Sacred Love - Be the Love You Dream

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they needed your approval. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again. There is no greater existence than the life that gives more than it takes.

If you are in love it will show. In your eyes, your face, the way you walk, the way you sit, everything will show it, because you are not the same person. You have been touched. The desiring mind is not there. And here is a big problem.

If you are only happy when you find a lover to fall in love with, your life and relationship will be a mess. Before you fell in love there was not the same experience, so basically you were walking around incomplete without a lover. It's like that song "You're nobody till somebody loves you", in reality, that headspace causes all our suffering .

It should read, "You're somebody, whether anybody loves you". If you are one person before you fall in love, and then you are somebody else after you fall in love, there is dependency on this great experience, and that is the beginning of relationship problems. This is the first or second level of love, where there is significant confusion between love, need, rescue and an anti-depressant.

There are four substitutes for love. They are sex, food, religion and material greed. Many people can't discern the difference between love and substitutes. They feel in love because of great sex, or because their lover has lots of wealth. This is because the same chemicals that are produced in the body when love is there, are produced when we experience hope. So chemically, love hormones are secreted when we experience other forms of happiness, such as infatuation, but hope is also a powerful aphrodisiac.

This is the motive that attracts people together in the first, second and third levels of love. Their hormones are racing; they can't tell if it is love, infatuation or hope. The chemistry of their body changes and they feel every experience of "In LOVE". But they are not in love. They are in solution. Solution to a problem is a substitute for love. This substitution is unsustainable. The attachment to their lover is highly emotional, highly conditional, it's the relationship made in hell, because there is a heightened hope that love is there, but it is not really love, and it fails. They were just not ready to be in love, because they were not in love before they met their lover.

To really be in love, we must learn to be in love without a partner, as well as with a partner. We must become "in love" without someone to love. It is a loving attitude to life, to trees and children and sunsets alone; in love with a movie, and in love with our parents. To be ready to fall in love, we must be in love with our past and our future.

When you are really in love with something in your life, you are ambivalent to it. In other words you are not attracted to it, or repelled by it. You are not afraid of it or avoiding it. That person or circumstance is a part of you. They are you. You are they, they are the mirror and you can see yourself there. In this love, there is thankfulness. You can thank someone, you are no longer trying to do the opposite to them; you are them. You can be in love with anyone if you choose. Of course, that is not to say you need a relationship with them. Love is a way of being in the world without reaction to it.

There are many single people who learn to love everyone in order to keep themselves at peace, safe. And this is healthy, but contentment is not a place to stay, it is only a place that you might become happy without a lover. That is fine if you want your ego to be strong and powerful in the world. Just stay single so there is no person who can confront your "giant within" - but this is not love. That state of contentment is a war on love. This is not what I am suggesting. Because if the ego is in control, then your contentment is something you'll try to protect in your relationship, there will be no experience of a life with love, only sexual moments of it. If your ego wants contentment, it is asking to flatten the spirit of your lover, it will search the world for someone who is "trustworthy", but what it is really asking for is "non-disturbance", authority. Eventually, that relationship will deteriorate, then you will be controlling, possessive, jealous, fearful, unable to trust, judgmental, self righteous, blaming. And frankly, what level of celebration of love is that going to promote? You will lose that chemistry of falling in love and gain the acidity of resentment.

This tension will usually kill love before it begins. Remember, nobody can do to you more than you do to yourself so, if you are not sitting on a beach, painting a picture, or doing your work at the office with love; if you are unhappy before you meet someone, or addicted to the substitutes, then your love will have all the chemical experiences you want, but none of the sustainable spiritual experiences you need. If you are not in love with life before you meet your lover, then it's a bit weird to expect that you will be able to fix all your emotional problems by falling in love. You'll only find someone to relieve the pain. And nothing is going to do that for long.

Many people I have worked with blame their relationship for everything. But when you look inside their heart, those issues, that unhappiness, has been there forever. They may have channeled it to their parents, ex-partner, children or brothers and sisters, even the business can get the blame, but when they come into relationship, their partner gets the blame and everything else is let off the hook, including themselves.

In nature, the forest is the same forest whether you are in it or not.

Romance is not built out of a fearful dependency that says, "Without you, my life is not worth living". That expression comes from someone who is severely depressed and you have become their anti-depressant. You are not an anti-depressant, you are a lover of life, and a lover of lovers. So, the question is, are you in love, before you fall in love with someone?

