Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. – Rumi.

See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness. – Eckhart Tolle.

You empower what you fight. You withdraw power from what you release. – Alan Cohen

Gaining awareness of our resistance to love is quite an advanced level of skill – it takes a lot of silence and time and space to tap into the subtle dynamics of a relationship and to recognize that we are not fully accepting and allowing the love from the other person. We may even be blocking their love. If that is done in full consciousness – then that is fine, if that is what we want. When it is not done consciously, it sends the self into a very painful place, where the self feels that s/he is not getting enough love in the relationship and that the other person is mean, cold, uncaring towards them. It is extremely painful to witness our own or our partner’s suffering when our or their awareness of how we/they are resisting the flow of love towards us/them, is missing.

In a love relationship, OFTEN it is not a matter of having the love of the other person or not having the love of the other person, but it is a matter of allowing their love to flow towards us or not allowing their love to flow towards us. Yes there are cold partners, who love a little. some people do not like loving a lot, they like loving a little. And that may be the case with your partner. But before you jump to that conclusion and move on, (and your wish to move on may be the driving force behind your perception of your partner as being unloving), and even if you are 100% sure that you want to move on, whether they are loving enough or not, you will benefit to reflect on the ways you have resisted their love while you were together, and examine in that way your own motivations, why you got involved with them, what you truly want in your life, or what are the traumas that have created mistrust towards him and fear of giving yourself to his/her love, and accepting their love. Understanding how you have been an active participant in the overtly unloving relating that came from him/her, shifts the power of responsibility from being solely on him, to being shared by both of you equally and this insight expands your consciousness, expands and empowers you enough to stop feeling like a victim, but as the Creator of your reality.

Going deeper in our reflection on how we resist love, it may emerge that we do not feel worthy of their love or of anyone’s love, it may emerge that we have fears of being exposed in the spotlight of intimacy, it may emerge that we do not trust, it may emerge that we are scared of being confined in the small space of an intimate relationship, all kinds of other issues may emerge. The whole point of this recognition process is the recognition. It takes a lifetime to heal traumas and resolve issues, as it is a never ending cycle of onion layers peeling. Once we have resolved an issue, then another one emerges. So the trick here is not to be scared from the pleiades of issues that emerge, and run away hiding, or roll up our sleeves and start dealing with them ruthlessly. The trick is to just RECOGNIZE them and ACCEPT them. Once they are accepted and brought to our awareness, then they lose their power over us. Then they no longer operate. They are there but they stop functioning. And that is all we want. When they stop functioning – we are liberated. This upgrade of our consciousness leads to a big, very visible shift in our reality, in the kind of people we start attracting and in the kind of circumstances we start attracting. You will be catapulted to completely new reality with more love flowing in your direction, with easier to get on people, and the next time you feel short of love, you will have developed a muscle for scanning your own contribution to that shortage of love. And you will know that you are a Creator of your love life.

If the opposite is true, that your partner is cold and not very giving emotionally and physically, then another question arises – why are you with them and not with someone else? That is always symptomatic of poor relating to ourselves, of lack of loving and caring for ourselves.

It is very human to hold onto attachments for reasons I describe in Emotional Processing Work During the Ending of a Relationship. When the end has come in the physical 3-d reality, if the two people still love each other or if one of them loves the other, they will hold onto their attachments emotionally and mentally despite the physical ending. On one hand this is very human, on the other hand it is not a good idea. So how do we consolidate these two? Answer: We loosen up the attachment. And we do that by 1) Allowing ourselves to love them and 2) by visualizing creative representations-metaphors for the ending and meaning of the relationship, which release both of you in very safe and harmless and even playful way. First I will give you examples for 2) as they are easier.

