You say love is within, but how do we touch that love?

What you are looking for waits exactly where you keep leaving.

Leaving where?

Leaving yourself.

Then how do I come back?

The path of truth leads you there.
The return home is a movement in love.
To come home to yourself is to remove
the distance between you and love.

You thought love was somewhere else.
In someone else. Given by someone else.
But the moment you stop abandoning yourself
to get it you are already standing in it.

When you come back to yourself, something
extraordinary happens. You stop demanding
completion, negotiating for worth, asking
others to confirm your existence The fight
relaxes. And what is felt in the absence
of that fight? Warmth, openness, relief,
softness. We call that love. Love is not
created. It is revealed when the inner exile
ends, when you live in truth.

Can you explain how love and truth are related?

What happens when we are not true?
The moment we move against what we know is true for us,
a spilt appears. There is the one we truly are, and there
is the mask - the version of us that performs in order
to be accepted. From that split comes fragmentation.
From fragmentation comes inner war.
War and love cannot coexist.

The mask believes that if it tries harder, if it
becomes nicer, more polished, more impressive, more
agreeable it will find love in the outside world.
Yet, love cannot land, it hits the mask and falls
on the ground, not because love is missing,
but because we are missing.

Every lie, especially the ones we tell ourselves,
creates a mask, a role, a defensive posture.
But love cannot pass through walls, because in its
clean form love requires exposure. Yet the fragmented
self believes it must hide in order to survive.
And so the very strategy meant to secure love
becomes a thing that prevents it.

Love also requires freedom. But a fragmented self
feels incomplete, and incompleteness turns freedom
into a threat. Instead of allowing, it begins to secure.
The divided self tries to control, manipulate and cling.
And in that grasping, the natural flow of love, within
us and between us, is slowly blocked.

The moment you drop the performance, the people-pleasing,
the hiding and seeking - the moment you stop rejecting
and judging yourself and allow what is within you to shine -
you touch wholeness. The inner war between what is right
and what is real comes to an end.

Truth integrates you. Integration creates wholeness.
Wholeness allows love to flow without distortion.

Remember as long as you seek acceptance from others,
you are organizing your life around avoiding rejection.
And the moment you do that, you divide yourself.
Love cannot enter a divided house. So go within.
Notice the urge to be approved of. That urge is the wall.
Truth is what brings down the wall. And love is what remains
when the one trying to be accepted disappears.

freedom.from.the.madness
Art:the forgetting of passions - jean-delville