In nature, there is nothing missing, there is always love in one form or another

When I was first married, I thought there was only one person I could be in love with. So, that became my wife. There were people that I loved, but there was only my wife to be in love with. I didn't really think about love as something I could do at work, or at sport. I said, "Love is for my wife, and everything else is something else". It's like putting on a straight jacket. It's inhuman because anything we do in life without love is competitive and dry. So in my business, I was not interested in loving what I was doing, I was dry and tough, which made my leadership very aggressive. When my divorce came, I realised that I had been inhuman to myself. That I needed to actually be in love with my world, and with what I did, in order to be in love with a partner. Then, my relationships were not little love moments in an otherwise hard working life, my relationships were a magnificent extension of what I already had.

To be in love we cannot become exclusive. We cannot pretend to be loving and open hearted to one person, and judgmental and protective toward another. Love is not like a suit we wear that can be put on and taken off. Love is a way of living, an attitude from which we choose a relationship, and there we become exclusive in our actions. To love is not exclusive, that cannot be. But from that love, we can choose to be in relationship, an intimate, romantic and beautiful relationship, and then we prioritise that person, and choose to open to them. So we focus significant energy in this book on becoming that which you want others to be, to make your life an act of love.

Love is a state of being. It cannot depend on what you are doing physically, or with whom you are doing it. But lovers want the beloved to love only them, no one else. They don't know that unless you can love all, you cannot love anyone. The wife might say the husband can love only her, and not be loving toward anybody else; the stream of his love should flow only toward her. But she does not realise that such love is false, and that she has caused it to be false. How can a lover who is not full of love for everybody be loving to his partner?

A magnificent key to creating a harmonious, lasting and sacred relationship is to understand that a loving person treats both those they like, and those they dislike, with love. This is the spiritual aspect of it all. A person with love offers a loving attitude even to lifeless objects. This is the beginning, learning to love pets and objects, good friends and kind acts. But the true test comes when we are asked to love those who hurt us, those who are unkind to us, and most importantly, in our relationship, our lover who brings truth home to us, by challenging us.

This sacred relationship you dream of, is an attitude. You must be mindful that your attitude in every moment of your life causes the quality of your life. Your emotions are not automatic; you are not a leaf blown around the park wherever the wind takes you. You are the tree, your roots go deep, your soul is guiding you to love. There is no authenticity in following your emotions of hurt or pleasure. Only animals cannot choose how they respond to circumstance. Although your animal instinct is important to your feeling of emotion, you must choose one thousand times a day to be inspired by love and work through your judgments. If you gravitate to your emotional nature (Ego), and be swept along in the rush of it all, your love life will always deteriorate to drama.

Do you think that we can hate one person and love another? No, that is impossible. A loving human being is a loving human being; it has nothing to do with some individual. Even sitting alone such a person is loving, even when no one is watching, they are loving. To be loving is this persons nature, it has nothing to do with relationship. A loving person is loving no matter with whom or where they are.

Love Bites

Every day we walk, talk, smile, laugh and work. In this, there is an opportunity to open ourselves to Love people. The bus driver, the checkout person, the taxi driver, the CEO. We can just grab a moment and feel love without acting, I call them love bites Tiny moments in time, where you actually fall in love and let it pass. It is not invasive, like asking for phone numbers or even trying to get an acknowledgement. These spoil the beauty of it. Simply by opening your mind to the possibility that, if you are mindful you can fall in love, over and over and over, with anyone, anywhere, anytime. I once experienced a love bite with 500 people in one day. I doubt any of them knew it. Because a love bite stops right there, in the awareness. You fall in love, feel the love bite, and keep it a secret. The action stops there. Then you simply buy the milk and go home. You just fall in love, feel the love bite, and leave it. A love bite experience means no action, and then you will have many. This is a culture of love. Where you learn to see beauty as often as possible, to celebrate that diversity of beauty by taking the nano-second to honor and witness it.

A man walked into the room, flung the door open, angrily undid his shoelaces because they were too tight, tossed them in the corner, then closed the door with a thud. If there is anger inside, a person will treat their shoes and possessions as if they were his worst enemy. The man bowed before the monk, and offered his respects.

The monk said, "I cannot respond to your greeting until you apologise to the door and your shoes."

The man protested, "They are not alive, I will not apologise, why should I?"

