Authenticity, Willingness, and Compassion
“We waste time looking for the perfect lover,
instead of creating the perfect love.”
—Tom Robbins
Much like our relationship with food, our relationship with love, both as a concept and as a practice, determines our state of well-being in life. As such, it’s an important topic, and one not readily discussed except as some kind of pie-in-the-sky romantic fantasy that promises nothing but good feelings and answers all of our prayers and hopes.
But before we get further into the discussion, it’s worthwhile and instructive to assess ourselves right up front, to see how we relate to love in general.
Honesty Exercise: Where You Stand with Relationships
Completing the following checklist will help you to take an inventory on how you feel, think, and behave regarding love as it applies in a variety of relationships in your life. The use of the word “love” here refers to a warm and kindly feeling rather than a romantic sentiment. You will need a pen or a pencil and a few minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time.
For each statement below, make a mark in the appropriate column: most of the time, some of the time, or rarely, whichever best applies. Please add any relationships that you feel are important but are not included here.
Self
Respond to these statements regarding yourself.
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Most of the time |
Some of the time |
Rarely |
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Parents
Respond to these statements regarding your parents even if they are no longer living.
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Rarely |
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Spouse or Partner
Leave this blank if you do not currently have a spouse; or, you can complete it in relation to an ex or deceased partner.
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Most of the time |
Some of the time |
Rarely |
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Siblings
Consider these statements in regard to all of your siblings in general or contemplate each singly if you prefer. Leave this section blank if you do not have siblings.
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Rarely |
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Friends
Consider these statements in regard to all of your friends in general or certain ones in particular, whichever you prefer.
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Rarely |
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Work
If you do not work, consider these statements in light of your involvement in community service or a church group, book club, or some other regular social interaction.
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Rarely |
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Acquaintances
These include familiar cashiers, service personnel, post office workers, etc., that you encounter regularly, but do not really know.
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Rarely |
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Strangers
These are people you encounter in your daily interactions but have never seen before and will likely never see again.
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Rarely |
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The point of the exercise above is twofold. First, it gives you a measure of your level of comfort, or discomfort, with the idea of love as a common spiritual principle in your life. And secondly, it helps you become familiar with how you may or may not give or withhold love depending on whom you are dealing with. Perhaps you think that your love is to be “reserved” for a few special people in your life and is not for everyone—definitely not for strangers, and possibly not for yourself. There are no right answers here. The purpose is simply to see where you stand.
Nonetheless, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to experience love, either intimately, or with others in general, if we do not have a certain amount of basic compassion and appreciation for ourselves. And learning who we are, free from pretense and posturing, is part of the work of love and part of our spiritual journey, and partly what we will address in this chapter. But before we go there, let’s consider how it all begins.
In the Beginning
Our first experiences of love come from our parents, and for most of us are probably imperfect at best. We may have been loved with conditions, loved by smothering, loved through discipline, or not loved at all. We may have learned to associate love with abusive cycles or the seeking of approval.
Perhaps our parents were insecure themselves and told us from a young age that we were worthless or gave us that message through actions. Perhaps we were abandoned by our fathers, our mothers, or both of them. Maybe our parents died young and left us to negotiate the world without their influence.
Or maybe we were loved deeply and knew it. Perhaps we were cherished and coddled and given every physical thing that we wanted and needed or could ask for. Or maybe we grew up without anything materially but knew that we were important and valuable because that’s what we were told and were shown through affection, kindness, encouragement, and compassion. Everybody’s story is different.
But no matter the story, our relationship with our parents is likely to have had its own kinds of pitfalls one way or the other, and I imagine that most of us wished that we had something other than what we got. Our parents were people, after all, just like we are, and they had good days and bad days and all of their own personal anger and fear mixed in with their ability to love.
As children, most of us were probably exposed to some combination of love and heartache—confusing messages of our worth and our worthlessness depending upon our parents’ moods and their state of mind on any given day. But at least some of the time, we probably got hugs and kisses from someone: our grandparents, a loving aunt, a nanny, or a family friend, if not our parents themselves. And we probably got some form of punishment as well, and felt every bit of it whether it was physical, emotional, mental, or all of the above.
