Have you heard the story about the Mexican, his dog and the cactus? It goes like this, there was a British tourist driving through the Mexican desert when he saw a Mexican sitting in the shade of a cactus with his dog. The dog was howling piteously. Being a caring sort of person the tourist stopped and asked the Mexican “what’s the matter with your dog?” “He is sitting on a cactus,” replied the Mexican. “Why doesn’t he move?” asked the tourist. ” He will” replied the Mexican ” it just doesn’t hurt enough yet.”
If this brings a smile to your lips maybe its a smile of recognition. Many women put up with and underestimate the pain of not having a life partner. Or being in a relationship that never lives up to its true potential. The trouble with this response is that they stay in pain and don’t resolve the situation.
The good news is that there is an answer and its just two short steps away. First make a commitment to change. I still remember the evening I did this although its decades ago. My thought process went something like this-Eileen, you are not a stupid woman you are successful at work and have good friendships with people of both sexes. How come you are such a loser in relationships? I looked into my future and didn’t like what a saw. In my mid-twenties with a divorce and a broken engagement behind me it looked bleak. I saw the years stretching ahead with one failed relationship after another. So what was I doing wrong.
Nothing, I was pretty much going about my relationships in the way everyone else I knew did. That was the problem. Despite having success models for many things our society has none for success in personal relationships. I knew that I had to find or create my own success model otherwise I was stuck with my current problems. At that moment I made a commitment to myself and my future. It changed my entire life.
I decided that I would have a happy, joyous, successful relationship whatever it took. I was willing to invest time, energy, money to move myself away from the pain of my failed relationships to where I wanted to be.At that point I was just one step from success.
Are you ready yet to move from pain towards pleasure or isn’t it hurting enough? This little exercise will help you to find out. Choose a time when you are alone and will be undisturbed for at least twenty minutes. Sit in a comfortable chair and close your eyes. Picture your future, what will your life be like in five years from now if you don’t change what you are currently doing? Now ask yourself this question supposing I make a commitment to change and decide to find a way to have a wonderful relationship with my ideal partner what will my life be like in five years time? Now picture your future ten years ahead, you still haven’t changed the way you handle relationships? Where are you? Who is around you? How is your time spent? What’s happening in your life? Now picture the future ten years on you’ve made the commitment. You’ve invested the time; energy and money in creating a future relationship that’s all you want it to be. How does it feel to be a happy woman living in her ideal relationship knowing that you are accepted, cared for and loved?
Meeting the wonderful man with whom I now share my life was like coming home after a long abscence. I often say that the day we met was one of the best days of my life. However it could never have happened if I hadn’t made my total commitment to finding or creating a success model for my relationships.
What’s more it wasn’t just my relationship that changed almost every area of my life has benefited. I’ve enjoyed improved health, career success at a level previously unknown to name just two benefits. No longer held back by the millstone of disappointing relationships my life took off in new and promising directions.
My second and final step to having a great relationship was finding a mentor. The ideal mentor in any situation is someone who has been where you are and achieved what you are aiming at. My mentor consisted of the many psychology books I read and courses I undertook to understand the human mind and the subjects of love and relationships. I wasn’t fortunate enough to have a living mentor available.
So there you have it the two magic steps that took me and can take you from relationship disaster to relationship success. First I made a firm commitment to invest in myself and to do whatever it took to enjoy and benefit from a successful relationship. Then I found my mentor. Believing that I was worth a relationship that would bring joy into my life every day allowed me to take these steps. You are worth a joyous relationship too.
Love is the order of the universe and we are its atoms.
It is the ocean and we are its drops…
Through love the heavens are brilliant;
Without love even suns and moons are eclipsed
Wherever and whenever people meet, it is never long before love and relationships – their problems and confusions, their bliss and beauty – is discussed.
Love is as essential to us as air; a force that drives us all. It determines who we are, who we become, what we can achieve and, through this, how the world will evolve. It may even determine how long we live. Policy advisors to government now claim that the single strongest predictor of whether an individual will be alive in 10 years time is his answer now to the question: “Does somebody love you?”
Psychologists have found links between love and self-esteem, mental, emotional, and physical well-being, and freedom from stress and anxiety. By sad contrast, those working with Romanian orphans have also found that children who are denied love can develop a “virtual black hole” where the emotional centres of their brains should be. Because of this, they can never grow up to be “fully human”.