The Monk replied, "You took your anger out on those shoes, and the door, you acknowledged their personality when you were angry with them. You threw the shoes as if they were guilty of something. You have acknowledged their personality in your actions, so you must acknowledge their personality in your apology to them."

The man, "Sorry to you shoes, I was angry at you, sorry door I took out my frustration on you."

The man turned to the Monk and spoke, "I feel so at peace with myself, this has made me aware that I have been treating everything with my anger, people and things, I have been stirring my anger."

Chris Walker is a world leading change agent, an environmentalist and author of more than 20 books. Born and bred in Australia, he consults to people and organisations throughout the world on improved relationships, health and lifestyle through the application of the Universal laws of Nature. The result he offers is that we stay balanced, share loving relationships, work with passion, enjoy success, and live our personal truth. To learn more about Chris?s work and journeys to Nepal, visit http://www.chriswalker.com.au

Sacred Love - Relationship Problem Solving Made Easy Part 11

Solving problems in relationships requires honesty, integrity and a downright simple understanding of where the answers are not....

1/ Nobody does anything to you more that you do to yourself

2/ Blame doesn't work

3/ If you can't go back you are carrying baggage

4/ Sex is not the answer

5/ you are the same person, in or out of relationship

6/ Love is not attachment, control, possession, need or anything like that.

7/ Laughter is health

8/ Busy - ness kills love.

9/ Everything is possible without changing anything.

The person who is in relationship, fearing loneliness, fearing a repeat of the past is committing a very high form of abuse. They are living in an independence, a bubble of delusion unable to open to truth they apply the laws of relationship and set boundaries like this is what I want and this is what I need. and this is what I don't need. So they are loving with their mind. Mind love is mind games, substituting ideas for investment, substituting their rules for love. In this relationship the hardness of rock can be compared to it. Like a religious seeker, or a devotee, they cannot love, just repeat their priest or guru, and say this is how it is, this is how it shoud be. It's like western people wearing a sari and saying "I am indian" a false representation. there cannot be love in this situation, only imprisonment of the spirit.

We need a home. We need a physical and emotional home. Yes, this is really important. Emptiness is the lack of a home. We fear emptiness, because now our mind is not validated as representing our home (knowledge and righteousness) our emotions are found to be delusional they are no longer validated as being our home. Our money can be stolen or our possessions lost, so if these are our home we become fearful that our lover will steal our safety, living always in worry and problems. Our dreams are no home, they are hopes and ambitions and blind recitation of second hand knowledge is really no home because it takes so little to debunk it. Emptiness exists behind all this. Behind the bricks and mortar that you call home, behind the veil of your spiritual or religious practice there is loneliness and emptiness. Here is the love that is possible.

Homelessness is Godliness. You won't want to accept it because your ego will be fighting for it's own survival. How can I live without the bricks and mortar and the rights and wrongs of my morality? And you are right to argue this. How can you live without the contructions? there is in fact no need to live without them, but the day you validate them as something measurable, something real and significant, then you have forfeit the very reason your own soul incarnated into this life. If there is no love, then all that is really the barrier, there cannot be a God in a heart that cannot love.

We build homes. Titles, trophies, families, wealth, careers, knowledge, we can repeat, store, possess and accumulate so much that if the earth stopped turning we'd still be wealthy. But we cannot build a home to camouflage our emptiness.

Nothing. Empty. A vacuum. A black hole in the universe. A nothingness that is unbarable. The experience of the meditator. the witnessing of the depressed. The hopelessness of the suicide victim. A place condemned by the material surface of the shallow worlds of repition nad conformity, yet, sanctified by those who know love. Santified by all the great teachers, prophets and leaders of depth, emptiness, the place of genius, and brilliance in music, art and mathematics. the empty mind, is the sacred mind, the spirit of the mountain, here, now, empty but for this moment of existence. this is love.

Spirituality applied is the athlete who knows nothing other than this one millisecond of performance. This is the business person who, in a flash knows choices, a child on a swing who goes one swing to far, the love who falls without regard for the cost. This is the magic of love. Emotiness, the highest note sung by a performer.

So rare is this moment in the average life that we have become obsessed with sex. Because in the moment of climax this experience occurs. Months of persuit just for that one moment of climax, manipulation, distortion just for that one moment, when all else goes blank and the world ends. So complex has this become that the average person cannot even invest the effort in partnering for it would bring to much disturbance to their pleasure hunt, and hence they masturbate.