2) What was the style of your love relationship? Romantic? Raunchy? Caring? Sweet? Adventurous? Visualize your release from attachment in the style which your relationship had or be more playful than that and design it in the opposite style. For example my relationship had a passionate mindless nature (style would be the wrong word to use, as style relates to culture and our relationship was the opposite of culture), so I created a visualization opposite to the crazy passion, as I felt very comforted by it. We were cosmonauts in a spacecraft. We decided to leave the craft and go in outer space. We opened the door, we held hands at the door and as we left the craft. Our hands gently separated. We were gently floating in space in our cosmonauts suits and the cosmic forces were slowly sending us in different directions. We were calm and accepting and we were enjoying the gentle care and support we were receiving from the cosmos. We both knew that was for our best and both loved each other and were loved by the cosmos. Use your imagination and create your own energetic ending of your relationship to loosen the attachment. It does more than just to loosen it, but if we start with that goal in mind that we are going to cut the attachment, we will create too much resistance within ourselves, as our inner selves do not like change to be forced. So just think of it as you are slightly loosening the attachment with your visualization and aim for nothing more. Enjoy the playfulness and the tenderness of releasing yourself gently from your attachment. Make it to feel very soft and very comforting to you personally.

Use your imagination and create visual metaphors for the meaning of your relationship. For example – we were stepping stones in each other’s lives. We were not the Ones for each other and there is nothing wrong in that. There is no blame, there is no failure. The relationship was instrumental in achieving something even if that is to realize what we did not want and it did all that it could do. So visualize a nice picture to summarize that acceptance and validation of your relationship, instead of feeling that it did not work out, and that it failed. There are no failures in relationships. Every relationship is fulfilling a function and it us up to us to be conscious of that function and appreciative of it. Personally, I so agree with the stepping stones comparison, however it does sound a bit too functional and pragmatic and in that way it does not fully capture the true essence of the relationship – the romance, the passion, the joy. So dive deeper in your imagination and search for a more suitable metaphor, that will capture more accurately the essence of your relationship. Become fully absorbed by this exercise, and enjoy the process of scanning images in your mind and searching for the one that represents your relationship and your personalities best. This process is incredibly healing and valuable in the processing of your emotions about the relationship, so fully surrender to it and enjoy it without being in a rush to find the accurate image. Two ships in the sea, greeting each other and moving on, two birds flying and separating, two dolphins swimming together for a while and then swimming away and away from each other… The sky is the limit as to what images you can conjure up. And then when you find the accurate image – you will feel a big release of the highly charged emotion. You will feel it leaving your body and being replaced with calmness, understanding, acceptance. When I conjured up the image of connecting flight, I knew straight away that was the most accurate representation of our relationship. It was functional but so much more romantic and adventurous like both of us. And everything clicked. I suddenly felt peaceful and grateful rather than sad and regretful. We could not be the long flights to each other, but we were the connecting flights. And that was good enough and very valuable, as without a connecting flight – how could one get their long flight?

