Your Barriers Aren’t Keeping You Safe — They’re Making You Lonely
Your task is not to seek for love, but to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against love.
I’ve always liked this quote, credited to Rumi. It made perfect sense to me. What I didn’t know was how you do it. How does a person seek and find their internal barriers to love? What does such a barrier even look like?
You know how some people just emit defensive, “don’t hurt me” vibes? Well I’m not one of those people. I’ve survived my fair share of heartbreak and relationship failure, and I’ve tolerated romantic disappointment. But I think my heart is relatively untarnished. I can do the whole “love and be loved thing”.
Maybe I haven’t been hurt enough. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve invested a great deal of time and energy in trying to suss out love’s mysterious essence. Increasingly, I tend to define love less as a feeling and more a way to be. And that way has the qualities of gentleness, compassion, forgiveness, among other cool things.
Whatever your definition, we cannot live without love. It is a vital nutrient.
Anyways, what I have found is, I have inner barriers just like the rest of us. My barriers do not have me behave defensively around new people. They’re more sly than that. They're powering up my judgments, expectations and secret non-acceptance of others. Now I’m paying attention, they are becoming luminous.
So how do we open the heart, and find our way to more love, deeper love — wider love?
The Barriers Within
“Dissolving” a barrier to love isn’t a one-time thing. It is a spiritual-ish practice you do every day. A process of becoming, if you like.
Last week my boyfriend canceled our date two hours before we were due to meet as he needed to work late. I know, worse things happen. Still, at the moment I received his message, I was judging him for not managing his time well, for prioritizing what I deemed to be a temporary situation (getting the approval of his superior) over a long-term one (spending quality time with me, his doting girlfriend). And because I adore him, that judgment felt like grief in my heart, sitting heavy like a stone.
(This is how I am with someone I feel easy about loving. I won’t give you examples of the barriers I discover during interactions with my parents.)
Most of us can easily find our way back to love when we receive minor disappointments such as this one. And that was what I did last week. I discarded that heavy stone, and returned to a state of spaciousness, ready to engage in our flow of perpetual reciprocity. I received my man’s care in his carefully chosen words and apologetic tone.
What I just described is ‘the work’. It is noticing when a barrier has gone up, and getting back to love.
Sometimes talking yourself around will be enough. Other times, you’ll need something physical, maybe to manipulate your body into different positions during a yoga class. Or perhaps you need to take a ride or a walk. Because most of us want to feel good as soon as possible, we can move through our barriers quite quickly, if love is our intention.
Oh, and I should say. Removing inner barriers to love isn’t the same as letting others walk all over you. An often-overlooked fact is you don’t actually need to stay in an internal place of judgment/non-acceptance, in order to point out to someone that their behavior isn’t acceptable to you. It’s a little counter-intuitive I know.
Reclaiming lost parts
Often, our inner barriers are there because of the aspects of ourselves we neither love nor accept.
Let’s say you mercilessly judge your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife when they behave incompetently or are lazy. You don’t allow yourself such luxuries, so why should they be loved for them?
This is a big fat clue of an inner barrier, rather than tangible grounds for making both of your lives miserable.
Consider this. If you are denying something exists in you, you’ll have a tough time loving that quality in others. That’s why most of us have the same inner barriers against loving fear, small-mindedness, selfishness, etc.
Basically, our barriers are there because we needed them once. When we as children first expressed our messier parts, we probably encountered someone else’s barrier to love, causing us to hide this part of us away, and erect our own barrier defending against the trait in question.
If you want to feel more love, you have to reclaim the parts of yourself that you turned away from. It will unburden you and free you from excessive judgment-making.
Loving isn’t condoning
Should we love people’s negative qualities? What about evil behavior?
This is probably one of the most problematic, controversial aspects of the conversation on unconditional love. Ask people to forgive those that wrong them, and they will rightly ask, “why should I?” Forgiveness, a quality of love, is equated with accepting something.
But love is not condoning. Condoning is approving, another value judgment when it comes down to it. Love is a being, a state we can animate at any time, under the most appalling of conditions.
A choice to live, breathe, open.
So ask yourself:
~ Where can you be more generous to those around you (including you)? The generosity can be in the form of time, energy or tolerance.
~ Where can you be more compassionate? Can you forgive others’ foibles, knowing you have your own?
~ Where can you be more caring?
A life less lonely
Removing our inner barriers to love isn’t the sole solution to our longings for companionship, intimacy, and connection. However, I believe this process makes us less hungry for those things, as we are more embraced by the universal field of love around us.
Meet you there.
