unconditional love – Just the Tarot

The Ace of Cups, Love Without a Pronoun, and Purple Thongs in the Back Seat of the Mercedes

A look at love as existing independently from people.

In the esoteric system of the Tarot, Cups represent emotions and the Ace of Cups represents pure love. This is a card of love-as-an-energy, pouring into the world out of thin air, magically filling our lives with wonder and ecstasy. The love isn’t, “attached,” to anything, it’s just there, existing by itself.

Love-as-an-energy is a notion that’s foreign to most Westerners, so it takes a little bit of work to wrap our heads around it. We can see a similar notion in Reiki energy healing. The Reiki practitioner directs healing energy (which we could call, “love”) to the person or situation that is sick. BUT . . . and this is a subtle and important distinction . . . the practitioner doesn’t tell the energy what to do. She just sends the energy and the energy solves the problems.

Huh? What in the hell does that mean?

Well, suppose we’ve got a friend who’s got kidney problems, or at least that’s what the doctor told him. So we sit down and light our white candles and incense and we try to visualize as much healing and love flowing toward our friend’s kidneys as we possibly can. Only the doctor our friend saw was distracted that morning because his mistress had left her purple thong in the back seat of his Mercedes and his wife found it and now his wife and his children aren’t speaking to him and his mistress wants her thong back and his life has just turned into a shit burger. So he accidentally grabs the wrong chart and diagnoses a kidney problem when our friend actually has exhausted adrenals.

There we are, then, sending tons of healing energy to our friend’s kidneys when his kidneys are perfectly fine and it’s his adrenals that need a little TLC. Instead of helping, we’re accidentally short circuiting the healing process because we decided what the problem is and we were wrong.

The Reiki practitioner, on the other hand, just sets the intention of sending the healing energy to his friend but lets the energy figure out what the real problem is and what really needs to be healed. In other words, he views the energy of love and healing as something that exists independently of the healer and something that has its own intelligence, an intelligence that’s far greater than ours. You send it, but you don’t direct it.

All of which seems completely weird to most of us, because we view love as coming out of SOMEONE. We view love as always being attached to a pronoun. I love YOU. YOU love me. SHE loves him. We view it as something that people generate themselves and bestow on others, not something that flows THROUGH us, but isn’t really ours. Even when we talk about divine love, we view it as a very personal transaction where God or the Goddess or the Angels or the Guides are personally sending us love because, you know, we’re really nice people and why wouldn’t they? We don’t just want the love, we want the hug that goes with it.

Ram Dass expressed a lot of the same ideas when he talked about love and relationships. What happens when we fall in love? We’re tritty-trotting down The Great Road of Life when we suddenly see another human being and, for whatever reason, something inside of us says, “YUM!!! I want some of that.” So, penises get hard, vaginas get moist, we leap into the nearest bed at the first opportunity and make love like bunnies until we fall over in an intertwined heap of sweat and hormones. Big, silly grins for everyone. Yay!

There’s a lot going on beneath the surface, of course. Our brains are pumping out oxytocin and we feel high as a kite because, “we’re in love.” That very feeling and all of those pleasure hormones predispose us to view the other person favorably and as someone who’s wonderful and magical and the source of that amazing feeling of being in love. Many times we’re totally puzzled because our friends see our love object as a schlub with a bad haircut, instead of the Amazing Wizard of Love and Happiness that we perceive, and so we begin to cut our friends out of our lives and our lover becomes the SOLE source of love in our existence.

What happens when our lovers die or we break up because we caught them playing hide the sausage with the neighbor’s teenage daughter? Grief happens. Deep, devastating, profound grief.

Ram Dass looked at that whole process and said, “Yup, that’s what happens,” but he put an interesting twist on it. He said that it isn’t the loss of the person that we’re grieving, it’s the loss of love. The person was just a vehicle in human form that GOT us to the love that we craved and we thought he or she was the source. Put another way, we mistook the car for the destination.

That’s basically seeing love-as-an-energy. It isn’t an energy that comes FROM our lovers, it’s an energy that flows THROUGH them.

None of that denigrates or diminishes the wonderful process that we call, “falling in love.” Falling in love seems to be one of the ways that nature has hard wired us to reach that state of love that heals us and makes us whole. It’s a good thing.

What it DOES do, though, is to remove a lot of the negative qualities that too frequently go along with that process. When we realize that love is out there, that it exists independently of other people, then falling in love loses its addictive and dependent nature. We don’t view the other person as the source of love, we view them as a portal in our lives – sometimes temporary and sometimes lasting – through which the love flows. We don’t depend on them for our source of love, like a junkie depends on his dealer for heroin.

If the other person goes away, that’s okay, because the love remains and we can tap into it any time that we want to, just by opening our hearts to that energy. In a very real sense, we become the source of our own love, because we’re the ones who are making the conscious decision to stay open to that amazing energy, no matter what happens or who comes and goes in our lives.

And then we’re living in love, instead of falling in love.

It’s a good thing.

