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Love Pressures

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to love and be loved. We see love as a magic elixir that can make everything in our lives right. The loss of love can be devastating. We define ourselves, create our identities, around who and what we love and by who loves us. Empires are built and Kingdoms crumble from the forces of love. With so much riding on love, it is important that we learn to live with it.

Living with love should be easy. It is the closest thing we have to a magic elixir that will make everything right. When we feel love, we feel good. When we don’t feel love, we feel bad. That part is simple. When we try to love ourselves or other people things get more complicated. The problems do not come out of love, they come out of our ideas about how love should be.

Love is always just as it should be. We often think it should be different, which causes problems. We think love should make us feel good. It does. When we think love is making us feel bad, we are not feeling love. We are feeling attachment to an idea of what love should be. We expect people to behave in certain ways to demonstrate their love. They behave differently and we question the love. We expect ourselves to be a certain way to worthy of love, we are how we are and we question love.

When we feel sad or anxious or scared because of love, we are putting too much pressure on love. We are trying to confine it to too small of a space. We try to confine it to a specific circumstance, person, place or time. No matter how awful these ideas of love may make us feel, love will eventually be there to make us feel better. Big love, spacious love, is all around us.

Everybody, everywhere, does everything they do for love. Admittedly, in our confusion, we sometimes make a big mess of things as we do what we do for love. When we are feeling the pressure of the love we want, we need to open ourselves up to the love that we have. In every interaction, love is present. To summon love we don’t need to find our soul mate,  we can think of people we love. think of things we love, or think of times we felt loved. When we are able to evoke that feeling of love, it works. We love. We feel good. No pressure.

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Repost from @king.erica

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My prints are finally done.......#zendoodle #zentangle #micronpen #freehand #drawing #etsy #daily__art #doodles #doodleartenthusiasts #artstag #abstractart #illustrationartists #illustration #instadraw #instart

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#wip #zendoodle #zentangle #etsy #enlightment #artstag #abstractart #daily__art #drawing #doodleartenthusiasts #doodles #micronpen #mini #lineporn #lineart #meditation #creative #circle #shapes #sketch_daily #sketch

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Geometric doodle

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Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now how could I help him? What should I tell him? I refrained from telling him anything, but instead confronted him with a question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?:” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you who have spared her this suffering; but now, you have to pay for it by surviving and mourning her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left the office.

Viktor Frankl (via panatmansam)

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I was sent this GIF version of my last project by Eli Bary (be2212@gmail.com)

I’m flattered and impressed.

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Let The Love Flow: Practicing Non-Attachment In Our Relationships

Becoming attached to people, things and situations is part of the conditioning of almost every human being. Attachment develops when we identify with a person or thing and begin to believe that we need this for our happiness. But attachment is not love. In its most extreme manifestation the self will do anything to keep the object of its attachment within its sphere of influence and control. An addiction to any person or thing leads to behaviors such as manipulation, abuse and even violence. In its milder form, attachment is manifested as clinging, believing that the self is enhanced by the object of desire. Grief, rage or depression most often follows if loss of the object occurs.

Yoga teacher and Zen practitioner Michael Stone says; Non-attachment, often gets translated as “detachment,” which implies that you don’t care too much about the thing or person in question. Rather, attachment always involves clinging not to the person, but the story you are holding about them. Attachment is about your viewpoint, not about the world itself. When you hear “non-attachment,” he said, you should be translating that as a very deep engagement.

In contrast to attachment, true love springs from the divine source within. Nothing can ever be added or taken away from an aware being. Therefore love does not seek to possess and capture. Love can only display its deepest nature by freely flowing and connecting in light with all other beings.

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I never lose. I either win or I learn.

Angie Sarhan (via yogachocolatelove)