Understanding Love

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Tuesday, 25 July 2023

Written by Alberto Villoldo PhD

“To an Earthkeeper, love is not a feeling or something your barter with. Love is the essence of who you are, and it radiates from you as a brilliant aura: You become love, practice fearlessness, and attain enlightenment.” -Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D

Love is not only a feeling. The sages believed that love is the singular force in the universe, that all of creation arises from love, and that every beautiful thing you create in your life comes from love.

Love is a force that you cannot escape, like gravity. It is ubiquitous, yet invisible. It exerts an irresistible pull on us, leading us to acts of courage and foolishness beyond our wildest imagining. But unlike gravity, which you cannot do anything about—you cannot easily levitate, for example—love is the force that you use to co-create with the Primordial Light. When you discover this, you can go about dreaming a new world into being.

For the shamans we work with at The Four Winds, love is not a feeling, although most of us experience it as such. It is a force. It’s what the flower feels for the morning dew, the jaguar for the deer it hunts to feed her cubs. It is the rainbow after a rain. Love is the force that can help us elicit the truth amid the lies.

And above all, love is the power of the Primordial Light, which is cognizant, intelligent, wise. We can interact with the Primordial Light, what we call Spirit, and it responds to us. This is the contract that the Laika has with Spirit. You call, and Spirit responds to you every single time.

Transforming the daydream of love, that is unconditional, requires you to discover fearlessness. You become fearless by taking three actions:

Give up the fantasy of finding your perfect soul mate.
Love who you are, even with that nasty streak.
Give up the idea of a god who loves you only when you do “what’s right.”

How do we recognize when we are living under the spell of a daydream? Daydreams always contain a contract or agreement that we make with life that goes like this: “When…., then…”

When I find my true love (or my true calling, or the perfect house, or job. . .) then I will be happy (or successful, or fulfilled, or—you name it). But life does not like these bargains. We begin to wake up from the daydream when we turn the “when…., then” agreement around: When I love who I am, then others love me.

When we break the habit of searching for our soul mate, we start to end the dream of unconditional love. The next action we must take is to love who we are and here’s how: Be fearless as you look at yourself. You are what you are. Take a deep breath and accept that for better and for worse, you are you. No one else is going to give you this kind of approval without extracting a sky-high price.

Embracing all of yourself is the true path to unconditional love for all those around you. Your parents, partner, children, friends, extended family, and co-workers. All are imperfect, the same as you.

What parts of yourself will you Love today?

In Munay

Alberto Villoldo PhD

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Alberto Villoldo PhD is a medical anthropologist who has spent the last 30 years investigating the healing practices of the shamans of the Amazon and the Andes. He is the founder and director of the Four Winds Society, and author of Shaman, Healer, Sage, Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval, The Four Insights and Yoga, Power and Spirit. Alberto is founder of the world-renowned Four Winds Society and of the Light Body School. In his teachings and writings, he shares the experience of infinity and its ability to heal and transform us, to free us from the temporal chains that keep us fettered to illness, old age and disease.