Do I Love Too Much?

It has been suggested to me several times in the past week from various people that I love my teacher too much.

Know that I am not offended, and I hear your concerns. Thank you for caring about me enough to put yourselves out there.

I would like to explain my perspective on the issue. I figure if a few people have voiced their concerns, then maybe there are others who have the same concerns, but don't speak them. Plus, I love telling you how much I love my teacher, and this just gives me another excuse to do so. :)

First, I'd like to say that I believe there is only one kind of love. There is not romantic love, and motherly love, and friendly love. Love is love is love.

However, depending on the relationship, we may exhibit different qualities or characteristics while expressing our love. For example, and I borrow this from Marianne Williamson, when we love a newborn baby, we are loving them the same as we love anyone else, but we may display a tenderness that may not be there in other relationships, a tenderness we didn't even know we were capable of.

If we have a sexual relationship with a person, we can enhance our sexual experience by bringing in love, but the love itself is not sexual. Love is of the spirit and sex is of the body. It can go on and on with the characteristics we can project on the love we give or recieve, but it doesn't change the love. It may change the perception of our ego self, but the love remains pure and divine, no matter what the relationship. Romance is not love, control is not love, need is not love, playfulness is not love - but love can be given in any of these wrappers.

Secondly, how much love is too much? Is there a limit on the amount of love you'd like to give or receive? Would you ever like someone to say to you, "I love you, but not fully. I'm holding back a little because I think I might love you too much"? Of course not!

The sick and twisted ways we choose to show our love sometimes can be more than enough, thank you very much, but that is not the love that is causing the discomfort. If I smother my partner 'because I love him so much', that is not love- that is manipulation. Love may be under there somewhere, but it is all covered up with fear.

And third- and this is important and, perhaps selfish-, the way I see it, my teacher holds a mirror for me. He reflects me back to myself. Time and time again, I have projected my fears and the lowest aspects of myself onto him, not realizing it was my projection, of course, and had to deal with it right back at me in my reflection. I get back what I put in. He is not playing out my projections, he is just holding up a mirror so I can see myself. This is not only with things I need to work on, but also with love and all the good and wonderful things too.

So what I'm trying to say, is that by loving my teacher, I am loving myself. And to take that a step further, if you believe we are all One, and I do, then I am loving myself no matter who I love. I am hating myself no matter who I hate. I am hurting myself no matter who I hurt. I am helping myself no matter who I help. And this is not just a concept. This is (my) reality. I am you and you are me and we are each other. Whatever you think of me is a reflection of some aspect of yourself. If I recognize your beauty, then I am seeing beauty reflected back to me. If I recognize your wounds, it is because I can see those places in myself. Nothing is there that we are not puting there ourselves.

If you think I love my teacher too much, I encourage you to explore what my adoration brings up in you. Does it make you feel humiliated? Lonely? Does it make you feel more love than you know what to do with? Does it make you cry? What is triggered in you when you see how much love there is here?

So do I love my teacher? Yes, madly!
Am I in love with my teacher? Absolutely.
Being "in love" is not romantic. As I already explained, romance is not love. Love and romance are not joined at the hip. Being in love is being in a state of love. I am in love all the time with everyone. I am having a love affair with the world. What a beautiful experience I am having here! What a great opportunity I have with this life I have been given! How amazing is this illusion?!

Especially in this country, in the USA, we bastardize love. We make it creepy. We tend to sexualize everything. People are afraid to say 'I love you' because they are afraid of how it will be taken. That is so sad to me. I had a best friend for 20 years, and it took like 17 years and for one of us to move across the country before we said I love you to each other. But we both felt it everyday. It was right there, wanting to be expressed, but we held back because society dictates that it is not okay to love, to be in love with anyone but a sexual partner. That is a load of bull pucky.

To be in a state of love... That is all 'in love' is. I am in love with my husband. I am in love with my children. I am in love with my friends. I am in love with my teacher and my teacher's teacher and her teacher. I am in love with life. I am in love with spirit. I am in love with my own soul.

The other thing I am hearing, along with loving my teacher too much, is that I need to take him down off this pedistal I have him on.

Just so you know, he was not born on that pedistal, not in my life anyway. If there is indeed a pedistal, it is made of Light and he earned his way there.

I want to be like him. He is my teacher, my friend, my guide, my mentor. I do hold him in high esteem. Do you know what he has done for me? What he has helped me do for myself? What I have written on this blog is just the tip of the iceberg.

This may suprise you, but I didn't start out liking him a whole lot on a conscious level. My ego was quite inflamed when I met Joey - and for a long time after. My soul kept bringing me back to him (thank you soul!), but my ego tried to torment him. I mean for months on end!

I'm telling you, I have put this guy through the wringer. He has worked hard for every bit of love and trust he has from me in this relationship. And what's worse is that I still put the screws to him. My ego STILL gets the better of me sometimes before I realize it. Joey just holds the space of love and waits for me to come back to center. He is like a rock. He has never asked me to love him. He has never asked me to trust him. He has never asked me to change. The love and trust and change were MY decisions, 100%. He doesn't even tell me when I am having an ego trip. He lets me come to it on my own. There is no arm twisting, no brain washing, no cult mentality, no religion, no dogma. There is only love.

I talked about this in one of my first posts on Zaadz, but my goal is to love myself as much as my teacher loves me.

I was thinking about love and self-esteem one day, and I first thought, "If only I loved myself as much as I love my teacher..." and then I realized how silly that was. I must love myself as much as I love my teacher- I am not capable of giving more love than I have. Therefore, what I realized, was that when I love me as much as he loves me, then I will be getting somewhere!

I'm not there yet. I have no doubt that he loves me more than I love him. I don't understand love on that level yet. I've had glimpses, but I don't hold that space the way Joey does, the way Sai Maa does. I still have much work to do.

One day, I ran into another of Joey's students at a fair. I hadn't seen this lady in a while, and I went over to say hello. She looked at me and started to cry. She said, "I have to tell you something...When I look into your eyes, I see what I see when I look into Joey's eyes. You carry that same energy." And for a moment, I saw me through her - I saw Joey in my eyes, from her perspective, and for that moment, I loved me so intensely... I felt a love for myself like I had never even imagined possible.

Of course, I immediately snapped back out of it and began to tell her all the reasons why I was not what she saw in me. She told me to get a mirror and spend more time looking in it. I cried too. This exchange was such a great gift to me.

So this love, it is really about me and how I am learning to love myself. Imagine how much more I will have to give when I realize my own light!

And if there is a pedistal, he earned his place on it, and is there to show me there is more for me up ahead. He lights the path for me so I can see where I'm going.

Don't worry - I know he is human. And he is the first to say that he is no better than anyone else. There is no pedistal, really. He lights the way by shining brighter.

Does that help explain things at all?
Does it make more sense now?
Does it seem any more acceptible for me to love my teacher so much?
It's all about me. And therefore it's all about you. :)

I love YOU too.