Question: I feel more love than when I started to meditate. It frightens me to realize that I feel so much love. Sometimes I feel this love for people I can never have a relationship with and I cry that I can never have someone like that.
Why is it frightening to feel love?
Because I realize how much love I have been missing my whole life. I want so much love. This does not reconcile with how I was raised. I was raised to think that love is a weakness, that men will exploit me if I show my real yearning and I have to be careful and shield my heart. I feel vulnerable and powerless. I thought meditation would solve all my problems. But I realize that meditation makes me confront my problems instead of running from them or hiding them from myself. But I have limited control, how do I solve these problems!
What do you yearn for?
I yearn to be loved. I want someone to love me like they show in books and movies. Someone for whom I matter and there is this feeling of being happy and alive. I want happiness in a relationship.
How do you feel?
I feel ugly, old and unloveable.
There is silence in the room as she feels how it feels to be ‘ugly’ and therefore unloveable.
After a while she gets up and says. “What should I do?”
Why do you feel ugly?
Because I don’t have enough beauty (you can put any physical flaw here)
Then she tells me about how it was so important to have perfect symmetry, colour and youthfulness for a woman. That if only she had it, then the right man will come who will love her and take care of her. But perhaps she just isn’t good enough for that right man to come along and love her.
I give her more guidance about compassion. I tell her that compassion is not enough if it is only practiced towards others. You have to practice it towards yourself.
After a month or so of daily practice:
She said, ‘I feel ok. I practiced compassion towards myself and realized that there are millions of people who aren’t beautiful but they may have love in there lives. To be loved for my beauty would mean that the love would lessen when I grew old, I’d be a habit for that man. Also, if you are loved for your beauty, that’s not real love, that’s like consuming a cake or watching a movie. I am a real person. I want to be loved for me.
How do I find real love? Where is he? The person who can love me for me? What do I do?
To be continued….