Because of the convoluted nature of the love that most of us received as children, we learned at a young age to feel fear, shame, and guilt. Something about the way we behaved or the way we were intrinsically seemed to make us lovable or not lovable, and the terms were dictated to us through the behavior of the important adults in our lives, if not their words.
For my part, I got the distinct message as a child that I would be loved as long as I did my best—innocent enough, really, but it set me up for a lifetime of strained effort and over-achievement and feeling like whatever I did was never good enough. I didn’t know how to measure my “best.” Couldn’t I always do better, and then better yet again? I got in the habit of giving everything I had and then some. After a time, this left me worn out and rather used-up feeling.
We all got information about love when we were children from the people of influence who surrounded us. And much of the love that we may have experienced was not really love at all, but rather bargaining and manipulation and maybe even cruelty disguised as goodness.
Meanwhile, in fairy tales, we were exposed to stories like “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty” that told us that we could be “rescued” by romantic love, often in the form of a kiss from a prince and an unlikely chain of events. So many of our childhood epics told us of someone’s hard life ending happily ever after because of love. This is reinforced by adult stories with the same plot. As a result, love became for us, at an early age, something distant and far away to be hoped for and blessed with—if we were lucky and beautiful and in the right place at the right time. We began to long for it, and we looked for it in the most unlikely places.
Love is rarely offered up in books and movies as the way for us to be and the thing to do on a daily basis and as a lifetime strategy. Instead, it is just out there, lost and waiting to be discovered, maybe held captive by a spell; it is not within us at all but encapsulated in some kind of “other” person—some hero or victor or fairy-tale prince.
So it’s no wonder that when we became teenagers and started to feel drawn to others in a physical way, that we were certain it must be the lure of love. Our time had come at last to be the prince or the princess. We entered into a kind of love-hunt and looked for it everywhere. And we put up with endless nonsense and dysfunction believing in the magic of our childhood stories. I got the idea somehow that the more troubled an individual was, the more likely they embodied the love that I hoped for, and I was always on the lookout for toads I could kiss.
Expectations Versus Reality
We expect another person to fulfill us and to bring us love and to make us feel the loving feeling. We expect another person to be our happily ever after, to right our wrongs and make okay all of our childhood horror—to end once and for all the evil rule of our wicked stepmother. But another person can’t do that. No matter how much we want them to and believe in them, another person can’t fix what ails us. Only we can do that. Doing that is our job and our journey.
And doing that—fixing ourselves—is part of love. It’s an important part, maybe the most important part. It comes before everything else. As mentioned earlier, we cannot be in a healthy, loving relationship with anyone else until we know how to behave in a healthy and loving manner toward ourselves.
On some level, this is a familiar concept. We have all encountered one version of it or another, but it’s still difficult to understand. What does it mean to love ourselves? Isn’t it selfish to do so? Isn’t it wrong? Aren’t we supposed to be all about everyone else and making sure that the people we care about are happy and taken care of and well fed? Isn’t that our primary duty in a love relationship?
Certainly that’s what many of us have been told, often enough that we now believe it. Consequently, we don’t understand when the people we fuss over don’t seem to appreciate our efforts—our children, spouses, parents, and friends. We are doing everything right. We are giving so much. Why don’t they fall at our feet in adoration and gratitude? And how is it that they can actually appear hostile and annoyed with us at times in the face of our incomparable generosity?
We are actually smothering them like this, and it becomes a vicious cycle. They lash out in frustration, which makes us do more, and makes them feel more smothered. They say they can’t breathe, and we don’t understand. They resent our unending attention and we resent their lack of appreciation. I have been at both ends of this game, and neither one is particularly satisfying or fun.
One of the most difficult concepts to understand and integrate is that love is letting go. We have no doubt heard this before, but how are we supposed to do it? All of our instincts tell us to hold on to the ones we love no matter what, to be there for them constantly, to enmesh our lives with theirs, and to be each other’s everything.
