The Spiritual Gifts of Unrequited Love.
Being able to love and not be loved back puts you in the state of soft heartedness. A soft heart is hurt and bruised, when you can cry almost anytime, when the emotional pain becomes so much, it is almost physical. My blog “Ways to Handle Unrequited Love”, talks about how it may sound romantic to love someone with your heart and soul, knowing that it is never going to be reciprocated, the truth is – it hurts. It hurts so much that is becomes unbearable. When your heart is breaking inside with the feeling of rejection, or to see your beloved fall in love with someone else, the pain is almost physical. It is not that your heart is actually breaking inside your chest but it feels like it is crushed and bleeding. Every bit of your body aches with an inexplicable real pain.
Mark Epstein’s book Open to Desire uses the Buddha’s lesson of letting go of attachment as the way to make people realise the difference between attachment and desire. Because humans are sensually oriented, anything that makes us feel better, becomes a habit. Tending these through introspection, meditation and constant mental training can help distinguish between desire and attachment.
Life is a mirror. What you see depends mainly on what you look for. The transformative gifts of unrequited love enable us to see what we don’t like much. I have talked about this in my blog “Lessons Learnt from Unrequited Love”. When you are told that your beloved does not feel for you, step back. Initially it is excruciatingly difficult to accept the truth, but given some time, reflecting on what happened, acknowledging your conflicting emotions and searching your soul will tell you exactly that – step back. With time, you will accept the truth. And this is the transformative gift you receive from unrequited love. To accept the truth and learn to live with it, happily.
The emotional availability of our beloved is absolutely fundamental to whether this love is going to cause pain or bring happiness to us. Unrequited love can be an extremely destructive force in your life, if you allow it to be. I have written about this in my blog “More About Limerence”. The more time one-way lovers get to themselves, the more their imagination soars. When their thoughts linger around “possible rejection”, they start focussing more on despair; these fabricated stories sometimes also have a tragic end and leave the limerent unhappy, low on self-confidence and sometimes even suicidal. In extreme cases, unrequited love can reduce a person to a shadow of his true self.
Love is one of the greatest teachers and mysteries of life, but we become almost obsessed with cracking the code of love when the object of our love doesn’t love us back. Lovers start believing that there is something that is missing in them, which, if changed, can cause the beloved to fall in love with them. They start finding ways to carve out of the marble of their being, someone that the beloved will find irresistible. The more you change yourself, the more you will turn into a shadow of your own.
In all honesty, unrequited love actually has nothing to do with the other person at all. It is your mind that makes them special, like no one else. It turns them to an idol, an object of worship. Because of the very nature of unrequited love, the object of your love never becomes a part of your real life, hence you never bring them down from the pedestal and know who they truly are. You continue to live in a constant state of denial and keep weaving the powerful myths about how perfect everything would be if they were with you.
From a spiritual perspective you might have a ‘past life’ connection with your beloved, which makes them feel incredibly familiar and your heart unknowingly goes out to them. This involuntary clinging onto a past life blocks the growth of your soul in this life. You need to claim your power back, snap out of the spell and rescue yourself. In order to make this happen, you need to first realise that you are trapped into a state of negative enchantment. Only then will you be able to do whatever it takes to come out of it. This is the only way to free yourself and go on and attract real love. Once you have rescued yourself, you will be astonished at looking back to your own behaviour in the past. You will then see the object of your love as an ordinary person and not a God.
Seeing through the eyes of your soul, you will see another soul come by, at the perfect time, and make you experience what it’s like to be powerless. Send them a silent blessing for giving you the spiritual gift of unrequited love. Then turn away, get on with your own life once again. Find the real love that you deserve.
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