Studies like these show us the importance of love. And yet, so many questions remain unanswered. How many of us can say, for example, what love really is, or how to find it, nurture it, and learn from it so it can feed and enrich our souls? How do we make our relationships work so that they – and we – are healthy, happy, and whole?
These are questions which scientists cannot answer. For that we need a Master who can teach us love’s simple truths and guide us onto the path of the heart.
RUMI: THE MASTER OF LOVE’S SIMPLE TRUTHS
This year marks the 800th anniversary of one such Master. Sufi mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi was born on September 29 1207 in Eastern Persia. As a child he gained a reputation as a gifted spiritual teacher, and went on to establish the Sufi order of whirling dervishes known as The Path of the Master.
During his life Rumi composed thousands of verses of mystical love poetry, the messages of which concern the notion of tahweed (unity), where, through love itself, we become one with “the Beloved”: the divine spirit of love within all of us. For Rumi, we are all divine and there is no problem we can face which does not have a solution, no question we can ask which does not have an answer, as long as we remember who and what we are. What, after all, is impossible to God? And the essence of God is love.
To love well, therefore, may be our most important task as spiritual human beings, because only by this can we overcome our difficulties and distractions, and reconnect with our true selves. Through love we can make miracles.
To find love, however, we must surrender to love, knowing that our partners are reflections of ourselves and that we are both capable of the deepest, most soulful, and intoxicating of loves – if we choose to see things this way. But let us start at the beginning…
WHAT IS LOVE ANYWAY?
The word ‘love’ is nowadays poorly defined. It stands for so much yet can mean so little. Other ages and cultures were clearer, suggesting that they were more thoughtful about and respectful of it. The ancient Greeks, for example, had many different words for love, describing its various forms and how each feels, including eros (sensuality and passion), philo (the love between friends), and agape (the love of God, or, more generally, the kindness and compassion we show to all people when we recognise them as divine and special beings, just like us).
For Rumi, any (and all) of these forms of love is a gateway through which we can step to meet God. When we are loving and loved by another, our perceptions change and things become brighter, clearer, and more meaningful. We see the world as it really is: alive, intelligent, and benign. Even a gesture from our lovers can leave us swooning in sacred meaning. We wake up to the world and, through this awakening, we realise that everyone and all things are part of a single consciousness: We are One – and, more remarkable still: We are all God.
The problem for modern relationships is the pace of life. We do not have time to reflect on love, to experience it fully, or even to be in the company of our lovers as much as we would like. We are always wanted somewhere else. On top of this, in the modern age, we are all consumers and consumed. As consumers of a fast-food lifestyle, we have grown to expect instant answers and gratification; to simply be ‘in love’ and our lovers to feel the same.
Love’s confusions arise from this because love, despite the spin which makes it look so easy, is never really that simple. It requires that we look more deeply at ourselves and our lovers, who have been gifted to us by God for our mutual spiritual advancement, and not approach them just with expectations to be met.
If we accept love in this way, we will learn from it and grow; if we have demands and expectations, however, we will be disappointed and experience rejection and hurt when love does not go our way. These feelings click into our deepest wounds and lead to defensiveness and conflict – the opposite of love in any form.
To avoid this, we must be clear on what ‘love’ means to us, because when we know what we want there is less room for misunderstanding. We must also be willing to explore and release our feelings of rejection if and when they arise. By doing so, we free ourselves from hurt so that in future – and in Rumi’s words – we “Do not revisit the past” because “This fleeting moment must not be wasted”.
HOW CAN WE BE MORE LOVING?
Intimate relationships are our universities of the heart. In them we will find challenges and blessings, ecstasy and sorrows, and come to realise that our lovers are our mirrors and we are reflected in their eyes. If there is conflict in our relationships it is because we ourselves are in conflict; if there is joy and fulfilment it is because we have found peace within ourselves.
Love seeks balance, stability, and a subtle deepening. For it to evolve in a positive way, it is not necessary, therefore, to force things in our relationships or to worry that we are not doing enough or being as loving as we could; it is only necessary, as a first step, to Do No Harm. This is the first principle of love and Rumi urges us to use it to find our equilibrium:
If you are like the wind: sometimes hot, sometimes cold,
Find the place within you where heat and cold are no more
Then love can evolve naturally towards its perfection.
In Sufi tradition, life is a mystery and we cannot know its secrets, but there is a logic to the universe beyond our understanding and things are unfolding as they should to help us learn, heal, and to love. We are all as perfect as we can be in this special moment.
