LOVE AND TRUST

​My quest last summer was to discover love and its mysteries. Many great adventures unfolded before me, and indeed I experienced the mystery of love in many different ways.
Following this journey of exploration, I ponder the difference between love and relationship…for they are not one and the same.
Love can be experienced in a single moment. Love does not need words even…I have loved others deeply when sharing profound experiences, and not even known if they speak the same language as me.
In fact I have reached the conclusion that love is there when everything else is gone…all the thoughts, words, boundaries and protections. When we drop the boundaries, love is there. Have you ever been in one of those experiences where you completely let go, like singing or dancing ecstatically? Love is, and is all that is. When we drop our protection and judgments, we see into the other’s deepest heart, Oneness Is, and the experience of that is love.
Yet to build a relationship with another, love is not enough. Love is an important part, a foundation, but it is not enough. Because once you begin a journey with another, you will encounter your closures. Experiences and circumstances will come that close you down…and when closed we can’t feel the love anymore. Love is, but we cannot experience it. Can we trust the other to carry us through our closures, or even open us in them?
Perhaps it is because relationship is linked with co-creating children and at some deep level that comes through even if we have no desire to have children. I can love many people, but there are few I would have children with! I want to trust him to cope in a crisis. I want to trust him to hold me even when I am down. I want to trust him to be honest with me, even when he has done something that he is ashamed of. I want to trust my lover to support himself financially.
To love is to be our very nature. But we do all have wrappings of conditioning that swaddles our natural core of love….no matter HOW much “work” we have done on ourselves! And we need to respect those layers in ourselves and in others, trust that our beloved won’t poke into them harshly, or judge them, but will either open us through them, or to respect and leave them alone.
I have had people in workshops report that the most hurtful experience in a relationship is to share something deep and vulnerable with their lover, and later have the lover hurl that very thing back as abuse in a moment of conflict. This is such a great example of how important trust is. Can I trust you that if I open my deepest core to you, you will never hurl it back to me as an attack? Can you respect me enough as a human to hold that space sacred for me?
Is it worse to open and be let down than not to open at all? I don’t know. But I do know that trust is precious indeed. It takes time, naturally, to build trust. We do not gain trust through blissful moments of delight and love, but through facing challenge together. THEN we find out.
It is a journey of each individual to be willing to drop some of their protection, or their attachment to being “right”, and to meet in a new place?. Then we can move beyond boundaries clashing and back into the space of love. As the saying goes, “would you rather be right or would you rather be love?”
I read a book that says trust is not a fixed quality but changes from person to person, depending on each individual’s principles and boundaries. In a relationship, trust is like a unique painting that the couple paints together. I liked that analogy.
Myself, I realized that love is the foundation of the building that is a relationship, but trust is the glue that holds it all together. Without trust, it all falls down.