Love is an inner experience that arises from centered self-awareness. It brings us peace, joy, and a deepening of perspective, compassion, and giving.

In our culture, we do not learn how to access this inner experience of love, and many people do not even know it exists. Without this inner connection, people suffer a subconscious sense of self-doubt, fear, purposelessness, and unworthiness.

In lieu of feeling love, we try to feel loved. The problem with this is two-fold...

Firstly, our desire to feel loved involves a personalized perception of what it means to be loved… or what being loved looks like. Thus, we accidentally become controlling because we need others to act out certain behaviors for us to perceive that we are loved. This form of control is a source of stress and joylessness in any relationship.

Secondly, the comfort we experience when others do fulfill our emotional needs, doesn’t really lead us to understanding how to access the connection to love within ourselves, so we continue to experience the stress of subconscious self-doubt, fear, purposelessness, and unworthiness cropping up in different forms. Thus, our pursuit of being loved does not lead us to real peace, joy, and inner freedom. And as a result, our relationships with others also do not reflect real peace, joyful communication, and liberated happiness.

Inner disconnection leads to forcefulness. The inner experience of love allows us a deep inner peace. This inner calm provides emotional quietude, which is necessary for our inherent energetic sensitivity to bloom. Energetic sensitivity allows us to relate with others in a flow of communication that takes place without force. This dance of forceless, intimately-engaged communication naturally precipitates a sense of perfection, joy, and freedom for all who participate in the dance.

When people do not know how to connect to the divine love within their core, they are unaware of how to access the area of their mind wherein they can experience deep, objective clarity, and a sense of perfection and divine joy. This absence of connection in the core is what precipitates subtle emotions of self-doubt, fear, purposelessness, and unworthiness.

These emotions are so subtle that they are not recognized; but their influence is experienced as a general perception of lack or imperfection that molds itself around various circumstances. Without realizing it, people transfer this inner feeling of lack to an interpretation of what about their situation is imperfect and needing to be fixed. They then do whatever they believe is appropriate to solve the imperfection they conceive and believe.

But in this state of mind, they are not recognizing the dance of energy that allows everything to communicate and relate harmoniously. They are driven to solve the lack they see outside in an effort to resolve the lack of connection they are feeling within. Their feeling sensitivity is clouded with how they feel emotionally, and thus they are not clear enough to sense their environment energetically. Their emotional drive and reduced sensitivity yields forced and forceful action. As a result, what they do generates stress and distrust.

Relationships are wonderful arenas for experiencing and learning the full range of what is possible in communication. Where there is stress in a relationship, it can be quite difficult to unravel the tension, and find resolution and a genuinely fresh start again. But if each individual can understand his or her own relationship to love inside, and thus grow toward taking responsibility for his or her own joy or discontent, then challenges within the relationship can be simplified from indirect struggles for power and validation to simple miscommunications, misunderstandings, or mistakes that can be discussed without tactics of attack and defense. Deeper, clearer, and more peaceful communication promotes relationships of deeper mutual understanding, warmth, intimacy, freedom, and happiness.