Thursday 20 December 2007

Can anyone stop loving someone ?

I actually doubt that there is nothing like someone wants to stop loving anybody. It sounds like they probably want to stop needing or craving somebody.

Love is joyful -- need and craving tend to be painful. In many relationships love and need are mixed up into a complicated soup that makes it hard to tell which way is up.

Love has this timeless, transcendent quality to it, there's no need to get rid of that -- as people say, it can change forms and still be love. If your being-together is over, there's nothing to stop the love from changing into a form appropriate for the current state of your relationship.

But the need or craving is something that you have to deal with in yourself. It can be very painful to be in a situation where you've decided that you need to have someone who is no longer in your life.

Ultimately, these kinds of longings have their root in your own identity. Sometimes we have an unconscious belief about ourselves that we're incomplete somehow -- missing something. It's common to believe that some other person fills in the missing piece and makes us whole. This is a terrible situation to be in if that person is not available -- and even if they are available it makes for an unstable sense of personal identity.

Mostly people resolve these "holes inside" by trying to fill them up with some new distraction: another lover, work, excesses of some kind, etc. Needless to say, a hole in your soul isn't going to be filled like that, although such things can reduce the pain.

The real solution is to recognize that there's a false identity at work: there is no such thing as a human being who isn't already whole and complete. Yet many of us have beliefs about ourselves which are very strong, and those beliefs take some form of "I'm not OK just the way I am". Those beliefs are the source of the hole. They're like weeds that take over and choke off the healthy growth and development of a person.

If you learn how to find those weeds and pull them out by the roots, the hole goes away.

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