But this kind of entwined existence, especially in intimate relationships, is not usually love so much as it is codependence, and it is rooted in fear. It tells us that we cannot survive without the other, that we need the relationship, that our hearts would break and we would be lost and devastated if anything happened to our partner or to our love. Yet, things happen to loves like this all the time. One or the other partner gets to a place where they just can’t stand it anymore. It feels like a form of entrapment, and the one who is left can hardly function alone and is miserable, bereft, and victimized until he or she realizes that the other person is not a requirement for happiness.
We have to learn how to be okay on our own if we ever want to feel the deep completion and pure connection of true love that allows for space and movement. But more often than not, a person such as the one described above just moves on to another relationship with all of the same enmeshing qualities and continues in this cycle ad infinitum, trying to get it right each successive time by giving more and enmeshing more; however, “more” doesn’t usually work out any differently than it did the first go-round.
Still, others do fine under the model described above. They become completely dependent upon each other and it somehow works for them. They go everywhere together, do everything together, finish each other’s sentences, and carry on this way for years. They become a kind of force field of established routines and structures and are a complete universe in and of themselves. It’s them against the world, and that’s the way they like it.
But I would argue that such a situation is maybe more about attachment and habit than it is about love, and might not really be for the highest good of the individuals involved or the community at large. It functions, but may not be entirely healthy. It is diminishing rather than enlarging, and limited by its own design.
The bottom line is that we all have certain ideas and expectations about what role love is supposed to play in our lives. And these expectations are important because they may be the very thing that ends up limiting us, and blocking us from the reality of love in the end.
Awareness Exercise:
Expectations and What You Believe
This exercise is designed to help you see how far apart your expectations of love are from your actual experience. You will need a pen or a pencil and a few minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time. Complete the two statements by circling all that apply.
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easy |
magical |
perfect |
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special |
fulfilling |
natural |
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freeing |
unconditional |
accepting |
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beautiful |
difficult |
scary |
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confusing |
suffocating |
conditional |
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unfair |
judgmental |
ordinary |
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given to me |
my responsibility |
make me happy |
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answer my prayers |
my life purpose |
free me from pain |
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for everyone |
reserved for special people |
for only the lucky |
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easy |
magical |
perfect |
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special |
fulfilling |
natural |
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freeing |
unconditional |
accepting |
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beautiful |
difficult |
scary |
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confusing |
suffocating |
conditional |
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unfair |
judgmental |
ordinary |
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given to me |
my responsibility |
make me happy |
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answer my prayers |
my life purpose |
free me from pain |
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for everyone |
reserved for special people |
for only the lucky |
Consider how the two completed lists are different and how they are the same. The more dramatic the dichotomy, the more likely you are to feel a certain dissatisfaction with love in your life. A sense of well-being comes when you can honestly respond to this exercise and discover that for the most part, both lists match.
Potential and Discernment
So how do we go about defining love? Does it have certain characteristics that we can systematically pinpoint? Can dysfunctional love still be love? Is the love we feel for some people different from the love that we feel for others? Or does all love ultimately come from the same source? And if so, what is that source? There are lots of questions but no agreed-upon answers.
In my experience, love is living energy that comes into the world through us. And when it comes through, it is pure. But depending upon what it encounters, it can be reflected back to us with equivalent purity or become warped and twisted and tangled up with fear. So who we give our love to matters in terms of the love we feel coming back to us in return. When we’re young and looking for our love savior, we are willing to offer it up to anyone who seems at all interested in what we have to give, which makes us potential victims of dangerous others. We may attract people to us who do not have our best interests in mind. For this reason, age is a blessing because we learn over time who has the ability to love us, and not merely the potential.
Potential is an interesting and intriguing concept. Though we all, certainly, have the innate potential to be loving and to experience all of the blessings and benefits of great love, the truth is that not all of us reach this potential. Those individuals who are on the self-actualizing path often assume that everyone else is traveling the same road toward fulfillment; yet, if we take the time to consider it honestly, we know that this is not necessarily the case.
Some die before reaching their potential and some never even bother trying to reach it. This is an unfortunate, but true, fact. And yet, for the hopeful among us, it’s easy—too easy almost—to fall in love with who someone could be instead of who they actually are. Many of us do this, especially when we are young. We see possibility in our prospective lovers and know how incredible they would be if they just made this simple change—or that one. We make the fairy-tale error of believing that our love can, and will, be the thing to bring them around.
