When Love is no longer Blind
I can say so much about love. Love makes life worth living. Love softens and grounds our being. Love celebrates with all there is. Love is the essence of all religion and spirituality.
Love is the flowering of wisdom. Love is wisdom in action.
It is also so easy to be confused about love, to mistake love with pity, to mistake love with enabling of hurtful or unhealthy behaviours of others, to mistake love with blind tolerance.
Some of the biggest harm is done with good intensions. When our love is blind, we might have good intentions, yet the way we express our love might not work for the other person and can, in fact, harm them.
In such moments, do you protest because you know you had good intentions or do you take a moment to reflect and learn, to deepen not only in your feeling of love, but also in love’s skillful expression?
Love is perhaps the greatest teacher, if only we submit to its fierce guidance. The learnings of Love can be at once shocking and soothing, at once destabilizing and renewing, that we might lose more than we have bargained for in our sweet struggle with love. Love reveals what cannot be lost.
When our love is blind, we get blind compassion.
When we are in the grips of blind compassion, we cut people too much slack in moments where a healthy, assertive “no” might be called for. We might hold in our truth thinking that we don’t want to hurt them while the real reason for such self-repression could be that we are scared of conflict or of what they might do if they knew what we really thought or felt.
Kindly and patiently investigating the hidden agendas in our compassion can reveal the deep pain they arise from. This is a pain we must explore and emerge from if we are to truly live and love with both passion and grace.
Love is a virtue, but not when it is blind! Blind love tends to damage more than it soothes, tends to harm more than it heals. The deepening of love is wisdom.
When love and wisdom work together, our awareness carries a sharply alert and attentive yet also warm and relational quality. This is the domain of true liberated action even when all we do in a moment is being there - awake, present, and loving.