Falling in love is life's gift to us. It's life's way of showing us what we are capable of, what our potential is.

When we fall in love, our heart opens. The boundaries fall away, all the world loves a lover, life is glorious, it doesn't matter. So you're in debt - who cares? So you're not going to live forever - who cares? There's only this moment, right now, and everything is wonderful. 

Then the conditioning begins to take over. Your beloved says something cruel or stupid - and your heart closes a little. Soon there's disappointment and upset and misunderstandings and the barriers are going up and pretty soon you're snarling at each other across the breakfast table. We've gone from the best in us to the worst in us.

The argument for bringing conscious awareness to a love relationship is that through that conscious awareness, we can find that original, unconditional place in us that we touch into when we fall deeply in love. We can find that place through conscious awareness, rather than slipping into it by an accident of hormones.  

By staying with that conscious awareness, we can learn to keep our hearts open, we can learn to open hearts that have been closed. We can learn to stay present in that loving place within ourselves. 

 From a talk by Zen teacher, Cheri Huber. 

An update you probably won't get because the feedreader is broken.

But if you do see this, the new domain www.loveprojectblog.com will now work, though I think you will need to re-add it. Oh, technology. How you enjoy thwarting me.

(via we heart it)

Forgive me for lapsing toward my Church of Hippie roots, but this one is worth any resultant patchouli jokes. Meditation has become the very best resource I have. For everything. In my life. Yes. So I want to tell you about it and urge you to try it, even if your first instinct is to insist that you have no desire - ever - to wear hemp pants. Trust me. I don't either. Hemp sounds itchy. 

Here's a bulleted list that will, if we're lucky, explain that grandiose and sweeping IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE LIKE THAT FIRST BITE OF BRIE OR FIRST INHALATION OF WHAT I'M SURE WAS MEDICAL MARIJUANA, ONLY BETTER statement:

• Stepping away from the world and looking internally for answers is one of the best life tools you can ever have. Maybe the best. 
• I'm learning to answer every single question I have about myself and the world and my place in it via my own internal wisdom.
• It's helped me admit that yes, I do have internal wisdom. So do you.
• All the love you need can be found internally - a concept I'm still struggling to accept. It's so tempting and culturally reinforced to go outside yourself when it's just...there. Hiding under your spleen and waiting for you to poke around and find it. Meditation is a direct line, which is really helpful when there's no external resource to count on, like a significant other or a new puppy.
• Boy will this sucker calm you down when you're frazzled and ready to throttle some innocent or not-so-innocent bystander.
• It's a haven of sorts, your own personal tropical island, minus the plane fare.
• Also a good time to think about what you want, imagine it, play with it in your brain and refine it until you're able to 1) recognize and 2) seize it mercilessly when it appears. 

I've been meditating regularly for the last six months (year?) and it's an amazing defense against a bad day, a bad mood, a bad situation. Because it strips away the bullshit and helps you either dissolve the issue completely or find the center of it so you know what you're really dealing with. Knowledge that will save you a lot of time because you learn to pick up the twisted, tangled mass of yarn that metaphorically comprises the problem and go straight to the loose end so you can tug on the bastard and watch the whole thing unravel. It's quite satisfying and you don't even have to chant or bang on a little gong. (Though the little gongs can be fun, especially when you try to play Bohemian Rhapsody.)

Meditation isn't necessarily sitting cross-legged on the floor and envisioning a white wall. What I do would more accurately be called creative visualization or centering. (The book Creative Visualization has a lot of good techniques.) It's really just about sitting there quietly and trying to listen to whatever your brain wants to tell you. I mean, what it really wants to tell you. Not all the chattery crap about how you should be polishing the silver right now or finally planting that organic garden. You're looking for the voices that make you feel good, not the ones that tell you you're doing it wrong. (Feel free to bury those voices in that organic garden. With extra manure.)

Like anything else, it takes practice. I started with five minutes a day and sometimes still just do five minutes if that's all I have time for. Some days I feel like the Buddha, some days it feels like a waste of time. But staying in the habit is helpful, even if I occasionally feel it was 20 minutes that would have been better spent reading Twitter or scrubbing my shower grout with a toothbrush. Because on the days it works, I walk out my front door feeling happy and peaceful and certain that my life is headed in the right direction. It feels like being wrapped up in the throes of first love. Seriously. You just can't buy that kind of thing, and certainly not without a prescription.

Of course you have. You're human. (Dear god, please tell me you have. DON'T LEAVE ME ALONE OUT HERE.)

I recently discovered a sticky spot on this whole Loving Myself path. Guess where that particular molasses pit is? OH, BUT YES. When you find yourself at a funeral saying what most would identify as the Exact Wrong Thing. Or you try to sympathize with a friend and manage in your delightful and inimitable way to make the problem worse. In other words, when I behave like a complete and utter ass. It's accidental, yes. And I like to think it gives me more compassion when I'm on the flip side of the situation. But it's still so much harder to forgive yourself when you hurt someone else than when you hurt yourself.

When this happens and I'm tempted to start to beat myself up - something I have finally (finally) learned doesn't actually work - I focus on forgiving myself instead. (For opening up my mouth and braying like an ill-bred donkey.) (Does it count as beating yourself up if the self-flagellation is entertaining?) (Yes?) (Blast!) I take deep breaths and try to remember that I did the best I could under the circumstances. Because if I can dredge up some compassion for myself when my mouth makes a mockery of my I'm a Good Communicator claim, then compassion for others in the same situation will come easier.

Because human interaction is a delicate process and we all bungle it occasionally. Braying jackasses need love too.

What makes a good relationship is actually not great communication. You could master all sorts of communication techniques and still not have a good relationship. What makes a good relationship actually, is the ability of each person to be with the other person in whatever state they are in.

(via Bindu Wiles)