Obsessed with substitution, the average person can fall in love for moments, then, remember how it was forever. They have little preparedness to find the emptiness that guarantees love. If the average person were excited about nothing, inspired by life itself then the trend toward sex and the industry it sporns would be less. But this is not the case. Corporations design jobs for people who want to be safe and conform. So sex becomes their only outlet. In fact it is not sex or relationship at all that causes this obsession. It is that one moment of release, that moment of emptiness that we call loneliness, that moment of orgasm that causes this obsession. Emptiness is a human desire.

So why does the mind conform? Why are we obsessed with second hand knowledge? Why do we try to create relationships that are built on patterns? to understand these questions we must understand a little more about mind science.

It is quite a strange obsession this need to conform. It is not freedom, which most people aspire to. It is not independence which the spirit wants in order to express it's love. So the fact that we drive so hard to repeat what others have told us, in bibles and gita books seems to be driven by something very strong, given that the cost is so high.

We conform in order to gain intimacy. Intimacy is associated with security. A person who is insecure will seek intimacy through the process of conformity. This means that the individual is seaching for security through intimacy, and to do this they must label things as safe and unsafe. So, if they are labeled as a bhudist for example it might be safe. They could also label others as safe and unsafe by diagnosing them as depressed or liars. That is how we try to make sense of the world, by giving it a label. then there is security and in security there is intimacy of sorts. It is an open letter demanding conformity to a precedent of principles. Basically a request to ask the lover to lie or die.

Patterns are build out of conformity to a dogma, laws or principles. Patterns overcome fear, so the insecure person will demand patterns. They gain access to security by overcoming their fears by creating patterns for themselves and particularly others to follow. So, these patterns are helpful but they too cost. To live by patterns is to deny internal freedom, to deny love, it is a mind game in which disorder in relationship is guaranteed.

What builds patterns in relationships? Comparison is the first thing. That means that one person might compare themselves and their lover to someone else and demand that they meet that expectation. Like even comparison to how their ex husband or wife was not. We can build expectations out of the opposites can't we. We can build ideals and models of who we are looking to be with based on who we don't want to be with. Automatically by doing this we inject the mind into love and then there cannot be love. Can you see this?

Disorder in relationship is poison to it. Understanding can turn chaos to order. So knowledge is the enemy of order. Knowledge is disorder. Fools know everything. That person who knows how it can be, should be or could be done is the fool because this person mistakes knowledge for love. Knowledge blocks love. what you know about somebody only eliminates your insecurity, blocks your fears. Your knowledge is based on your information. That information you can say is wise or unwise but it comes from the mind, whether you call it intuition or not, it comes out and through the mind. So, disorder in the mind, is the result of knowledge, and knowledge comes mostly from experience. Experience is emotional incompleteness until it is love.

Experiences that are anything but love are delusional. So you might say, "I fell out of love with someone" and then want to fall in love with someone else, but you are actually lying to yourself. You became fearful, insecure and therefore you needed some knowledge in order to justify running away from that insecurity and you called them good or bad. But they are not the cause. You are the cause, your insecurity and need for patterns is the cause, because you are unable to face real love.

If you even leave a relationship it is unlikely that it would succeed if you went back because you will now have partial knowledge. You will not have understanding, or if you do, it will be blame and incomplete. Mostly we analyse things in order to know them and justify our judgements of them. To go back to a relationship you must not know anything. To go back, which is the best path, you must really just fall in love and have amnesia. What past? What other lovers? Who would care about such things? Only a person who is afraid of being hurt or afraid of falling down in love.

That is the key you see. Falling down in love is the necessity of it. You must be disappointed in order to really be into the sacredness of love. That void is falling down over and over. It only hurts your ego. Really love cannot hurt, or be hurt, only your ego can be hurt, and isn't that the mind, getting less and less control so that intimacy can appear. I don't mean conformity or safety I mean truth.

One lady who came to me for advice was obsessed with lies. She lied to her mother, her father, her ex husband and her lover. She lied to her son and her friends. She wanted patterns that were predicatable in her life so she lied in order to giove people the impression she was a conformist, a patterned individual so that she could have security. Her fear was that if she were honest she would be intimate with people. That intimacy would be real and take the form of love, both acceptance and rejection of herself. She wanted only pleasure in love so she lied. Everybody knew she lied. she thought that they didn't know. It was real because did get rejected but not for being herself, she got rejected because she lied to everyone.

