At any moment, on any day of your life, love is flowing through you like a river. It’s as automatic as breathing, and just like you may sometimes hold your breath without realizing it, it’s likely you hold back that flow of love without knowing you’re doing it.
Most of us are probably so accustomed to judging everything and everyone we come across, it doesn’t register in our conscious attention. How often do you leave home and go out into the world without judging something you encounter? This is likely to be an unknown experience for lots of us.
Here’s what happens when you decide to give your inner judge a rest for a day.
You’re likely to discover that you’re in love with everything you come across.
This is the way you, like every other human, were born. We’re in love with everything until we decide a person, or a situation, or a circumstance is something other than it’s supposed to be. Which is to say, something other than what we’ve judged it to be or want it to be.
At the moment judgment comes into play, without meaning to, you fall out of love with the world. Being in love with the world may sound like an impossibly difficult task. It’s not. It’s the way you were made to be, and still are right now, except when you’re resisting life.
Once you’ve judged something or someone, resistance temporarily cuts you off from being able to feel the flow of that river of love. Strangely, when we do this, what we’re resisting is the love that animates us as living beings. In other words, you’re resisting “your own” flow of love.” (It’s not really yours, it’s the love that animates all of us, flowing through you.)
Many of us live in this “cut-off from love” feeling. And it’s easy to believe the bad feeling we experience comes from the outside world. It doesn’t; it comes from feeling resistant to what the world presents to us.
If you judge something without first seeing what’s really there, your judgment can’t possibly be meaningful or valid because you haven’t really seen what’s there.
When you’re not judging, there’s nothing to resist. Think about the last time (or any time) you were completely engaged with people, or with a task, and when I say completely engaged, I mean with no resistance and judgment clouding your experience. What I’ve just described is the experience of happiness. When we’re not resisting and judging life, we call that experience happiness.
The simplicity of that definition, that happiness equals the absence of resistance, can seem bewildering at first. How can happiness be that simple? It’s a beautiful example of how easily we can miss the truth when it is presented to us in its simplest, most unvarnished form.
When you lose something, say your keys, where do you start looking for them? Probably in the place that seems most logical. But how often do you find those keys in what strikes you as the most impossibly illogical place imaginable? In other words, you were able to find your keys only when you “widened your aperture” and were able to take in a broader range of information.
This is how truth hides in plain sight: we don’t see it where we don’t expect to see it.
The absence of judgment and resistance has the effect of “widening your aperture.” When that happens you discover the flow of love that had been temporarily, unknowingly cut off by judgment and resistance, is as strong and steady as it ever was.
Withholding the love you’re made of will always feel worse than letting that love flow like a river, which brings up two questions: Would you like to feel better? Or would you like to feel worse?
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