We have to be realistic about who we’re dealing with. We project ourselves onto others and assume that they will react as we would react, and feel as we feel. And some sympathetic others may do just that, but most do not. In Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, one of her main characters, Dagny Taggart, has exactly this problem as described in the introduction to the thirty-fifth anniversary edition: “Her error is over-optimism. She thinks … she can make people do what she wants or needs, what is right, by the sheer force of her own talent; not by forcing them, of course, not by enslaving them and giving orders—but by the sheer over-abundance of her own energy; she will show them how, she can teach them and persuade them, she is so able that they’ll catch it from her.”
Much as we have to learn how to love and how to be loving, we have to learn how to discern and how to be discerning: how to see clearly. The art of clear sight is the result of experience. In youth for sure, and sometimes well into our lives, most of us are completely blind to the truth of who is before us. We see what we want to see, and fall in love with our projected fantasies. And then we are crushed when our fantasies crumble before us. No one is more surprised than we are when our dreams of ardor crash to the ground.
Compassion and Appreciation
The evolved journey is to see what is, to see who is actually there, and to love and appreciate that. We need to understand that we can only experience an exchange of love when love is what’s before us. Otherwise what we might actually be engaging in under the guise of love are mind-games and codependency at best, and sexual addiction and abuse at worst. When we believe these things are love, we end up feeling fiercely let down.
Real love is about real appreciation, which is full of patience, forgiveness, and compassion. Such a love requires that we understand the actual value of a person and have a desire to do no harm to that person but to celebrate them and honor them as they are, with all of their limitations. And in an ideal situation, love completes itself by having this same kind of appreciation returned in kind.
Having the energy of real love moving through us results in a good feeling, a “loving” feeling, and when we are “in love” we are almost euphoric from just how good we feel. But sadly, for most of us, it doesn’t seem to last. It seems to have a kind of on-again off-again pattern in which we feel “in love” much of the time, as if nothing can go wrong and life is beautiful and blissful, and then without warning we feel unsure, and almost dark, as if everything could go wrong.
I would argue that we unconsciously flip-flop from love to fear and back again over and over for the bulk of our lives. And I would further argue that all of it begins in us—not in the other person and not in the world at large. We don’t get our loving feeling from another person; we get it from the compassion and the appreciation for life and for others that starts inside of us.
But love has layers and heights that go above and beyond any earthly description, or even any attempt at description. Love is cosmic and divine, something bigger than we are or than we can completely comprehend. I believe love is the most powerful force on earth and the answer to any and all of our questions. And that when we are “in love,” whether because of a person or a beautiful vista or a sense of well-being, then everything is beautiful and we begin at those moments to “get it” in the big sense of the word “it.”
“It” in this sense is all-inclusive. It is purpose and plan and perfection. So in this bigger sense of the word, I believe love is transcendent. But whatever it is exactly, or however we might characterize it, hopefully we can all agree that love is something we need and something we want, even if we don’t, or won’t, admit it. And hopefully, we can also agree that love has something to do with compassion and something to do with appreciation: an understanding and valuing of others and an understanding and valuing of ourselves.
Authenticity
So in order for us to experience love in the biggest and best way possible, where and how do we begin? The easy answer is from wherever we are and with absolute honesty. And we have already started that process in the exercises we have completed. What comes next is to consider what we find lovable in others. What inspires in us the compassionate appreciation that we have described above?
More than material things and impressive statistics, I believe we feel natural, outpouring love for others when we experience their authenticity. We can appreciate their expertise and the curve of their lips and bodily stature, but in my experience, our love is for their lack of pretense; for their struggling and beautiful spirit as it rises above the challenges of daily life; and for the raw presence of their absolute truth. This is what inspires compassion and appreciation in us.
And sometimes this truth is their vulnerability, and sometimes it is the perfect and sublime expression of their divine gift. We witness their authenticity, but we also participate in it. Authenticity in others inspires authenticity in us. It gives us permission to be who we are without pretense, and a kind of union occurs. Duality disappears and we no longer feel separate from each other. We feel connection and oneness.