I do not support extreme abrasive cut of the attachment if the two people love each other, unless you feel that person’s presence in your mental and emotional space is disturbing you. If you feel that – then take the sharp scissors and cut it. However if the feeling of love is strong but you cannot be together because of personality incompatibilities or lack of common vision, or other obstacles, then the solution is very simple. You allow yourself to love them. You don’t try to stop loving them. Feeling love for someone is not a 3-dimensional physical behaviour. You don’t have to do anything to express your love. You just feel the love. Allow your heart to love them. Many people complain from being hurt from the endings and from Love in general, many people leave relationships bruised and make themselves lonely after that because they felt too much pain in their last relationship and they do not want to do Love any more. Love is too painful for them. And that is not the solution. That is a sad interpretation of Love. Love does not bring any pain to the carrier. Constriction of the heart, telling ourselves not to feel love for someone because they are not worth it, that is what gives pain to the heart. When we assess that someone is not good for us and we tell ourselves not to love them and we feel the pain so strong, so strong. This pain is not from the love for them. This pain is from the constriction. I did not know that until I allowed myself to love them. I felt very strong pain in my heart and chest area because of unrequited love and I was so scared. That pain was not going away. Day after day, week after week, the pain was strong. And I hated Love. I asked Love: “why did you come in my life, to hurt me so much, what good are you?” Until one day I decided to try one more thing. After doing everything else and nothing had worked, I decided to let my heart love him. Just allowed my heart to love him. We had stopped being in touch, there was no more expression of my love towards him but I allowed myself to love him. And all the pain disappeared. My heart was glad. And that is how I learned: allowing the heart to love is its own reward. It does not want any more rewards. It just wants to love. It is happiest when it loves. And that is how I learned where the pain came from. From constricting the heart and from confusing our profound sacred feeling of Love with behavioural expressions, and expecting that once the behavioural expressions stop, the feeling has to stop as well, and that is – it gets even sillier- because we want to protect ourselves from being hurt. This is the logic of our mind which speaks the language of logic. It does not understand the language of the heart so it is just doing its best in its capacity, to protect us. And we need to love the mind because the mind is innocent and it is constantly doing its best in its capacity to protect us. I do not support any negativity towards the mind. Where most people go wrong is that they listen only to the mind and they don’t listen to the heart. The heart does not have logic. I know I am not the only one, and men are always so puzzled with women, when we choose very wrong guys to be on the receiving end of our love. No one understands this because everyone is engaging their mind and its logical reasoning capacity, to understand something which does not have any logic. The heart does not have logic. The heart does not understand discernment either. The heart just wants to love. The heart wants to love everybody. If you listen to your heart and you allow your heart to love – you will see that your heart enjoys loving everyone, all the people in the world, all the animals in the world, all the plants in the world, all the planets around us, all the satellites of the planets around us, all the stars, all the galaxies. This is how the heart loves – all inclusively and indiscriminately. So if you want to heal emotional-physical pain of the heart – you need to understand where the pain comes from, and you need to slow down and start listening to the heart and start communicating with the heart. Ask your heart at any point in time what it feels like doing, what it feels most comfortable with. Ask, listen and act. Act according to the wishes and desires and calls of the heart. Trust the heart that it has wisdom which will not hurt you. Trust the heart that it knows best what is good for you. If you had trusted the heart and had made your choices according to your heart – you would not have ended up in a situation where the emotions are loud and the heart is in pain. The heart would have been very happy if you had trusted it before, if you had listened to it before and it would have rewarded you with creating the best reality for you, the most suitable people, the easiest and most pleasant circumstances. The heart does not believe in tough circumstances that teach you to grow. No. We create the tough circumstances for us when we don’t listen to our heart and then we grow tremendously from them, and we think they are necessary for our growth. The reason why that has worked to our favour is because all roads lead to enlightenment. But, there are easier roads than others. Exactly because all roads lead to enlightenment, we don’t need to choose the toughest possible reality for us. The easier roads will also lead us to enlightenment in much smoother and comfortable ways. The easiest road is the road of the Heart. Ask, listen and act according to the heart and you will enter the easiest of circumstances and the easiest of people to deal with, whether that is in relationships or at work, on holidays, on the roads, on the trains, on the planes. When you listen to your heart and have the bravery to act according to the heart, you enter a natural state of alignment between you and the surrounding environment and from there on the sky is the limit. People, events, circumstances run to you to help you and to support you and even in the most neutral level – you are become surrounded only by pleasant and compatible people with who you have pleasant and mutually supportive relationships. The difference is so great that it is impossible to ignore. When you listen and act to the wishes of your heart – the shifts of reality happen very fast.

