Growing up, love for me was about getting attention. I am the oldest of four, so was often asked to be the understanding one – told that I am old enough or the older one and therefore needed to be cooperative, which meant to not get as much attention as the others. This made attention a rare commodity and put its value very high.
Dad’s attention was valued higher than Mum’s, because he was not there that often, whilst she was with us every day, very attentively so. However, looking up to her as a role model and seeing her craving his attention, this became my highest standard of what I called love.
In my teenage years and early twenties this resulted in looking for attention from men and I soon figured that in the society I was growing up in, the easiest way to get men’s attention was through sexual advances and offering them to sleep with me.
So, inevitably love for me became equal to sex. A man having sex with me was a man that loved me – if a man did not want to go there with me, I was distraught and felt totally lost. I met several men that offered me a different form of love, but I could not perceive it as love because my picture looked different and so I avoided them. Obviously, women did not show up in this equation either as attention from men was of higher value, so I did not develop any deeper relationships with women.
In my thirties I came across a man, that whilst not fulfilling my picture on any level, offered me something that today I know is true love. Whilst I had ignored other men offering me their expression of love before, this man could not so easily be dismissed. Why?
For once one could say that I had been through so many relationship dramas and one-night-stand inanition that it became extremely difficult to distract myself away from the growing emptiness I felt inside. The longing for something to ease the inner pain and unrest was growing and the call for something truer became louder and louder on the inside.
But more so the love that was presented to me was so divine and pure that it completely stopped me in my tracks and asked me without any words to raise my standards to a whole other level. This happened without any resolutions or any big interaction other than receiving a healing session from this man, Serge Benhayon, which was preceded by a conversation about my latest failed relationship and some minor physical discomforts. However, this session left such an impression on me that I followed it up with a couple of workshops and started to attend some of the healing courses offered also.
I found that after this exchange I could not return to my old ways and it marked the start of what I now refer to as my path of return to what true love is.
The first step involved a ‘renouncing of men’. Now obviously this was not actually about men but about my idea that men would give me what I was missing inside of me, and particularly to renounce the picture that love equals sex. For the next few years I started to build a loving relationship with myself.
The day came when I opened up again and commenced a relationship with the man that is my husband today, which naturally undid the Pandora’s box and everything that was stashed away in there showed up again. However, this time with a slight difference, as now I was equipped with self-care and a growing sense of self-love, which has been nurtured continuously by the expanding movement of The Way of The Livingness and its community.
And so, I was able to form a relationship that has been founded on love.
It started out with decency, respect and understanding in the way we live and evolve together and is growing in love every day since.
So today my understanding of what love is, is light years away from what it was when I started out as a child and teenager. I would say I always knew what love truly is, however calibrating to my social environment I settled for a standard of love that today I cannot even accept as decency.
For me today, love is a beholding quality that allows no harm to come to another on any level, physically, verbally or energetically. Even the tone of voice or the derogatory thought, deprecating or downgrading another in any way for me is already stepping away from love in its truth and purity.
And this love is but the foundation for all the inner richness that can follow thereafter: it is not reduced to the relationship with my husband by any means but includes my relationship with women, children and other men equally so, and expands to God and everything that is the universe.
