{*Did you know you can write on Elephant? Here’s how—big changes: How to Write & Make Money or at least Be of Benefit on Elephant. ~ Waylon}

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Ask any person about one of the things that they long for and most, if not all, will more than likely note love as one of their top five.

Indeed, regardless of gender, geographic location, age, or socioeconomic status, love is felt by nearly all of us as an overwhelming and irrepressible need, the vibrant sun that warms and embraces our insides, colours our world, and illumines our perceptions.

Love, we could say, is the very breath of life.

Yet, although it is a universal experience that wears many faces, many of us seem to feel that it is finite, and in many cases, in short supply.

We believe that love is limited to our closest connections, be they familial or intimate, that it is something that must be earned, maintained, and that it is caused by someone or something external to us.

However, what if I told you that all of the above beliefs weren’t true? Moreover, what if I were to go so far as to suggest that those same misconceptions are actually preventing us from having a direct, first-hand experience with the very thing most of us yearn for?

Four-and-a-half years ago, when my awakening kicked off, I learned my lesson the hard way. That is, that love is a frequency that is felt within as a sense of wholeness and completion and then extended and projected onto people, situations, and other forms of life. In other words, if we do not feel love within first and foremost, our environment cannot reflect the love we feel we lack back to us in a way that we can appreciate. Rather, our manifested reality will continue to show us, in myriad ways, just how cut-off, separate, and disconnected we feel from the love we think we want and need.

However, if we can come to understand and feel ourselves as a frequency of love, irrespective of whatever has happened in the past to make us believe we are anything less than that, everything we see and touch will become imbued with it, regardless of how events and circumstances present themselves.

One of my favorite quotes about love was spoken by Jalaluddin Rumi. He said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

What did Rumi mean by this, you ask?

Well, I humbly but firmly believe that he was referring to the fact that love is not something that is caused. Rather, it is an effect of something that we are made of. The primary source of love isn’t out there. In order to see it reflected back to us in ways we deem favourable, we must first access that deep wellspring of innate contentment and completion that has never really left us but rather follows us like a light shadow throughout the course of our lives as a backdrop of peace that is essential to our feeling nature and is unperturbed by thoughts, feelings, and experiences, which ebb and flow like the waves of a restless sea.

You can feel it most distinctly when your mind is quiet, when you’re deeply immersed in an activity that makes you feel blissfully alive, or when you’re intensely present and aware of your surroundings, in moments of joy, laughter, and abandon, or when you’re engaged in looking at an exquisite sunset that seems to take your breath away, for instance. In these moments, you are experiencing your own core frequency. That is your direct, first-hand, felt experience with your own true nature. That is identical to the frequency that is love. It helps you to access it, but it does not cause it. Rather, you are the effect, and the beauty, excitement, and peace you perceive outside of you is the cause.

As some of you may have read in my previous articles, my own spiritual awakening took off in a rather unusual way—that is, after having met my Twin Flame (aka a “simultaneous incarnation”) and had soul recognition. This was, by far, the most intense, mystical, and spellbinding connection I’d ever experienced in my life.

For the first several months, I felt exalted. Then, after all of the fear piled up and caused me to beg and chase, and her to feel suffocated and run, I felt shocked, broken on the floor, and in pain. Months and months passed, and to no avail, I couldn’t stop thinking and wondering about her, no matter how hard I tried to work on myself via therapy and distract myself with work, hobbies, and other people.

Slowly but surely, I was gently guided toward the realization that there was something so much deeper and more esoteric going on underneath the surface, and suddenly, the whole meaning, purpose, and direction of my life changed. That is when I stumbled upon a radical realization—that is, the understanding that I had met this person to be ignited and catapulted onto a path of self-realization and unconditional love of self.

Still, I nevertheless recycled in and out of bouts of anger and resentment for the following two years, lamenting over the fact that I was the chosen one—that is, the one who was hand-picked to walk through the fire. I was the one, I thought, who had to go through all of the pain and suffering while she could (seemingly) just move on and forget about me. I was also resentful of the fact that it seemed as though I was the one who had been catalyzed onto an awakening path, tasked with the hard work of transmuting decades of fear and mental distortions that were holding me back and skewing my perception of myself, while she could just get on with her every day and not feel the burden of having to look within and set herself free from her own self-imposed prison.

