Love is the basis of everything.
Any spiritual practice or form of therapy that doesn’t recognize that ultimately, it’s all about love, will be superficial in what it can accomplish.
Love is the aspiration: feeling love, giving love, being loved.
All undesirable feelings and conditions are rooted in a fear of being rejected, unaccepted, left alone, abandoned, unloved.
What are the most intense undesirable feelings you’ve ever had? Betrayal, sudden loss of love, humiliation.
Humiliation is very intense unacceptance. It’s having people express their unacceptance of you. It’s about the strongest thing you can feel, isn’t it?
Love is what drives us. Felling or fearing being alone, unconnected and unloved, drives us through all kinds of behaviors, feelings, and conditions that are painful to live with.
To be happy and well in your existence, this will only be true to the degree that you can accept love, that you can love yourself, and that you can feel and express your love for others. Anything else that becomes the focal point instead, is sort of misdirection.
Let me give you an example, of one client of mine. Sometimes a client will come to me seeking a financial or a business goal, and my feeling is that the job of any counselor, therapist, spiritual practitioner, or whatever, is to facilitate what the other person, what the patient or participant, is here seeking to accomplish with me.
Any therapist whose work is driven by anything else, some idea of levels of existence, one’s own thoughts of existence, what matters is helping the person in front of you, to accomplish what they are here to accomplish, and that’s as valuable as you can be.
But it can also be understanding the difference between what the person thinks will accomplish what they want, and simply what a person really wants.
One of my clients a few months ago expressed it best. What is the general aspiration we all have? He used the phrase “a beautiful life.”
How perfect is that? It’s very, you could say, non-specific because it doesn’t need to be specific. I believe that what works best is to recognize your aspiration for your end goal, not what you think will give you that beautiful life. A home, a car, money, an occupation, it’s wonderful to have all sorts of aspirations, but when you think of something as the thing that’s going to give you the beautiful life that you want, well, the truth is, you should just be focusing on wanting to have a beautiful life, envisioning a beautiful life, because when you get there it doesn’t really matter how, does it?
But when we substitute the idea that having some piece of property, some possession or activity, as being the end goal, well it’s really just the representation of what we feel will give us a beautiful life. And ultimately, what gives us all a beautiful life is feeling loved, and loving, expressing one’s love.
So, here’s one example:
Sometimes I have a client whose goal is financial fortune, success in business, that sort of thing. Now as I’ve been explaining, that’s really sort of a sub-goal, it’s what this person feels will make them feel accomplished or valid, so that they can love themselves and feel loved, and have that beautiful life, that’s where it really goes.
So one example of mine, I’ve had a few clients who had very high financial aspirations and saw that as their route to a beautiful life, and the couple of clients who I’ve had with that being voiced as what they’re looking for, well I have been able to successfully help them to achieve their financial goals, to go from a regular, you could say mundane employment, to having or dealing with millions of dollars. Both of these clients who had these aspirations, they are now dealing with numbers in the millions. But more importantly, they’re finding love and having love in their lives, which was something that was sort of an issue that was being skirted when we first started working together, see? So part of my responsibility, or any spiritual counselor or therapist’s responsibility, is to recognize what a person needs and wants.
So one example I’m going to give you, with the client’s permission, I’m going to quote from some things he said, during and at the end of some sessions that we’ve had, and this client, who happens to be located in Europe, he was totally fixed on how his business is doing.
And so I allowed that to be the focus so he could follow that route as far as it could take him, but after over a year of starting every session with “How are things going for you?” and having the only subject to come out of his mouth be how the business was going, you know, it was time to talk about relationships and love.
And his first reaction was “oh I really don’t want to go have to go there, I don’t have to think about that “ and that was a big give-away of a lot of trouble in that area, a lot of pain in that area and you can’t leave a client in pain, can you? You can’t leave your participant afraid to experience love, afraid to be abandoned, rejected, unaccepted, to be focused on loss so much, that he continues to avoid the area.
So of course we took this up, beginning with, in my approach, we always deal with feelings.
Feelings are energies, feelings are what matter. In a relationship, all that really matters is how you make each other feel.
All these theories of compatibility. Compatibility is merely one attempted means of finding love, of finding someone who makes you feel the way you want to feel and love, and you can make them feel the way they want to feel. But all of these ideas of compatibility, similar interests, and activities, while these are not completely irrelevant, the point is how you make each other feel.
So where we started from with this, in the way that I work, was having him accept his feelings of rejection and fear about love, and allow these to actually be processed within him, rather than trying to avoid and push away these feelings. Allow them to express within him and be felt and noticed and just let them express and digest within him, all the objections and all the fears, that’s the first step. If you want to process or help somebody to process their pain and their fear, well, most of the time the first thing they need to process is their pushback against it, trying not to feel it, all the energy we don’t realize we’re exhaustively expending in trying not to feel things. It is exhausting, and we process all that effort against that with us, we only then realize how exhausting it’s been all along and then enjoy a great feeling of release and relaxation.
So that’s where we begin. I won’t go through all the details of exactly how we work through what I call Stubbornly Held Protective Attitudes, things a person generates to say “Oh I’m not going there, I’m not going to think about that, I’m not going into that zone, I’m not touching that”; all these protective things that accomplish exactly what they’re intended to prevent, prevent exactly what they’re intended to accomplish. You know, “I’m going to have a better existence and relation to love by preventing anyone from getting close enough to me to hurt me”.
That’s more or less the basis of many of the things that we generate and how we get in our own way. You can’t get simultaneously protect yourself from the projected consequences of love and at the same time be open to actually experiencing love, so you’ve got to get those things out of the way, and that’s not done by pushing back. That’s why we need to allow those energies of those feelings to be noticed and felt, and let them digest within us, and then it is resolved.
So I’m going to take a look, with my client’s permission, and see some of the things he had to say when we finally broke through, and now he has a very happy and wonderful relationship. For years before we broached this subject and began working on it, he was just focused on business, he did not have love in his life.
So, here’s, I’m quoting from this participant, earlier this month:
“What we ran on love, Dex, you changed me. The simplicity of it, is astounding. It’s like having stepped out of a prison, into the light. I really thank you, Dex. What you do is incredible. I feel so lucky to know you.”
Those were his unsolicited expressions. This was at the beginning of a session, describing what had happened, in and since the previous session.
He says “This changes the quality of my existence, and it feels like it won’t go away.”
This changes the quality of my existence, and it feels like it won’t go away.
So when you, or if you’re a practitioner like me, your participant keeps coming to you with his interests being things other than love in his life, like when you have a client who says “my wife, my wife, my wife,” doesn’t even mention the wife’s name, you know there are things to be processed there.
Once again, love is the basis. Any spiritual practice or form of therapy that doesn’t recognize that it’s all about love, will be superficial in what it can accomplish.
Now a lot of my friends, you know what I’m talking about, those of us who had the Scientology experience, where was love in Scientology? Amazingly, the subject was always avoided, and the results tend to be very superficial, don’t they? The things that are still unresolved, and really important, remain.
Love is the basis. Any fears, painful feelings, chronic unwanted conditions, taking on personas or attitudes that are unpleasant, it’s all routed in fear of being unaccepted, fear of being rejected, of not being loved, a feeling unworthy of love, a feeling like you can’t have love, that’s the basis.
And I’m here to help you with that, and I would love for you to be in love. I would love to help you to have a beautiful life. I look forward to hearing from you.