Webster’s defines authenticity as “trustworthy and genuine; corresponding to truth: being actually and precisely what is claimed.” By its very definition, it is rooted in honesty. So being authentic is being honest with others and with ourselves as well as being honest about our victories, failures, fears, motivations, and limitations. Authenticity accepts the good and the bad. It celebrates wholeness and does not apologize for itself. It is pure expression of the energies of life. And the result of authenticity is love. It sees beyond the surface to the truth within.
If love is hidden, then it’s hidden right in front of our eyes. It is inside people and inside of us. It is in the way we express ourselves and show the world who we are underneath. And yet, we spend time and effort developing masks, fortresses, and walls so that no one can see us—and so no one does. And then we wonder why we don’t feel love. We block others from seeing it in us, and consequently, we become incapable of seeing it in ourselves.
If we want to experience love in our lives, we must become willing to be at least somewhat see-through. We must let down our barriers and expose our authentic selves to the world and be willing to be vulnerable and imperfect—exactly who we are without any kind of facade. This kind of willingness in an ongoing way requires great courage, but before the courage, we need simply the willingness. And we can build that up as a kind of spiritual habit.
Willingness Exercise: Embracing Your Authentic Self
By regularly repeating the affirmation below—in the morning when you wake up, in the evening before sleep, and whenever you think of it throughout the day—you will increase your ability to be authentic and true to yourself, which helps you more effectively experience love in your life. You will need a pen or pencil, your journal, and a few quiet, uninterrupted moments.
Read the passage below out loud to yourself several times. Go slowly and really feel each statement as you read through. Then pick the sentence, or statement, that resonates most strongly with you and write it in your journal in large letters. This is your affirmation. Commit it to memory, and repeat it as suggested above.
With this kind of willingness, we can change our lives for the better. Willingness is powerful medicine. It awakens spiritual energy within us that begins the expansion of love in our lives.
Identifying Blocks
One practical result of our willingness is a raised awareness regarding how we may have become habituated to blocking love in our lives. Love can be blocked in many ways and on many levels. It is blocked by resentment, anger, fear, insecurity, and greed; by guilt and shame, economics, politics, prejudice, and habit.
And perhaps, more than anything else, we are blocked by our own limiting beliefs and expectations, some of which we identified in the “What You Believe” exercise earlier in this chapter. Perhaps we expect that we will never find love, that we don’t deserve love, or that we have to earn love by good behavior or by looking or being a certain way. Or maybe we tell ourselves that we don’t believe in love at all, that it’s something for the movies but not for real life, and definitely not for us. Knowing what we believe and expect erroneously about love makes it easier to recognize when it bubbles up, and we can learn to dispel it with compassion, to shift our perspective, and to change our point of view.
Our self-consciousness is another barrier to love. If we feel awkward, unworthy, unattractive, or unwell; if we are blind with self-pity or doubt ourselves at every turn, it’s nearly impossible to be open to loving energy, even if it’s right in front of us. This tendency toward negative self-absorption can become a habit, and a powerful one. But we can shift it slowly over time. By raising our awareness and engaging our willingness, we can become diligent lookouts for this negative trend. We can learn to watch for it sneaking up quietly, like a tiger in the brush.
Blocks to love will inevitably rise and fall within us like the tides for as long as we live, but we can get better and better at identifying when we are blocked and why.
The Drawbridge of Love
Love is somewhat like a drawbridge. We raise it and lower it as we choose. And when we are blocked, our drawbridge is stuck in the drawn-up position, so nothing can come to us. From our guarded position, fortressed and secure, we may be able to fire off cannons at others but we cannot send out love—not until we are willing to lower our drawbridge. And some people never do.
Lowering the drawbridge takes the courage and willingness to be vulnerable that we have previously discussed. It requires that we trust ourselves and that we trust others, at least a little bit. But what glory and delight if we meet others whose drawbridges are also down. We can have a love exchange! We can share a smile or a laugh or a story or lots of stories. We can take a walk and appreciate the natural and beautiful world in which we live. We can eat a meal together with pleasure. We can share our wounds and our hopes. And the whole time, loving energy is passing back and forth between us. And it feels good and uplifts our spirits and gives us the sense that we belong and that we matter.