Those people who want patterns - to conform must surround themselves with fools also. They are looking for more knowledge, actually confirmation of the same wounded knowledge that they possess. They look for flattery, and because of that, there can be no innocence in their life.

An innocent mind, has amnesia. It forgets the past. Not because it is avoiding it ot running away from it but because it has found only love in the past and therefore it sees only one white wall, one clear sheet of paper which it calls the past. The whole past merges into that one clean sheet of paper. It was all love. So tomorrow is not based on escaping from yesterday, to running away to find tomorrow. There is nothing to run from and nothing to fear from the past. They can fall in love when they choose with that person from the past because they are actually new.

Many times we run from the past. But actually those experiences are the fodder for deeper love. We run with knowledge and lack of understanding. We say "I will never do that again" but of course this is foolish. From that day, we can only say "if my mind accepts this pattern and that conformity I will open to love" in other words we live for the respt of our lives in delisuion, in mind.

That is why sex is so important to the delusioned mind. It has so much knowledge that the only place it can find solace is in the emptiness of release in sex. This mind is incapable of love except in that moment of orgasm. So it becomes obseesed with it. If that same mind were set free, without the patterns and insecurities it would find the same passion and fire in life itself and sex would become less if not totally unimportant.

The knowing mind lacks understanding. It lives completely out of the past. Nothing is new. It will say "that reminds me of what used to happen to me" and then there is automatic disorder. Disorder of the greatest level. Because nothing is new, evethying is compared to knowledge. The past. This also goes for the pleasures of life. Because this knowing mind compares the present to the past, it wants to repeat what bought pleasure before. It will say "if I could have this part of that person and that part of this person I would be happy" It lives in conformity to knowledge of the past.

But all wanting kills love. So that person who has knowledge, cannot love because they don't want this, and they do want that. Then there is ambition, desire to be something, someone, become something or someone, the whole mechanism is driven by comparison to who they are, who you are and what they want. Beware of this in your life and the those who approach you with their wanting love. They are disordered and will therefore have disordered relationships.

So why is love so difficult to sustain?

Love is difficult to sustain because we are self obsessed. We are obsessed with pleasure and how we are. We want to have,be and do so much that from that moment in life there can be no love, only ambtion. This is the fear of emptiness. Because in emptiness all our wanting finds no traction. There is no ambition possible in emptiness, and therefore love. It is empty, therefore everything we do makes no difference, everything we mimick makes no difference, repeating patterns makes no difference, self isolation (staying out of relationship) makes no difference. They just increase the minds sense of conformity and security. But this is as close as it gets.

We think that the more we strive, the more we conform, the more we develop patterns the more secure our life will be and therefore the more love we will have. This is the great mistake because love does not thrive in security, ego does. Love thrives in insecurity and disspappointment, where loneliness is real and embraced and where everything we ask for is refused us. That is where love is. That requires understanding, not knowledge. There is no complete knowledge, but there is complete understanding. Complete understanding means love. Understanding something, or some situation is to see how there is or was love in it. Then that understanding creates an open heart and those problems that can block our life to not deaden the spirit.

You can see these half people. They walk like everyone else, they talk like everyone else but they are not able to think like everyone else. They are not love. They and knowledge, and therefore only living out of experiences which are incomplete. These people say "I am happy" but anyone who says they are happy are not happy. They are in their mind having an upper. They compare, and therefore they are blind.

Love is not mind, memory, ambition, desire, expectation, conformity, exlusiveness, righteousness, pattern, ownership, security, fear, jealousy, demand or anything of these emotional states of self obsession. These are states that trying to create patterns and therefore intimacy out of security. They are built on running away from insecurity. Therefore this person cannot love. Love requires insecurity.

Kind, loving and tender people cannot be self important and therefore they must be able to love without a home. They must be fully open to the emptiness that is love, the vulnerability that is love without trying to put up their patterns and knowledge and say "if this and this then I can love" no, this is mind and there can be no love in this life.

It does not matter where the ambition comes from. Spiritually ambitious, business ambitious, health ambitious, family ambitious - these are all blockages in relationship. They may have their place outside but in love they are the toxin. They breed disorder, and that disorder breads the emotional suffereing and pain. That means that ambition and wanting keep people on the surface of love. Superficial lovers are those who cannot understand life as love, but instead, know all about what they want, what they don't want and what they deserve.

