
I used to think I was crazy. I used to believe that this sort of thinking was alien and unique to me. But the truth is I am not alone in my thinking and many of us have no relationship with love. The truth is that every single human being who has ever walked this great, green earth is just like me. Love appears and we get wobbly, wacky and weird. We run to it, dance in it and then we trash it and imagine we will never see it again and then we get up and run away once more.
I can feel this inside-out, upside-down journey every time I breathe deeply and look into Love’s eyes. All at once, I am intoxicated and terrified and for a fraction of a divine moment, the moth of my soul wants to fly straight and joyfully into that flame.
Yes, sometimes Love makes me shamefully aware that I approach her with a thimble, but she also makes me want to drop that absurd love-container and plunge unafraid into her embrace. I want the plunging. I want the soaking. I do not want to remain the man who died of thirst while standing under a waterfall. I want to find the courage to face her love and give her what she gives me. I don’t really care what happens after that.
Practical Exercise
Most of us have a comfort zone for love. We live within its walls and convince ourselves that we cannot break out into a new and more joyful experience of life and love.
Today, I invite you to walk to the edge of that comfortable, tolerable and possibly
I once heard of a man who died of thirst while standing under a waterfall. Then I looked into the mirror and he was looking back at me.
love-impoverished space and take a brave step into an unknown territory. Open your heart to Love. Allow it to embrace you more passionately, more fiercely, more joyfully than ever before. Now close your eyes and imagine taking that step. What happens???
Dr Matthew Anderson has a Doctor of Ministry specialising in counselling. He has extensive training and experience in Gestalt and Jungian Psychology and has helped many people successfully navigate relationship issues. Dr Anderson has a best-selling book, ‘The Resurrection of Romance’ and he may be contacted via his website.
The moth of my soul wants to fly straight & joyfully into Love’s flame.