And hopefully we can learn to go along in life mostly open, mostly authentic, and mostly willing to let our love go out, and to freely take it in. But without a doubt, we will encounter many who are shut tight, like doors. And every time we face them, we have a choice. We can give them love anyway, and hope a little of it slips around the edges, or we can defensively shut our own doors and pull up our own bridges. That’s the instinctual response. When facing anger, or anything unpleasant in others, we have a tendency to retreat.
But we don’t have to. We can understand that angry and upset people are actually crying out for love, and we can choose to be kind to them. We can be authentically loving toward others even if they are incapable of loving us back, whether permanently or temporarily. We can accept that they are where they are, and that it’s not personal to us. We can have compassion knowing that we go there ourselves every now and again, and that sometimes we get stuck there too. But love can still reach us even if we are hostile toward its advances. It can and does creep through the cracks and shine its light across the darkness.
Awareness Exercise: Opening to Love
By curling and tightening your body and your muscles as described below, you will experience metaphorically what happens to your energy when you are blocked to love. By releasing tension, you will understand what happens when you make the decision to open up. You will need a few quiet, uninterrupted moments and a chair.
The key to recognizing when we are blocked to love in our lives is to become aware of physical or energetic “tightening” and rigidity. And the opening process, just like in this exercise, is simply a conscious decision to relax and let go.
Accepting Ourselves as We Are
The journey to experiencing love in our lives is a journey of remembering our own loveliness, and then being able to recognize that same loveliness in others—something easily forgotten and overlooked as we strive for success and struggle to make ends meet and to get along. But we can do better than that, and we need to if we want to live our best lives. Our birthright is love and our birthright is beauty and grace. We deserve these things. But they will not come to us if we are not willing to claim our part in the exchange.
It starts when we become willing to be authentically ourselves. When we stop pretending that we are something other than what we are and stop maintaining elaborate facades, energy is released within us that would otherwise be strained and rigid. This release of tension is the loosening of love, and the opening of a symbolically clenched fist. Such release and relaxation represents our acceptance of ourselves with all of our imperfections. We have nothing to apologize for, or to shrink from.
Living in the open air of acceptance and authenticity and having the ongoing willingness to show our true selves to the world keeps loving energy flowing from us, and consequently, to us. But life happens, and fear rises, and we will draw up into ourselves. It’s inevitable that this will happen. We will raise our drawbridge. We will pull back from life like a turtle retreating into his shell. Of course, there are times and places where self-protection is advisable and necessary, but retreat may not always be our best strategy, as it isolates us, and tends to hold us in fear. We will consider methods for appropriate boundary-setting further in the next chapter.
For now, suffice it to say that maintaining an ongoing willingness to be our authentic selves no matter what is the continual work of love preparedness. And catching ourselves when we have retreated in error or for too long, and willingly coming forth into the world authentically again and again, is the continuing journey.
Once our willingness to accept our own vulnerability has been somewhat mastered, then we can willingly accept and appreciate the vulnerability of others. The one follows naturally from the other. We learn compassionate appreciation for ourselves first and then we have compassionate appreciation for others. Having and growing this outpouring compassion is a key tenet of the experience of love in our lives. We have to give it away to keep it.
Appreciation Exercise: Compassion for Others
By learning to look for signs of vulnerability in people’s faces, as this exercise suggests, you will raise your ability to feel and experience compassion. You will need four pictures of regular people of varying ages and races who are not famous or known to you in any way. Google Images is a good source for locating such pictures. You can search “average people,” and find a wide selection to choose from.
Understanding and appreciating that as human beings, we all suffer with spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical aches and pains, insecurities, unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and our share of grief and loss, it becomes easier to have compassion for each other. Not one of us is immune to these things, no matter how shiny and bright our exteriors may appear. And recognizing the vulnerability in all of us makes for a kinder and gentler path through life. This is the way of shared experience and connection. And this is the way of love.