This is the periphery of love. Feelings, wantings, identification, knowledge, attachments, desire, trivia, conformity all come from self importance. Even an individual who has great loving powers will not know themselves if they are always wanting to be other than who they really are. Empty and lonely.

There are always problems. This is life. The question is whether you can understand that problem as yuour mind blocking love or whether you get more knowledge from that problem and therefore increase the blockage to love. You can choose. The important thing is that if you carry a problem from one day to the next, you will need pride and ambiton to deal with the lack of spirit in your life. Then sex obsession will drive the fire rather than the love of life. Remember, those who desire to be humble can never be humble.

As soon as we want, we kill love. Try to become empty, it is possible. If there is anything from your history, yesterday, last year or last 20 years that you have overcome with knowledge, maybe it is time to unlearn what ever you learned and fall back, into understanding, by finding where there was love, and where it was you who were blind. Love is everywhere. And your duty is to find it. That is how you solve problems daily.

http://www.chriswalker.com.au Chris Walker is a world leading change agent, an environmentalist and author of more than 20 books. Born and bred in Australia, he consults to people and organisations throughout the world on improved relationships, health and lifestyle through the application of the Universal laws of Nature. The result he offers is that we stay balanced, share loving relationships, work with passion, enjoy success, and live our personal truth. To learn more about Chris?s work and journeys to Nepal, visit http://www.chriswalker.com.au -- http://www.chriswalker.com.au

Sacred Love - The Rituals of Love

Surrender to love. Today, and every day, fall in love, again, and again and again. Give more than is expected of you. Expect no reward. The beauty of love will be half won when you learn the secret of putting out more than is expected in all that you do. Make yourself so valuable to your beloved that eventually you will become indispensable. Find their dream and help them live it. Exercise your privilege to support their journey, go the extra mile, and enjoy all the rewards you receive. You deserve them!

Today

Do something special for someone out of love

Laugh even if you have to invent it

Cry one tear of gratitude

Accept a gift

Live a dream

Use Magic

Float

Stay still for just 5 minutes on your own

Breath a breath of life giving air

Clear your mind for 30 seconds

Look up

Say thank you

Give somebody a special treat

Be Gentle

Step back from it all for just one long breath.

Succeed

To be in love, and to stay in love, is to surrender to another person. Then we open to direct communication. There is no trust required if the ego is soft. To be in a relationship, and celebrate the spontaneity of falling in love, we cannot hide. We cannot be embarrassed about our strange collection of qualities. We present everything as it is. And in return we must welcome our lover, without ego, and accept their strange collection of qualities too. Surrender means working together with love. You cannot take the moral high ground and still hold love sacred. You cannot surrender to love and then say, "IF".

Surrender means, "Here I am, and here you are". There is no need to make you better so that "I can love you in the future". There is no "if" in love.

To surrender means you'll need to get used to marching directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it, and make it an acceptable and important part of your way of life. Your expectations are not true, they are the barrier to the journey of love, so you must stop hoping to achieve them in your relationship, not want to achieve them, but to dismantle them.

Disappointment is a good sign of loving intelligence, because it reveals an honesty between your expectations and your love. It cannot be compared to anything else; it is so sharp, precise, obvious and direct. If we can open, surrender to love, then we suddenly begin to see that our expectations are not going to be met, no matter how much we try. Every time we change somebody, move them shift them, love dies. Wanting things to be different than they are is the mark of the ego. This is not love, this is the ego. They are opposites. So it takes courage to say, "You didn't meet my expectations, and that revealed how much I needed to grow." This is sacred love. A moving soft ego, always looking to adapt.

To stay in Love means we come down into the dirty, ordinary, street scene of reality. That is where real devotion and love exists. When we love someone we must learn to trust ourselves, surrender to love. This does not involve preparing for a soft landing, being half in and half out, hedging your bets. Nobody ever succeeded by creating escape routes.

I raced a surf ski in the life saving carnivals in Australia. Sometimes the waves were 20 feet high, and to crash the ski was an amazingly dangerous thing. But it happened nearly every time, because so many of us were going down the waves thinking, "What happens if I crash?". One day, I was out in huge waves with an old guy, a veteran with the oldest wooden ski. As the biggest wave of the day rose behind us, twenty-five foot like a building, I watched this old guy, I saw the look on his face, and he was just like a child. He looked 15 years old, his smile could have lit a city, his hooting and hollering was so enthusiastic, he was having a ball. Instead of holding back, thinking "What happens if...", he just threw his whole heart and soul into that wave and had the time of his life. I just fell in love with his exuberance, and thought that anybody who puts so much into anything they do is going to attract a crowd. He said to me later, "One great thing about age, there's less to go that there was, you know if you die, you may as well die with a smile on your dial, having a ball, doing it all."

