A Transcended Love
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
In exploring self-love, we have thus far looked at the ways that we can bring the energy of the heart chakra into the grounded reality of the lower chakras, which have to do with building a foundation of love for our experiences as human beings. In addition to grounding love, we can also come into expanding our love into the upper chakras. Our self-love can begin to take on this expansive nature through expressing the love that we have cultivated toward ourselves. Expressing love toward others and the world springs naturally from the pool of self-love. It becomes easier to see the goodness in others and in the world. We see past the masks that people put on in order to protect the vulnerable parts of their personalities from the experience of oneness between all of humanity. Love is a common bond that holds all of humanity together. We all want to be loved and to give love. Ellen Grace O’Brian states in A Single Blade Of Grass (2002), “Love is all-embracing, all-accepting, all-knowing, all-forgiving, wholeness itself. When we love, we are in God and can embrace life completely.” (61)
When we see that there is something beyond the physical reality, we can connect with the transcending nature of our being, which is within and beyond our human form and experience. Our self-love then takes on a whole new meaning as we recognize the self to be timeless, boundless, and eternally perfect. To love ourselves in this way is to acknowledge the divine self that we truly are and to let go of the numerous ways we limit our vastness and perfection. In Coming Home (1993), Martia Nelson states, “Self-love is the experience of the love that you are. This love is a brilliant light. Like the sun or a star, it shines continuously in the core of your being, even when it is not seen or felt…” (25) We are the love that we often seek for in the outside world.
It is when we begin to see from this larger sense of self that we can gain
through spiritual practice that we can step into unconditional love. We
can realize that there is nothing that we really need to defend and hold
onto, for all is the same, divine self. Deepak Chopra tells us in The
Path To Love (1998), “The reason you do not feel completely loved
and completely lovable is that you do not identify with your spiritual nature.”
The mind certainly likes to cling onto ideas of love, and in doing so, the
mind makes opposites out of the same energy of the Divine. With the expansive
nature of the upper chakras, we can come into a vaster understanding of
the oneness of all energy and be still amongst its flows.
We can see that love is truly at the core of our being and fully feel at
rest, safely in its expansive and grounding nature. To allow the heart to
open both through grounding and transcending in the personality and body
is to embrace each part of our experiences as spiritual beings in human
bodies.