Ok, so you have done the cognitive understanding that you were an active participant, co-creator, designer and an engineer of your relationship. You may have even understood why you have created that relationship, and what challenges you have set yourself up to overcome through it. However the emotions are not so easy to calm down with cognitive understanding. As useful as it is for your future success in relationships and for your growth as a person and for your development as a successful-at-relationships man or a woman, the cognitive understanding does not do much to cool down the emotions of love and sadness and missing someone. The cognitive understanding does help us with the feelings of being hurt, because it makes us aware how we have participated in that game of being hurt. It is a game, it is not real. This needs to be clear. Every occasion of being hurt by your partner is co-created with you to make you strong enough to stand up for yourself, to make you strong enough to choose You and to accept You, if they are not accepting you, to stretch their lack of accepting you and liking you and loving you so much so that you finally find it intolerable and you finally get it that you need to love yourself first before you love another, that you need to respect yourself first before you get into a healthy relationship, that you need to be compassionate and caring and kind towards yourself first before you can attract the right people for you. So these are the functions of the cognitive understanding.

The cognitive understanding does not do much to efface the love we feel for someone if we still love them and to help us stop missing them. The emotions run on a much deeper layer than the cognition so the cognition is not enough to reach that deep. And with the emotions of loving someone and missing them, come the emotions of fear from being alone, fear from the future, sadness, desires to hold on to that person because of these fears. So we need to do some emotional work. And this work is very simple and counter-logical. We accept whatever emotion arises and we stay with it. Accept it and stay with it. Accept it and stay with it. Matt Khan says “Whatever arises love that” as the map to successful navigation through rocky emotional landscapes. I have not reached the level of enlightenment of Matt Khan yet, however intuitively I feel very agreeable to his statement, and what I find useful is to go in a direction of multiplying the feelings instead of trying to reduce the feelings. And this technique I was taught by the Stanislavski school of acting. When a human tells herself/himself not to feel something, that feeling escalates higher and higher. So when an actor on stage has to perform a certain emotion, he tells himself not to feel that emotion. That is the inner talk of the actor – exactly the opposite of what he wants to portray. This is the curse of humans. We are not very good at portraying straight forwardly our emotions. It always comes out exactly the opposite to what it is intended. For example, someone wants to look sexy and carefree, if they start trying to achieve that – they will look silly. No one can achieve to look sexy if they try to look sexy. The main prerequisite of looking sexy, is not to try at all. There are other ingredients to looking sexy, it is a more complex formula, but if one thing needs to be done to look sexy that would be – not to try to look sexy. Not to try. There is failure conceived in the trying. So, if we are not going to be trying anything, because that does not work, then logically the opposite should work. And that is fully accepting, fully embracing the Now, the Present, the feeling at this moment. Breathe in and out and accept it. Breathe in and out and stay with it. Don’t run away from it. Stay with it and locate it in the body. See where it is located in the body. Direct your consciousness to that place in the body and observe it. Observe the pain that this emotion is giving to that place in the body. Breathe in and out and observe it. Direct your breathing towards the painful place in the body and breathe into it. Breathe into it. And just accept it. Then talk to it lovingly and caringly, with the sweetest, gentlest possible voice you can do without trying. “I love you” “Thank you” and repeat it as many times as you wish and keep breathing into it. This is the effective processing of emotions. You send acceptance, love and thanks to the emotion and to the body which contains the emotion. Not running away from it, distracting from it, or filling the empty space with new material. And no trickery – “hm, ok if I want to get rid of this emotion I have to accept it first and I have to love it first, so let’s do that then”. It will work only if the acceptance and the love are sincere and only if there is no goal-directed-ness towards reducing the emotion. We do not like it when we are upset someone to tell us “calm down”, so why do we tell that horrible ineffective, devalidating, devaluing, disrespectful, dishonoring statement to ourselves? Why don’t we trust that the emotions as uncomfortable they are and as obstructive they are, come from a deep, mysterious place within us which deserves all the respect and honour and validation and acceptance in the world. Trust it. Trust yourself. Trust the sincere and authentic nature of your emotions. Love them, respect them, honour them. They are part of your Authentic Design which is far too unique, enigmatic and deep to be reduced to some socio-cultural expectations of what emotions are appropriate and what levels of emotions are appropriate. And if you want to subside your emotions because they are disruptive in your daily life – then you need to see them as protestors in the streets with loudspeakers shouting at the government. You are the government and your emotions have something to say to you. If it has come to this point where they have got so loud and are shouting – you need to take responsibility for that. How did you neglect them along the way, how did you neglect your inner world, your deep feelings along the way. Why did you neglect them. And this is not done to reprimand yourself, but to better understand yourself. Did you feel the need to trade the fulfillment of your emotions with some other kind of security. Many people do that – they get a well-paid job, they leave a less paid job where their feelings were comfortable, for the financial security of a new job, and on the new job the emotions don’t feel comfortable. Or choose a partner who provides the financial security and leave a partner who offers an emotional security, then the emotions feel uncomfortable. These are just 2-dimensional examples, it is not given that less-paid jobs are more comfortable to the emotions than higher-paid jobs, nor is it given that financially supportive partners are not good with emotional support. The examples are just to show the direction of the self-exploration so that we to understand how and why our feelings ended up so strong and so out-of-control. And we will discover that it is our own mismanagement and neglect of our sacred emotional inner worlds. So back to some cognitive work of self-reflection and self-searching. In Cognitive Work During the Ending of a Relationship, I discuss that process in detail.