The relationship you have now, therefore, is perfect for who you are at this given time because you still have more to learn from it. But that doesn’t mean that you or your lover cannot become more perfect still! Each passing second brings change, the possibility of healing, new insights, and new ways of being. Perfection is not an absolute, but a process of evolution. “In aiming for perfection”, Rumi reminds us, “it is God that we become”. As we become more loving, we attract more love to us.
Every relationship – even the most unsatisfactory – is part of this evolutionary process, giving us the opportunity to practice our love, to open our hearts, and create perfection in the moment. If we are wise to love we will learn from it and this will allow us to better understand ourselves and move forward.
To do so, we need to look at ourselves, at what motivates us or holds us back, and at where we must place more of our attention so we are balanced and whole. When we are perfect beings, perfection cannot help but flow towards us. Rumi’s advice, then, is simple:
Keep company with Saints
And you will become a Saint!
AND WHEN PERFECTION SEEMS HARD TO COME BY?
It is difficult, when our hearts are broken or we are sad at the world, to feel that such perfection exists or can be found, or that we can trust enough to give ourselves completely to another. It is our challenge to do so. We must be the “Spiritual Warriors” Rumi implores us to become, and not give in to despair at our ‘failures’, for they are opportunities, too, for learning and growth.
Come, come, whoever you are!
Wanderer, idolater, worshipper of fire,
Come even though you have been broken a hundred times!
Come, and come again,
Ours is not a caravan of despair!
Relationships work because of openness, vulnerability, and a desire to love, no matter what. When we approach our lovers with a bitter heart or with sadness and fear in our souls, that is what we bring to them and what our relationship becomes: “I have run to you because I am afraid of myself. Please don’t give me back to myself!”
No relationship can ‘save’ us from the problems we bring to it. Instead, it will magnify them so we see what needs to be healed and are given an opportunity to do so. If we find it hard to give love, for example, then it will be equally hard for love to find us, and this will be central to every relationship we have until we decide to heal it. Our relationships reveal these truths and this is our lover’s gift.
It is clinging to hope and expectations – the ‘what could have beens’ – that cause us pain when we absorb ourselves with relationships that have failed. When we learn from them and let go, however, our pain is released and we can greet new lovers with wisdom, dignity, and respect for ourselves and for them.
There is a simple law of the universe that embraces us in times of sorrow: Love seeks balance, and our pain now is equal in measure to the joy that will come. Trust that it will and allow yourself to be blessed for, as the Master of Love remind us, “Peace always keeps company with troubles”.
The important thing, then, is to know the unresolved issues in our hearts. In this we find freedom, not shame. By understanding our pains and fears we and our lovers can find creative solutions so that love can flow once more. Knowing our answers, we can navigate our relationships so that, one step at a time, we give more of ourselves and open our hearts to love.
The person we are learning to love is always ourselves. When we understand this, our lover becomes our ally in helping us reconnect with our souls so that what is hidden becomes visible to us.
The mirror of my soul is your face, my love;
You reflect my perfect being
WHAT, THEN, ARE OUR BLOCKS TO LOVE?
There is a conflict within all human beings between what our souls know to be true and what we are taught is true. What every newborn child knows in his bliss-state of being is the reality of love; what he is taught by life is to fear. We will all have far more training in the latter than in how to love and to recognise it in others! Through our conditioning, we become experts in withholding trust.
Fear closes us down and, since the world we create is the one we perceive, once we shut ourselves off from love, fear is all we know because it is all we see. To change this we must be courageous in love so that, through our example, those around us can also wake up to the truth. By acting from love – no matter what – we create a more loving world, free of the limitations we have known.
“Leap into the fires of love”, writes Rumi.
When you know ecstasy
You cannot live without the flames
We must embrace love and allow it to flow – fearlessly, passionately, uncompromisingly – as the route to freedom for our souls. The path of the heart is one we must walk now.
The time for staying home is over.
It is time we entered the garden,
For the sun has risen on a new day of happiness:
Our day of vision and unity
About the Author
Ross Heaven is the author of Love’s Simple Truths: Meditations on Rumi and The Path of The Heart, which is available at www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com, and The Way of The Lover: Rumi and the Spiritual Art of Love. He is a therapist, healer, and counsellor, and runs workshops on the themes of his books. His website is www.thefourgates.com.
Ross Heaven is a therapist, workshop leader, and the author of several books on shamanism and healing, including Darkness Visible, the best-selling Plant Spirit Shamanism, and Love?s Simple Truths. His website is http://www.thefourgates.com where you can also read how to join his sacred journeys to the shamans and healers of the Amazon.
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