by Stephen Lau
Zen is The Way: So, stop looking for love!
To many, failed relationships are painful. In our contemporary society, divorces are commonplace.
Why is a good love relationship so difficult to come by? Or why do so many good love relationships ultimately fail?
Zen promotes healthy love relationships. A Zen love relationship is simple: Love without expectations.
Love is a gift, but you must be ready to receive it. Surprisingly, many people are just not ready. They come to love with great expectations, and when these expectations fail, love turns into pain.
But real love does not hurt, because real love is not a feeling; instead, it is a way of being. Real love is neither conditional nor dependent on someone or something else. Real love is simply an act, a deed.
Zen love relationship is simple: Feel good about yourself for who and what you are. Love means never having to use another person to make you feel better or fulfilled.
Real love is built of deeds. You do not feel love: you “do” love. When you “do” love, you are loving, and you are being loved when loving others. Love is made up of loving deeds, not feelings. Love, dependent on feelings, is infatuation, not real love. Real love is without expectations, and therefore it never hurts.
This is a common scenario of how a love relationship may end.
You want love, but you may be afraid to receive it. This is often the irony in a love relationship.
The problem (in Zen wisdom, there is nothing in life that becomes a problem; anything becomes a problem only when we try to create a solution to solve the problem that never existed in the first place) is that you are looking for a “perfect” love relationship, or the “right” person to make you “happy” about yourself.
In your subconscious mind, that “perfect” love relationship or the “right” person can make you “happy” because deep in your mind a “good” love relationship is supposed to make you “feel good” about yourself. In other words, you are using that “right” person to reinforce your self-image, thereby unwittingly creating the “fear” in your subconscious mind, because your “well-being” then becomes too dependent on that “right” person, so to speak.
When that “right” person does turn up in your life, you may feel inadequate, undeserving, or simply incomplete. Subconsciously, you feel the relationship may not last, and you may consciously or subconsciously “anticipate” the inevitable rejection that you think will inevitably happen one day. Then you start picking fights and testing the other person constantly (in fits of anger and jealousy), even though deep down you may want that love relationship to last. Ironically, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is how a love relationship may turn sour and end unhappily.
A Zen love relationship is simple: You are the “perfect” person just as you are, and so is your partner.
If you cannot love yourself completely, you cannot love another person. It is just that simple. If you cannot accept something unpleasant or incomplete in yourself, you cannot accept something else that you think is unpleasant and incomplete in another person. If you reject that person, you are in fact rejecting a part of yourself that you do not like.
In a love relationship, you often begin to “mask” what you do not like about yourself, hiding from that “right” person. You are afraid of giving yourself frankly and opening yourself completely, and accepting yourself just as you really are. If you don’t take off that “mask” of yours, you will only make any love relationship difficult to last.
Zen love relationship is simple: Accept what is good and bad in a love relationship; you cannot take just the good and discard the bad. A love relationship is there to tell you what you need, not what you want.
50 Secrets of Blissful Relationships: Get the best relationship advice from an expert. Use proven tips to reconnect and improve your relationship. Find out how to cope with a partner who has depression . . . how to avoid the top 21 marriage mistakes . . . how to tackle marriage issues smoothly and successfully. This is a complete manual on how to have a blissful love relationship.
Also, visit my blog: Healthy Relationships.
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
The content of this page cannot be reproduced in any form without the writer’s permission.