It is very important to understand that the seeds of the next relationship are in the ending of the previous one. More precisely in the style of the ending. How we end one relationship is of utmost importance to the success of the next relationship.

If we end the relationship with feelings of ‘he did this and he did that, and that hurt me and that is why I left’ I can guarantee you 100% that the next relationship will have exactly the same issues. Because the seeds of the next relationship are planted in the thoughts and the feelings we have during the ending of the previous relationship.

What are these seeds? These are seeds saying “I’m so nice and so innocent and look what he did to me”. And these are seeds of lack of self-awareness. Move on to the new relationship with this lack of self-awareness and no luck in the world will be able to help you. It will be just as hurtful and as doomed as the previous one.

Now imagine this. What if we have contributed somehow to whatever bad was done to us? And I do not mean ‘contributed’ on a 3-dimensional level – i.e. we have done something and our doing has contributed. No. I don’t meant that. I mean contributed on a conceptual level. Contributed not like a laborer contributes to a building construction, but contributed like an architect to a building construction. Not in the doing, but in the thinking and the conceptualizing. “I will go into this relationship where I will love the man but he will be unfaithful to me, which initially will hurt me, but then I will realize that this is his own issue of insecurity and it has nothing to do with me not being good enough. After several of these of occasions, I will emerge out of this relationship as a polished self-confident, self-reliant person, who knows my own worth and does not depend on the approval of others nor do I personalize their philandering.” There is no doing here, but it is a very big conceptual design of a relationship. So contribution is a very understated name for our designing and engineering of our relationships. When we have this understanding and self-awareness of our own participation in the design and the engineering of the events in the relationship, we will be able to build a better relationship the next time around.

So the ending of the relationship should be done like an actor leaving a stage, bowing to the audience and bowing to their colleague on the stage. Thank you for this interaction, thank you for this co-creation, thank you for this play. Eventhough I didn’t always enjoy it, it was good for my highest learning. And getting involved with you despite not liking you enough and despite you not being nice to me, revealed aspects of me which I didn’t know existed. Revealed how little value I have for myself, revealed how little self-worth I have for myself, revealed how little love I have for myself. And as you pushed me to the brink, I finally realised that. I am now ready to love and value myself. And then you continue with the self-talk and with the creative generating of ideas what this relationship has taught you. Remember this is not about how accurate these insights and conclusions are. This is about you developing a path towards yourself, a path to discovering yourself and a path of relating to yourself. The discovered obstacles you make will no longer be powerful obstacles to your relating with the next person. They are only powerful obstacles when they are not exposed to the consciousness.