Riddle me this, Batman. What is the one thing that we say we do the most of, without actually doing it at all?
Answer: “Love.”
The idea of love is woven through pretty much every aspect of our lives: it’s mentioned in almost every song that we sing and poem that we write, it features in nearly every book that’s ever been written and has centre stage in many of our plays. We use it to advertise everything from chocolates to nappies, it’s written in our cards and on our clothes, we talk about it and we proclaim that we feel it (passionately), but is our use of the word ‘love’ true?
Answer: “Love.”
The idea of love is woven through pretty much every aspect of our lives: it’s mentioned in almost every song that we sing and poem that we write, it features in nearly every book that’s ever been written and has centre stage in many of our plays. We use it to advertise everything from chocolates to nappies, it’s written in our cards and on our clothes, we talk about it and we proclaim that we feel it (passionately), but is our use of the word ‘love’ true?
I used to think that I was good at it. I genuinely thought of myself as a very loving person and if I was truly honest, I would say that I had a certain hidden smugness about just how ‘loving’ I thought I was able to be, particularly considering how hard it seemed to be for most other people to express love.
I truly believed that I was good at expressing my loving feelings to others, be that in the cards that I wrote or the words that I spoke. I also believed that many of the things that I did were loving, e.g. buying people thoughtful gifts, helping them out, listening to them when they needed support etc. and although I would like to say that I am not totally writing off thirty years of ‘loving acts,’ I, in fact, am. Not only am I writing off every single one of those supposed ‘loving acts’ as having had nothing to do with love whatsoever, but I am clearly stating that my feigned ‘loving acts’ contributed to the web of lies that we have spun and continue to spin around the subject of love.
At the time when I considered myself to be my most ‘loving,’ I was also my most self-abusive. I had two major beliefs that conjoined in my body to fuel the relentless motion that I was in: one was that “the more that I managed to do, (particularly as a woman), the stronger I was,” and the other was that “our self-worth is measured by the number of ‘selfless loving acts’ we do for others.”
Fuelled by these two major beliefs, I pushed my body relentlessly through my days (and nights). I worked full time as a disability support worker, doing forty hours of night-shifts a week, I taught yoga during the day and managed to squeeze in a couple of hours of voluntary work at the local hospice. On top of all of that I would volunteer to babysit for friends and family, so that they could go out and have quality time with their partners. Oh, and I should also add that I had a partner and a son of my own, both of whom I thought that I was in loving relationships with.
Without love in our bodies, there can be no love in anything that we do.
The body that I hauled around with me to do my ‘loving’ deeds was totally bankrupt, but the real problem with the way I felt was that it just felt so normal to me that it never entered my mind that there could possibly be another way to feel.
Love is naturally within us all: it is literally the energetic building blocks from which we are all made and yet I was completely unable to feel even so much as a skerrick of the stuff within myself, because I abused my body from the moment I woke up to the moment that I collapsed into bed at night. So a question I ask myself is that if I was unable to feel any love in my body, then where did I think the love that I imagined I was giving others was coming from?
It took my body breaking down in an exhausted heap for me to begin to see that much of what I had held as true was in fact not. I started to see that the way that I was living my life had been propped up by beliefs and now that many of those beliefs were crumbling in front of my eyes, so too was the ramshackle structure of my life. I had no choice but to go back to the drawing board and look at things afresh.
With the guidance and support of Serge Benhayon I started to introduce self-love into my life. Not the reconstituted version of self-love that is touted in magazines and the health industry but its true form, one that is governed by the body and the body alone.
I began asking my body what felt loving to it and what didn’t. I asked it if it was self-loving for me to eat salad and my distended belly was my body’s clear response that “no, it wasn’t at all self-loving to eat salad” at that point in time. I asked my body if it was loving to push through my days and not allow myself to sleep when I needed to. The feeling of utter depletion that sat deep within every cell of my body was my body’s clear response that “no, not allowing myself to sleep when I needed to” was completely devoid of love. I asked my body if it was loving to force it to exercise, when all it really wanted to do was to lay down? Once again, my body answered very clearly, this time through its painfully aching muscles, that to have exercised at that time would not have been at all loving.
Little by little I started to cut out choices that did not support my body. At first those self-abusive choices were glaringly obvious ones, like forcing myself to stay awake when my body was desperate to sleep, but what I found is that by staying connected to the honesty of my body, my body constantly revealed to me choices that I was making that were not self-loving, — and what’s interesting is that those choices became more and more refined.
For example, I am now aware that my body really dislikes hearing swear words and so when they play music at the gym that has swearing in it, I will always ask them to change the channel. When I am at work and someone has filled and boiled the kettle in an anxious rush, I will take the time to lovingly refill and boil the kettle before making myself a cup of tea.
Cutting out self-abusive choices is an ongoing process and one that feels like it has no end. With the removal of each non-loving choice, a little more love is revealed. This process is a gradual one and one that repeats until such time as love reveals itself in all its resplendent glory, without so much as a blemish.
You see, love is who we all are, it is the very fabric of our being, it’s just that we do such a good job at covering it up constantly with our non-loving choices that it’s totally obscured from our view. But the fact that we lose sight of it does not mean that it’s not there. In fact, it can never not be there, how can it be?
Love is who we all are.
By Alexis Stewart, a woman who has remembered the truth of who she is and in remembering that, she has remembered the truth of who we all are – the Glorious Collective Consciousness of God.
If you would like to read lots of other amazing blogs then check out https://wordsonsergebenhayon.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/riddle-me-this-batman/