The Strength Card, Ahimsa, and Your Magical Anti Shit-Head Cloak

Rebuilding trust in relationships using the doctrine of Ahimsa

Have you ever been deeply, deeply hurt by another human being?

I’m not talking about someone, “hurting your feelings,” a phrase that we all use to describe occasional, usually minor, pain or unhappiness. I’m talking about a deep, horrible, traumatic pain that feels like you may never recover from it.

For example, finding out your lover is cheating on you and has been lying to you about it for some time. Or, perhaps, your partner suddenly leaving you without even affording you a chance to process it. Or realizing that the person you’re still madly in love with has fallen out of love with you.

There are really two elements there: the first is the pain that you’re going through; the second is a profound sense of betrayal, a feeling that your deepest trust has been violated. Of the two, the sense of betrayal can be much, much harder to recover from. The betrayal of trust can be world changing for us, in a very dark way.

It’s not at all unusual for people to withdraw from intimate connections with other humans after something like that. Younger people may declare a hiatus on dating and say that they only want to be, “friends,” for a while. Older people may pull into a thick, impenetrable shell and become totally socially isolated.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s our Deeper Self taking care of us. That’s our Inner Wisdom saying, “You’ve been badly wounded. You need to rest and cry and heal.”

There comes a time, though, when we may realize that we need to reconnect with the world. Getting back out there can be scary and intimidating. There are, after all, no guarantees that it won’t happen again. If we loved someone with all of our heart, if we trusted someone with all of our being, and they betrayed us, how do we know that our trust and love won’t be misplaced again? And if our judgement was so flawed, so . . . totally wrong . . . about the person we loved, how can we know that we won’t just make the same stupid mistakes with the next person?

We might find at least a partial solution in the Yogic doctrine of Ahimsa. Ahimsa is the idea of total, complete, harmlessness. It’s the idea that if we emanate a vibration of nothing but love, we can attract nothing but love. We literally CANNOT attract aggression because we HAVE no aggression.

The Strength card from the Tarot is a wonderful image of this. The woman in the card is gently closing the mouth of one of the most ferocious predators on the planet. She’s almost caressing the lion, rather than trying to overpower it or force it in any way. The lion is calm and peaceful because she’s living in the vibration of love and he’s responding on exactly the same vibration.

So what the fuck does that have to do with your lover ripping your heart out of your chest, stomping on it with hobnailed boots, and serving it to you on a Ritz cracker? You might ask . . .

Part of the answer lies in the quality of the love that’s involved in Ahimsa. Ahimsa involves absolute unconditional love. In other words, there are no strings attached. We’re not loving people because we expect to get something back. We’re just loving them. And that’s very unusual in our society. Most of what we call, “love,” involves a definite quid pro quo.

If you don’t believe that, try telling people who are just acquaintances that you love them. You’ll find that the usual reaction is something along the lines of, “Uh, huh . . . what do you want?” I mean, if you’re saying you love me, you must want something, right?

When I look back on my deepest emotional wounds, I have to admit that a large part of the pain was based on the idea that I hadn’t been treated fairly. I loved someone with everything I had and she walked away from that love and that JUST WASN’T RIGHT! In other words, I had strings attached to my love. Yes, I love you deeply THEREFORE you are supposed to love me back just as deeply and, if you don’t, you’ve betrayed my love.

All of that’s perfectly human. Most of us are not Ram Dass or Mother Theresa or Saint Francis and we don’t just walk around with huge amounts of unconditional love bubbling out of us. Most of us expect that if we make a deep emotional commitment to someone, it will be reciprocated. And it hurts like hell when it isn’t. Conditional love seems almost hard-wired into us and – if it isn’t – it’s sure as hell soft-wired with some big, thick cables.

The funny thing is, though, that unconditional love can be terrifically liberating. If we go into relationships with the idea of, “I don’t want ANYTHING from you,” it frees us from that whole expectation that we should be getting something back. It frees us from constantly worrying about whether we’re being treated fairly or if the relationship is equitable or if the other person loves us just as much as we love them.

And it frees us of the probability of being hurt again, which is what this post is all about.

Sticking our toes back in the relationship water can be scary as hell if we’ve been deeply, deeply hurt in the past. But if we can consciously remove that idea that we’re always supposed to get some sort of an emotional payoff from our relationships, if we can consciously stay in that state of openness and love WITHOUT WANTING ANYTHING BACK, we effectively remove the other person’s power to hurt us.

That’s a hard concept to grasp. I know it’s been hard for me, but it works.

Now, if all of that doesn’t work for you, if all of the reasons for unconditional love I just talked about don’t ring your chimes, then just think of it as a Magical Shield to protect you when you’re moving out into the relationship world again. The more you can keep your heart in unconditional love, the more likely you are to attract people who are in the same vibration.

Put another way, the more you can live in unconditional love, the less likely you are to attract shit-heads and narcissists.

You remember the Invisibility Cloak in Harry Potter? When he put it on, he could walk right past people without being seen. In the same sense, if you’re living in Ahimsa, if you’re keeping that no-strings-attached love in your heart, you can walk right past the shit-heads and THEY WON’T EVEN KNOW YOU’RE THERE because you’re wearing your Magical Anti Shit-Head Cloak.

