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Why We Are Afraid of Love

You might be surprised by this month’s title – how could anyone be afraid of something that brings so much joy into our lives? Surely it is easy to love and be loved? What I would like to explain in this article is that love is in fact our greatest fear and that our avoidance of it lies at the heart of all our relationship problems – indeed all human problems.

To explain the fear of love we must understand what it really is. So much of our culture and media is obsessed with love as a sentiment – just another emotion that comes and goes like any other commodity. We fall in love and become deliriously happy and then fall out of love again and become miserable. Romantic love seems transient and fickle. But this is to completely misunderstand love.

Love is not an emotion – it is our natural state of being, and it connects us with everybody and everything in the Universe. Of course the bonds are invisible, but they form an infinite field of consciousness that we are all part of. When we fall in love we know ourselves as love and feel the joy of our personal and Universal connections. It feels so wonderful because we are allowing ourselves to feel all the love that is available to us – we are going home spiritually. But the problem is that we start to get frightened of so much love and start denying it. Before long fear and insecurity return to our lives and the feelings of love fade.

Although it can seem that our partner’s behaviour causes love to fade and the early ‘honeymoon period’ to come to end, this is an illusion. Falling in love, or feeling great love for somebody opens us up to our most fundamental state of connection where we realise that we are not separate entities controlled by our egos. This is terrifying for us because we only know ourselves as individual bodies and have built personalities that support our separateness. We live our lives independently rather than in partnership and this means that we have to shut down our hearts and push away love.

To accept our true identities means that we would stop seeing the difference and separation between ourselves and others and instead see that we are all One. We would need to stop judging people (including our partner’s!) and accept that we are accountable for everything. We would need to let go of our obsession with the physical body and embrace our spirituality. We would need let go of all of our fears that we have become addicted to and gained a perverse benefit from. We would need to accept that we are greater and more powerful than we could have ever dreamed. We would find our purpose, become leaders of society and show others the true nature of love and themselves. We would know ourselves simply as love.

Imagine yourself doing all these things and you will sense the fear that holds most of us back from embracing our true state of love and connection. We are scared of losing ourselves and letting go of our ego-based rewards, and yet to do so is the path to true happiness and fulfilment. Our relationship problems can be traced back to our denial of our true state of love and the best way to see them is as reminders to return to our authentic spiritual state. We can all do this by surrendering our ego’s and belief that we are separate and begin to know ourselves as love. There is nothing to learn and nothing to do - all that is required is to face the fear and trust in our higher mind, as we allow ourselves to become authentic. Love will then do the rest.

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