“The Self looking at you is the primary relationship you bring into all situations. Realizing that, you will start to reduce expectations for other relationships. If you expect a lot from fantasy, you could transfer those expectations to yourself.
What do you really want from a romantic partner? Security, well-being, a sense of belonging? These are all available to you from your own Self, and your healing will be to fall in love with that Self.
Maybe you are bringing the wrong model to your notion of what self-love is? In duality, love connects two people. If that is your model of love, you will have no choice
but to see self-love in much the same way. That is, you’ll try to separate off the parts of yourself that you value and direct appreciation toward them. But fragmentation is the problem, not the solution.
Self-love and self-division don’t go together. Self-love isn’t on the level of personality; it’s on the level of Being. Being is whole, and when you recognize that, every part
of yourself rejoins its true status as totality. Learning to love and accept the powerless, lonely little person inside you, giving that Being permission to be part of you, will lessen that one’s role in directing your love life.
Realize that love between ‘you’ and ‘me’ is a dualistic conception. People have been falling madly in love for centuries, but that hasn’t solved the deeper problem of inner division. If anything, such division has been exacerbated as generation after generation tries to resolve
separation through others. What heals inner division is a change of perception.
You are not just a small piece of divine essence that was created to exist separately. At the level of your soul you are the whole of spirit. Your connection to God is complete and seamless; your loving relationship to the universe is total. The mind can not conceive of this all-inclusiveness, however, while being caught in its own dualism.
We think of ourselves as father or mother, son or daughter, man or woman, here or there, this or that. Separation is built from our own self-image.
Everyone’s mind contains the essence of spirit; silence and intuitive knowledge come naturally to us. However, the deeper reaches of intuitive knowledge feel foreign because our culture hasn’t shown us how
to explore the inner world. …only the silent voice of spirit can reveal truths…
If we could rise above our narrowness of vision, we could perceive our higher Self directly. Our growth from duality to unity is still underway, which is why the path to love exists. The ability to live in the Self must be relearned — this is what walking the path is all about.”
The Path To Love – Spiritual Strategies For Healing, Deepak Chopra, pgs. 103-5.