“All you need is love,” – The Beatles.

The Ace of Cups, Heart Chakras, and Flounders in Rayon Golf Shirts

Opening our heart chakras to find love when our relationships aren’t working out.

I’ve been thinking a lot about broken hearts. LOL – Again.

At one point or another, whether it was the result of an adolescent crush gone awry or a mid-life divorce, most of us have gone through the experience that we tag as, “a broken heart.” We fall deeply in love with someone and they don’t love us back. Or they love us and leave us. Or they, “love us,” in such destructive ways that we end up in shreds.

It hurts like hell. Jeeeeezus, it hurts.

The 3 of Swords shows the classic broken heart scenario where two people were in love and one of them fell in love (or lust) with someone else. The heart is pierced with swords and the person who was betrayed is so deeply wounded that he feels that he may never heal from the pain.

So what do we do with our poor broken hearts after someone stomped them into a jelly with their hobnail boots?

One popular solution is to just jump right back into another relationship. “There are lots of fish in the sea,” we tell ourselves, “and I’m gonna hook me a big old flounder.”

Sometimes that works but a lot of times it doesn’t. The divorce rate in the U.S. regularly hovers between 45 and 50 percent, which means that an awful lot of serious relationships end up as flaming disasters.

One of the big problems with just catching another fish is that, “life is a mirror,” as Louise Hay says in You Can Heal Your Life, and we tend to catch the same damned flounder over and over and over. Whatever energy we’re radiating out into the Universe is the energy that’s going to come right back at us, in this case in the form of a lover.

If we’re really emotionally needy, clinging people, then we’ll probably attract other emotionally needy, clinging people and then – JOY OF JOYS – we can be needy and clinging together! Or, if you really hate yourself and you’re constantly treating yourself like shit, you’ll probably attract an abuser to do the job FOR you.

So, basically, unless we change our energy patterns, unless we change what we’re radiating out to others, we’re going to continue to attract the same kinds of people, the same lovers who broke our hearts, only in different clothing. (Hopefully stylish clothing, at least. It’s doubly tragic when your new flounder shows up in a rayon golf shirt.)

That can even happen to kind, loving people who’ve gotten therapy, who’ve done the spiritual work, and are really, sincerely looking for a healthy, compassionate partner. In some ways, people who are truly loving and on a sincere quest for genuine love may be even more vulnerable. Just take a moment or two to listen to this video from the wonderful Doctor Ramani about malignant narcissists and, “love bombing.”

Remember what it’s like when you’re really, really, REALLY in love with someone? You feel like – to use an old Southern expression – they hung the moon. Everything they do is perfect, everything they say is a glittering gem of wisdom, and just being around them makes you ecstatic.

The malignant narcissist gets to us because they can perfectly mimic that feeling of being in love. They praise us, they flatter us, they tell us that we’re smart and sexy and funny. Just like someone who really loved us would do. And then they destroy us.

Oops. Another goddamned flounder.

Hopefully, we go BACK to our therapist and he or she teaches us about malignant narcissists and how to spot them and how to build healthy boundaries. It’s all very complicated and it can take a lot of time along with a lot of emotional work and commitment.

In the meantime, in between time, we’re just hanging there with no love in our lives. I mean, we KNOW that if we just go back out fishing without cleaning up our own emotional messes, we’re just going to get the same fish again. And that’s not a good thing. Living without love is NOT a good idea. We NEED love. It nurtures us. It heals us. It grows us. So what do we do?

We can find at least a partial answer in the Ace of Cups. It shows love – pure, undifferentiated, unattached, unconditional love – pouring into the world.

Believe it or not, we can manifest that love in our hearts and in our lives without a relationship and without a mate. We all have a very special place in our energy systems called, “the heart chakra.” This is the place where we receive, store, and generate love.

We can sit down at any time that we choose, do a heart chakra meditation, and, “grow,” the love that is in our hearts. It’s not hard, it’s not complicated, and we don’t have to be spiritual masters to do it. There are heart chakra meditations all over the internet, so you can start loving TODAY, if you want to. (Here’s a nice one to get you started.)

The thing we frequently miss is that love exists. It’s a force in the Universe that’s out there, independent of people, and we can let it into our lives and our being anytime that we want to. Hell, we can set aside an afternoon for meditation and just BATHE in that energy if we want to. All we have to do is open our heart chakras.

That’s not to put down loving another person at all. Being in love can be one of the most magical, wonder-FULL things that ever happens to us. It’s really hard to beat snuggling up against your partners back on a cold, snowy night, right? (Well . . . neck kisses. Neck kisses might beat it. Of course, you could do both.)

Until that happens, though, until we can untie all of the weird, dysfunctional emotional knots that keep us from finding that relationship, we can remember that our lovers aren’t love itself. They are vehicles that get us to love, but we can still experience love without a relationship.

It’s right there in our hearts.

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