What Really Is Love? Part One

I’m going to give voice to my inner Lover archetype for this and the next post. We had an internal, “active imagination” dialogue while I was driving from Denver to Colorado Springs last night around the topic of Love.

I mean, really, who am I to speak of love? Apart from spiritual, unconditional love, which I do have abundantly from many decades of spiritual practice and positive relations generally, this is a topic that most would see in the context of romance, marriage and family, and I consider myself “post” relational, except nowadays for deep Friendship with my dog and cats, family, and close friends. I “did relationships…” but I have relinquished that pursuit for over 13 years—as I mentioned in the last post I have a Shadow Lover facet of Self going on…

Anyway then, Part One (this week) as an expression from my Inner Lover to the page is a Better Endings story that She/I like a whole lot and have never forgotten. Part Two (stay tuned!) will be an open expression from my Lover persona archetype about ‘What Really Is Love?’ that we will subtitle: ‘If I could live but only in the Moment.’

A Better Endings Story about ‘What Really Is Love?”:

One of the best love stories I have ever encountered was in a late night movie I happened to catch some 30 years ago on TV. It was titled “The Man Eating Tiger” (or something close to that). It was about a mercenary sharp shooter during WWII who was hired by an African village to track down and kill a Bengal tiger that was terrorizing the community and had already killed many residents. Now as the story goes, there was also a female nurse serving the village who just happened to be a woman the mercenary had been in love with before his best friend and war buddy had married her instead. She was the person who had recommended him for the job of taking down the man-eating tiger. As a plot twist, this nurse’s husband had gone Missing in Action from the WWII  front lines as an Army infantry soldier, and it had been months already since anyone had heard of his whereabouts so that he was considered to have likely been killed.

Now then, the plot thickens as the Mercenary is once again stricken with feelings of love for the nurse, his missing best friend’s wife that he now sees daily but only for so long as he will stay at the African village to complete his mission and take down the Tiger.  He becomes deeply conflicted—as does she but less so—about whether to act on his feelings in his friend’s absence (and probable death). Should he proclaim his love?

The scene I like so much and that I will never forget from this story involves an evening walk that the Mercenary takes with an Indian woman he has befriended, also a nurse in the village. He is able to open up with this wise Indian woman about his deep feelings of love he has for the Nurse and how conflicted he feels about being in the village without being able to declare his true feelings. He WANTS her; he sees the condition of her missing husband as an opportunity to have what he most desperately wants in his life: Her.

But the Indian friend speaks to the Mercenary about the true meaning of Love.  She tells him she has observed Americans and other Europeans to have gotten the reality of love all mixed up and topsy-turvy. She points out that to Europeans, what they—including the Mercenary—think of or speak of as love is much too often little more than possessiveness. They pursue one another by wanting to possess the love “object.” That is wrong. Instead, if they truly were meant for one another, if they truly held genuine and authentic love for one another, they would want ONLY that which would be the very BEST for their beloved. They would be willing and happy in fact to LET GO, to detach from any relationship less than fully conducive to the total freedom and happiness of their beloved.

images are from pixabay.com

Maybe I shouldn’t tell you the rest of the story as it was portrayed in the movie. I will tell you that the husband does come back and that in the jungle whilst the Mercenary is about to catch up with the Tiger, his MIA friend shows up (not yet having arrived at the village to present himself to his wife) and the Man Eating Tiger is about to pounce on him! What do you believe the Mercenary will do? Will he shoot the Tiger and save his rival friend? Has he yet learned what Really Is Love?

Can you relate to this story metaphorically?

I welcome your Comments and Stories!

Giving ‘UP’ — The Way of Surrender!

 

A Month of the Best of Better Endings, ‘First Principles’Day 7:

Giving UP! — The Way of Surrender

Never Give Up, but you can always give UP—or, surrender—to attain Better Endings. Giving UP means, to me, releasing a problem or an attitude to a Higher Force and Higher Awareness, however you choose to define that. “I give UP!” releases my attachment to a situation or to a specific outcome. Then, what is truly needed or appropriate is free to manifest.

