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July/August 2007 Featured Stories
In Love We Trust

by Gangaji

Gangaji

Many people have trouble with the word love.

Love, as most of us have known it, can be sentimental, potentially messy and most definitely out of control. And yet, love is what we crave. There is often a love/hate relationship with the idea of love, most likely stemming from our experiences as children, when we loved helplessly. We projected love out onto our loved ones - our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters - and at some point found our loved ones to be unreliable. We confused their actions with love and concluded that love was not trustworthy.

People are definitely not trustworthy, because in general, they are very busy protecting their story of who they think they are. Since they are mostly involved in their story, they can only give a certain amount of love before they start wondering, Well, when do I get mine? And since love has been identified as being connected with another person, this sets up a whole continuation of distrust around love.

But love is not a person. Love is the individual, collective and universal soul. Love is God. Love is truth. Love is beauty. Love is peace. Love is self. To truly know yourself, to surrender to the truth of yourself, is to surrender to love.

Many people are aware of their resistance and want to surrender, but they don't know how. The only actual barrier, however, is in not seeing the underlying story you are telling yourself about the danger of surrendering everything to love.

The degree to which you try to maintain the story about who you think you are is the degree to which you feel isolated from love - and, the degree to which you hold back surrendering everything to love is the degree to which you suffer. Until you realize, I want truth, which is love, more than anything, you will experience yourself as separate from love. Love is the constant. Love is not an aspect of truth. Truth, God and self are aspects of love.

What is the worst that could happen if you surrender to love?

What we seem to fear the most is the broken heart. Yet the very unwillingness for the heart to be broken is the broken heart. The tragedy and the irony is that in order to avoid a broken heart, people live in a state of broken-heartedness. In the willingness to have the heart be broken a million, trillion, zillion times, true love is revealed.

Most people are more afraid of having their feelings hurt than they are of having their bodies hurt. But the willingness to be hurt is crucial. Without the willingness to be hurt, there is no willingness to love, no willingness to die, no willingness to live, no willingness to be.

It is easy to see from your own life experience that no matter how much you try to run away from hurt, you still experience it. To stop the running, to turn and experience what is chasing you, open and unprotected, you have to be willing to be free.

Are you willing to be free?

Are you willing to trust love rather than your mind's protection from hurt? If you are willing, then you will taste the possibility of living a life of love and conscious innocence. This is possible for everyone. Love is the teacher. If you are willing to surrender to love rather than trying to control it, love teaches you who you are.

Hurt may feel like the end of the world, but it's not. Hurt hurts. The degree to which you are willing to be hurt - not wanting to be hurt, but willing to be hurt - is the degree to which you are willing to love, be loved and be taught by love.

Love can be your teacher, though it never teaches withdrawal from experiencing hurt. Other people are not the source of your hurt - the source of hurt is the fact that you love. Trust the love. If love is to hurt you, then let it hurt you fully. Let it annihilate you. Let your heart break open so that an even deeper love can be revealed.

Most everything we do is to avoid vulnerability. We dress up in grownup clothes and play at doing grownup work, in an attempt to escape the defenseless innocence associated with childhood. But innocence is not limited to children. It is possible for you as an adult to be consciously vulnerable and innocent. You can consciously hurt.

In conscious suffering, you are no longer fighting the suffering. You are consciously present in it. And if suffering is met as it appears, it is revealed to be not what you thought. Conscious suffering reveals itself as the Buddha, as Christ's heart. But the intention in this is not to meet suffering to get rid of it. The innocent intention is to meet suffering as it is, even if it means feeling hurt.

True innocence is the capacity to directly experience what is here right now, without any demands that it look, act or feel differently. Innocence is openness, the willingness to see and to trust, even if what appears seems absolutely untrustworthy. True innocence is not naiveté, nor is it delusion. However, it involves vulnerability. The willingness to be innocent is the willingness to be hurt.

This willingness to be vulnerable is what the term spiritual warrior really means. Vulnerability takes more courage than being cynical, strong or powerful. It takes courage to be open, innocent and willing to be hurt.

Let the whole world break your heart every instant of the remainder of your life. Then your life can be lived in service to love. This does not mean you stay in abusive relationships. It means only to stay true to that which is always true to you, and that is love. Anything else is a story.

If the story is never investigated, your whole life is lived on the assumption that the story is real, and that your heart, your soul and your love need to be protected. But that assumption is actually a denial of your heart, your soul, your love.

The great good news is that love is free and it has not gone anywhere. In all of these eons that you have been hiding from love, love is still here, it is still open, it is still waiting for your commitment, still waiting for you to say, Yes, I give my life to the truth of love. I vow to let love live this life as it will, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.

The love that you search for everywhere is already present within you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events. A mountain can evoke this love. A sunset can evoke this love. But finally, you must realize you are this love. The source of all love is within you.

Gangaji, an American born teacher and author, has traveled the globe since 1990, speaking with spiritual seekers from all walks of life. As the author of The Diamond In Your Pocket, her message is powerful in its clarity and simplicity: True peace and lasting fulfillment are not only our birthright, they are the essential nature of our being. Gangaji presents a meeting in Vancouver, BC on July 26 and a weekend workshop on July 28-29. Visit www.gangaji.org.