Stop Searching for Love—Remove Inner Obstacles to Find It

More than anything else, we want to love and be loved.

But let's pair this with what Rumi, the Sufi poet, tells us:

Seek not for love. Seek instead to remove the obstacles within you to your love.

So when we put these two together, we redirect our attention from grasping out there for that which we think will bring us love, whether that's the next partner, or money, or success, or whatever it is that we're grasping at to get the love that we so dearly want. Instead, we turn inward and say, what are my obstacles to love?

I think when we do that, we'll find a couple of kinds of obstacles. The first is just delusion. We're confused. We don't actually know what love is. There's so many screwed up definitions of love and screwed up approaches to love. We're very confused about what love is, what it looks like, how to recognize it. So we're confused.

A lot of our obstacles to love, though, are in our unconscious. They got lodged there when we were very, very young, sometimes before we were even verbal. And they keep us from giving and receiving love years and even decades later.

So together, these two passages — more than anything else, we want to love and be loved and seek to remove the obstacles to love — direct us inward where the search actually belongs. Inward to our cognitive processing, but also inward to our subconscious, inward to our bodies, so that we can locate and then move out of the way those things that impede the flow of love back and forth, our love outward and the love that is coming toward us.

And I'll close with this. If in fact, more than anything else, this is what we want, why would we not make this a priority, this inner work?

Well, let's make it a priority. This is where the action is. Remove the obstacles, conscious and unconscious, to giving and receiving love. That's our task, or so it seems to me in this moment.

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