Surrender. What a concept this is, riddled with a dual character. A warrior might regard surrender as a failure of mission, although it allows for them to survive to another day. I imagine the Wicked Witch of the West on her broomstick, spelling out “Surrender Dorothy!” in the sky over Munchkinland. “Never!,” we think. At the same time, though, surrender is a path to freedom from attachment; letting go, or letting God. Surrender your fears and anxiety; be willing to “Take the Journey!” Here’s the double entendre: what if the witch’s message was actually a positive invitation to Dorothy, a wake-up call in the form of a waking dream?

When we hold tightly to a fixed position, attitude, belief or desire, we might be limiting our flow of creative potential and insight. Release your grip just ever so much to be open to the Way. I had a Quaker friend who used to tell me, whenever there was any confusion about what next step to take, “Way will Out!”

So, Give UP; surrender to your higher awareness; Way will Out!

• Posted in First Principles
• Tagged Better Endings, Dorothy, letting go, Manifesting, mission, no more fear, releasing,self-growth, surrender, Take the Journey, Wizard of OZ

The Secret of Life In My Opinion, by MoodyMandi (Guest Re-Blog)

I’ve had an epiphany! The Secret to Life is NOT having it all, the money, fame, 1,000 “friends” on Facebook, designer jeans, an Audi/BMW, PhD or what not. However if you do have any of those that’s okay. It’s been used a billion times, but the secret to life involves the following:

• First and foremost learning to love yourself and your fellow man and God, or your higher power…FORGIVENESS!

• Once you’ve gotten better at loving yourself for who you are, and you can forgive others who have wronged you in any way whether betraying you or hurting you in some way, you will really begin to see RESULTS. Whether you are trying to lose weight, get a degree, or reach the ultimate state of self-actualization, you can if you can LET GO.

• Letting go is like the hardest thing a person can do on the planet, In My Opinion.

• If you can get past all of the drama, the person who stole your man in high school, the class you didn’t pass, the money you lost out on, the big numbers on the scale that won’t seem to ever go away…you will thrive, my friends

One might ask, How do you Let Go?

I will reply with this…it takes multiple efforts. Praying to God or your higher power, or finding a higher power, is necessary to be centered *Once again in my opinion* It takes eliminating negative influences in your life and on your mind like music that supports pain and bad moods, places that get you down, and people that put you down. It involves putting positive images into your mind and positive words and affirmations. The world actually sucks the positivity right out of us, and pulls the happy rug out from under us as well! So doing daily meditations, even if for a minute now and then throughout the day can help a lot. If you see you’ve gained a few pounds on the scale, know that this is only temporary, and that once you let go of the EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE that you’ve carried around for so long, the weight will drop, and with the forgiveness will come an interview/promotion. This is by no means an easy feat. It can be done.

I let go of everything that ever bothered me in any negative way a while back and lost a bunch of weight, but I stopped putting in positive things in my mind, and exercising to release Serotonin and feel better about myself. I am currently not practicing what I have just preached, but in the moment I am striving to get there again.
My hopes and prayers are that we can all learn to let go of what is standing in our way…because IN REALITY it’s all “in me/you”. We were born equipped with what we needed to survive and THRIVE!

You have to TRULY RECOGNIZE AND REALIZE that your feelings of negativity are just hindering you from what you are called to do, your purpose in life! I suppose you could look at it this in a cognitive-behavioral type way: Your negative thinking producing negative sad/angry emotion maybe resentment etc..which leads to your ultimate destiny in how you react to the matter at hand. The way you react has consequences which begin the cycle over again. So taking the initiative to make a stand TODAY could turn your life around so your dreams can be realized!

God bless us all tonight! xoxoxby

Mandi is the author of Caged No More. Her Bio can be found by clicking on: moodymandi . The heading of Mandi’s original Caged No More post is as follows:

December 22, 2013 ·  · in Bipolar, Bulimia, Hope,Life, lifestyle, Personal Journey, positive, Rant, self-help, Soul Searching.

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