Loving Your Desires, Whether You Get Them or Not

I recently worked with someone in a mentoring session on how to give love freely to everything and thereby be filled with love, as described in my article, Love Is For Giving. She wrote to me with some follow up questions:

Q: As I'm feeling the love towards everything and everyone including the body, I m feeling that I am this LOVE itself with no beginning or end. Even as thoughts of my financial  situation or relationship come up, I'm finding myself touching those images with love. Also I have some small health issues due to childhood illness. I'm finding myself touching these issues with loving awareness.

However, would it be wrong to imagine more finances, a better relationship, improved health and send those ideals more love? I’m finding myself sending love to all areas and sending love to more positive outcomes naturally.  I do know it feels different now as I feel the love flowing from emptiness and I don’t have the same cravings. But I'm afraid if I m taking a step back by sending love to these areas of my life and the beautiful visualisations that are coming up. Please advise.

A: The truth is bigger than we usually imagine it to be. All there is, is truth, and so everything has some truth to it. So there really is no contradiction between loving things just as they are and then also holding an image of a different outcome or possibility.

However, some truths are bigger than others, and so they are not all equal. Your capacity to give love is a very big truth and will open your heart even if your situation does not improve or even if it gets worse. So the simplest and best approach is to focus on the bigger truth of giving love freely and without expectations or conditions. Give that most of your attention.

And then you can also spend some time and effort on imagining the positive changes you would like to experience. Again, there is no contradiction. And if you start to feel overly contracted or attached to the outcomes you would like, then take a moment to drop back into simply loving what is. This will soften your awareness and allow you to see things in perspective again. And then you can once again imagine things improving, only you will be imaging it with a lightness and ease that actually allows your imagining to be more effective and more in alignment with your higher purpose. It is never wrong or harmful to want things to be different, but it can limit our ability to see the whole picture if we get stuck in focusing exclusively on our desires.

Improved finances, relationships and health without an experience of infinite love will never be fully satisfying, whereas an experience of the open hearted fullness of love will be deeply satisfying even if your relationship, health or financial situation does not improve. So it makes sense to focus more on giving love, even as normal and healthy desires for greater ease and abundance arise in your awareness.

Finally, if you are really caught up in a strong desire, then it can also work to simply love the experience of wanting. There is a lot of energy and passion and joy in desire itself....so instead of trying to stop the desire or imagination, just direct that same open and accepting awareness of love to the experience of desire itself. It is a subtle shift to simply redirect some of the attention from the object of the desire and onto the sensations and energetic experience of wanting or desiring. If you can deeply enjoy the experience of wanting, then it matters less and less whether you get what you want or not.

I hope this is helpful.