Sandy's February Editorial: Love

Hello Everyone,

I want to wish you all peace and happiness and above all, UNCONDITIONAL LOVE as we move deeper into this 2019 transitional year.  I especially want to wish you a happy Valentine's Day.   

Most people are unaware that Valentine's Day is a very old holiday, originating in the year 496. Wikpedia suggests that  the tradition was probably taken from the Roman festival Lupercalia that officially marked the start of their springtime.  St. Valentine himself was beheaded by the Roman Emperor Claudius II, supposedly for marrying Christian couples.  The histories are cloudy; no one is sure if St. Valentine was a simple temple priest, or the Bishop of Terni.  But when you put these histories together, it's easy to see that Valentine's day is symbolic of births and new beginnings of all kinds, most especially relationships, as well as the sacrifices we make for love and the unconditional expression of love.  Right from the beginning it heralded both unity and separation, peace and violence and the harsh affects negative outside interference can have on any loving relationship.  Love shouldn't have room for negativity, or for listening to nay-sayers who are not part of it.

When I decided to write about the expression of love, and Valentine's Day, for this newsletter my heart did a twist.  My parents, who were married nearly 60 years at the time of my mother's death, were married in February 1945 just after Valentine's Day, and just after WWII ended.  At that time there was a great deal of prejudice among Christian denominations, and so my Mother, a Lutheran, had to marry my father, a Catholic, in the vestibule of the Catholic church as she was not allowed inside.  She had to sign papers swearing to raise her children Catholic. 

Always a rebel, my mom chose instead to raise my sister and I Methodist as there was no Lutheran church in our town and she swore to not raise her children in Catholicism because of the way she was treated.  That one act on her part set my feet on the life-long pursuit of philosophical truth.  It turned my sister into a life-long rebel, like my mom.  It set the stage for a life-long struggle between my parents.  Though they loved one another completely and totally, and both defended and supported one another, never a day went by that their philosophical differences and attitudes didn't come between them.  Their marriage became a marriage of strife, judgement, withholding, and non-stop emotional wounds.  Outside influence from family and friends and life experiences ripped them apart. But through it all they never stopped loving one another and that was evident to all who knew them.  

It occurred to me that my parents, married as close to Valentine's day as they could reserve a date, had a marriage that perfectly characterized the holiday.

Is your Valentine someone you'd go through Hell to support and care for, in spite of your philosophical differences or your differing heritages, religions, life experiences, desires and needs?  Can you love one another so unconditionally that you remain a team through all the ups and downs that life throws at you?  That, my friends, is what true love is all about.

I came across this article I wrote in 2009 that expresses my feelings about love, especially unconditional love so well that I wanted to share it with you:

     An Energetic Perspective on Love and Relationships

 "The subject of love has attracted countless tombs of literature over the ages, and unquestionably will continue to receive more attention than just about any other topic one can imagine far into the distant future.  Why?

What is it about love, and about establishing loving relationships that keeps us struggling, scheming, planning, speculating, transforming, reaching and growing beyond ourselves in the hope of attaining it?  Why are most of us continuously searching for this ambiguous and indefinable thing we call love?

The answer is simple.  Love is about an exchange of energy.  Energy is the commodity of exchange in the world of spirit.  Energy makes us feel good. 

The ancient Greeks had many different names for love.  They gave a special name for the love between a man and a woman, and another for the love between a mother and child, still another for that which exists between a father and child or between two friends, two partners of the same sex, and so on.  But no matter how many forms of love we can identify, and give a name to, they all boil down to the same thing at their core.  Love is about the open exchange of energy. 

What we love we give our unreserved attention to.  Where we put our attention is where we put our energy.  So when we love someone or something, we give that thing or person our energy.  We are giving a piece of ourselves.  We give a piece of our soul, in other words.  When we give our attention totally and unreservedly to someone, they feel loved and cared for.  Especially if we give our attention to them with no expectation of anything in return, they remain open to feeling our love.

When we have expectations, we cause the person receiving our love to receive conditionally – with suspicion.  When that happens we feel rejected. It is that conditional giving of self, and the reactive conditional receiving of love, that is responsible for all of the unrequited love stories in the world.

All beings have a need to express love – i.e. – a need to give their attention/energy to someone or something unreservedly, and to feel that love completely received.  Likewise all beings also have a need for the circuit of energy to be completed.  That is, we all have a need to receive total, unconditional love from someone as well.  When the cycle of unconditional love between one person and another is complete in this way, there is a sense of wholeness and completeness that is incomparable to any other feeling in the universe.  The best description of that relationship is the old adage, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”.  It is what we all yearn for.

The problem is, the person we give our love to, even unconditionally, is not always capable of returning that love to us.  When our love is not returned by the person we want it from we feel rejected.  In our rejection we shut down, and when we shut down we shut off the universal flow of energy that is meant to flow through us continuously and unconditionally as the universe itself expresses it’s (God’s) love for us.  That is the beginning of all negativity in the world, from feelings of rejection to unworthiness, to fear and finally anger.

If the person whom you love cannot return those feelings in kind, do not shut down energetically.  As long as you remain open to possibility, you will find that the universe sends you that person who can in turn extend unconditional love to you.  You see, that is a universal law.  The circuit of energy MUST complete itself."   

May you enjoy the perfection of unconditional love in your life this Valentine's Day!  

Love and Light,

Sandy Anastasi