Indeed, for two-and-a-half years, I sometimes felt victimized by this person, put upon by Source, and ultimately, sorry for myself. I told myself that I wished I’d never met her, that I would have even settled for an extra year in an unhealthy marriage to avoid that fate that befell shortly after she walked into my life.

Not too long ago, however, a spiritual mentor who deeply understood this path I’m walking and had indeed walked through it herself, stepped up to the plate and set me straight. She told me that the subconscious twin (aka “the runner,” in popular terms), although unaware of the connection, feels burdened in their own way too and can only ever reflect, albeit unwittingly, the conscious twin’s (aka “the chasing twin,” which would be myself) deepest unconscious patterns, beliefs, and fears for the purpose of self-awareness and transmutation.

That is when things began to change for the better for me. When I finally and unequivocally accepted and understood this at a profound level, all the twisted, pent-up years of anger and resentment were off-loaded. Suddenly, I felt weightless and free once again. A four-hundred-pound weight had been lifted.

It was then that I realized just how indelibly sacred and powerful I am and that love truly is an inside job. The outer world follows the masculine principle of manifestation and can only ever reflect the feminine, which is the inner world, and the creative and causative principle. This is reflected in all of creation; it is a marriage, and no one more clearly and unmistakably shows you this more than your tonal mate, which is the simultaneous incarnation of the same energetic frequency representing the opposite polarity. We learn who we are through duality.

Truth be told, for the vast majority of my life, I wasn’t living in alignment with my core soul frequency, which of course meant that, as much as I didn’t think so, I wasn’t truly loving myself. Why? Because I was caught up in believing that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of thoughts, memories, perceptions, and opinions, and was looking to the outside world for validation. Because I was identified with and attached to a mercurial and temporal self rooted in all kinds of subjective judgments of right, wrong, good, and bad, I believed I was whatever either myself or others deemed me to be on any given day. I believed that who and what I was, fundamentally, depended upon how well I measured up to the standards of others and this world we live in.

How on earth could anyone, much less my own perfect reflection masquerading as another person, show up in a way that felt right to me when I didn’t truly know myself as a frequency of love?

There is a dialogue in the book, Alice In Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, between Alice and the White Rabbit.

It goes like this:

“Do you love me?” Alice asked.

“No, I don’t love you!” replied the White Rabbit.

Alice frowned and clasped her hands together as she did whenever she felt hurt.

“See?” replied the White Rabbit.

“Now you’re going to start asking yourself what makes you so imperfect and what you did wrong so that I can’t love you at least a little.

You know, that’s why I can’t love you.”

He continues…

“You will not always be loved, Alice. There will be days when others will be tired and bored with life, will have their heads in the clouds, and will hurt you.

Because people are like that, they somehow always end up hurting each other’s feelings, whether through carelessness, misunderstandings, or conflict with themselves.

If you don’t love yourself, at least a little, if you don’t create an armour of self-love around your heart, the feeble annoyances caused by others will become lethal and will destroy you.”

He goes on…

“When I first saw you, I made a deal with myself: I will refrain from loving you until you love yourself.”

Welcome to the Twin Flame experience. This is the lesson we, the so-called “chaser Twin,” learns on it. I sometimes playfully remark how White Rabbit was probably the closest thing to a “runner Twin” for Alice. He was reflecting back to Alice her own deep-seated incapacity to embrace herself. Therefore, he couldn’t embrace her, in turn. That is exactly what had been reflected back to me by this other person.

Even if we do get the love we consciously want to invest in, if we do not have a solid enough foundation of inner love, which means truly knowing ourselves beyond past, and all of our various limited beliefs and perceptions, our subconscious mind will sabotage the connection. If this happens often enough, we will eventually be forced to look within and confront the root of the problem: that is, faulty beliefs that were pressed upon us, whether consciously or unconsciously, by our parents, peers, and society.

If life is creation, we are the artist, and the canvas, colours, and paintbrush are the tools we need to sharpen and purify so that we can craft our masterpiece.

It is our perception of life and who we are that needs to be cleansed the most so that the eyes can perceive a more vast and effervescent landscape. Then, and only then, can we use the tools at our disposal to shape the reality that we want to experience.

In the end, it all comes back to you. You are the one. Yours is the love you first need to experience.

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