(Originally posted 28th April, 2004)
Love is a funny word in the English language. Over the years, it’s been used and abused and people using it in the wrong context has hugely diluted its meaning. These days, people talk about loving someone, loving sport, loving a good book (or sometimes even things like a good fight). Basically, what they call love is the good feelings that something fosters within them.
To the Hawaiians, love is far more specific concept, that they sum up with one word: Aloha. Most people thing that Aloha is just a greeting people use in Hawaii, but it’s much more than that. It’s a concept of complete acceptance and the sharing of joy with someone or something.
If you accept someone without judging them at all, then you find that you naturally drop into a state of joy. Sure, there might be things about that person or thing that could normally tick you off, but if you understand that those things are just where that they are at right now, you don’t tend to get bent out of shape.
This acceptance brings about a deep connection with the other person. The more you appreciate the good things in them, the more you will appreciate having them around. On the other hand, if you constantly criticise them, or worry what they think about you, then you focus on the negative aspects and you withdraw from them, decreasing your connection with them. In a relationship, this can be so poisonous that it causes the relationship to collapse.
Unfortunately, this sort of acceptance isn’t something that’s taught much anymore. Instead, people seem to focus on the negative aspects of other people, probably as part of a subconscious defence mechanism. This means that very few of our relationships have any real depth to them.
As fear goes away in a relationship, people tend to open up more to one another, an sharing things that they wouldn’t normally trust other people with. If the people involved truly accept one another, this can be a truly liberating thing, as old pain can be brought out into the open and released, bringing everyone involved even closer together still.
Totally accepting where someone or something is at right doesn’t mean that things have to stay the way they are though. Not everything is in a perfect condition – you only really have to watch the news to realise that. But before you can change something for the better, you have to acknowledge the place where that thing is now, so that you can determine the best course of action to take. Trying to pretend that something is different from the way it really is only causes confusion and pain, because you resist the truth.
It’s the same with people and relationships. If you want to improve your relationship with someone, you have to accept the condition of the relationship as it is now. Once you do that, ways to actually improve the relationship will normally become obvious. If you then start taking action on those things, you’re reinforcing the good in it, which increases your sense of connection and things will get better and your feelings of love will increase by themselves.
Criticism in itself can be a destructive thing. Because criticising something decreases your connection with it, it also closes down your own mind to the good that is in it. What happens on the subconscious level is that you start to tense up whenever you encounter something like that, which your mind starts to think of as pain. People naturally pull away from painful situations, so you immediately start to focus on the negative and you just head into an ever-tightening death spiral.
If, on the other hand, you look for the good in something, your mind connects that thing with pleasure and will relax and start to generate all the good chemicals that it needs to create sense of wellbeing.
This is important to realise, because your subconscious mind doesn’t realise the difference between criticising yourself and criticising someone or something else. It just takes everything personally. The more time you spend looking for the negative in things, the more depressed and upset you will become, quite often for no apparent reason. On the other hand, if you praise something, your body takes that personally as well and beings to relax and feel better.
All of this is true for our relationships with ourselves as well. The more we criticise ourselves, the more depressed we will come. This can be a real problem because there’s no way to get away from yourself, which means the source of pain is going to be with you 24/7. But if you can start to accept where you are at now and look for the positives in your current situation, then life will start to get much better, all by itself.