Love actually means being prepared to land on hard, ordinary ground; on the rocky, wild countryside of confrontation of your own issues. What you don't like in your lover is a mirror of your ego. Once we open ourselves, then we land on what is, it's disappointing, and this is the real beauty of love. People can reject your expectations, they cannot reject your love.

In true love, you have to allow your "self" to surrender. There is nothing to fear losing once you identify with the simplicity of surrender. The only thing that can be hurt is your ego, so if you can develop a soft ego, you will be free to hold that power of love anytime you choose. If your ego can flex, then there is no hurt. Instead of taking the ego and emotions so seriously, take love seriously. Love can shine through everything. The key to doing this is to surrender the moral high ground, and automatically you soften your ego, you.

Ritual

Try taking time to sit quietly in nature daily and imagine how much you love your lover, or ex-lover, once you drop any expectation of them. Consider all the issues you see in them as a mirror of you. By finding the balance, see if you can love those issues in you. You must remain committed to continuously improving this skill of discernment between a love free of expectation, and a love filled with judgments and projection. The real power you have in life, is to drop your ego driven judgments of right and wrong. Just love. No forgiveness. Love like that day on the beach when I saw the moon. Let go, fall in love with all those who have been on your path. Feel it sitting behind all the facades, and know that it is always there. This is nature's healing.

We bring our devotion into everyday life through the art of ritual. Rituals are more than acts of anchoring, they become acts of devotion to something beyond the self.

Ritual is an act of respect for someone or something outside ourselves, a large or small act of giving without need or desire to receive. Ritual can be spontaneous, but the true value of ritual is a relentless commitment, come rain, hail or shine.

That is the difference between doing something for ego, and doing it for ritual. Steadiness is the mark of ritual. Rituals of steadiness are repeated day, after day, after day. They are not for self, but are a mark of respect for something higher, like a purpose in life.

Ritual is how we bridge the inspiration of our inner stillness with the spontaneity of everyday life. If you walk around India, you will see this ritual as a way of life. Small paintings on doorsteps, the day couldn't begin without it, or the candle lit in the hall in honor of a deceased relative, or incense burning as a thank you to the Gods. Flowers adorn alters, not requesting privilege, it is an act of ritual. And nothing could prevent it happening. It is a mark of respect to something bigger than the individual.

Rituals are acts of Devotion. Here are some wonderful examples that people have developed and shared with me over the years. Remember, ritual is not an act of manifestation of anything, it is a remembrance of the divine nature of life.

1. Maintaining an altar in your home and keeping it clean daily.

2. Lighting a candle in the evening.

3. Saying a prayer of thank you at meal time.

4. Holding hands in the park.

5. Maintaining a garden.

6. Having a photo wall of those you love.

7. Having an affirmation wall with pictures of future dreams on it

8. Writing love letters to each other and posting them.

9. Cleaning the kitchen as an act of love.

10. Saving money according to an agreed plan for the future.

11. Never going to bed with an argument in progress

12. Loyalty, always standing up for and speaking well of your lover.

13. Prioritisation of your relationship over other things.

14. Maintaining health and wellness so you can turn up for love.

Can you see that we can re arrange many everyday tasks so they become acts of love? Even taking the garbage out can become a ritual act of love that makes your partners life easier. Then we are acting with loving intent, and it will be rewarded ten fold. In this way, we are not feeding the ego through what we do, we are humble to ritual, and the key is to be willing to maintain that ritual even when you don't want to, or need to, any longer. These are just a few ideas on the rituals of love. I am sure you can think of a few more unique ones between you. Remember to make them every day events and easy.

Today, love without expectation. Love someone you hate, love someone you fear, love someone you left behind and don't take their reaction to heart. Make every day a Valentines day, and see how many people you can honor, past present and future. Love them from a place if gratefulness. Love them knowing tomorrow may never come and know that the deepest regret any human being can have, is to hold back their love, even for a second.

Today, light a candle in your heart for all those people that you love or have loved. Drink a glass of fresh water to their beauty, their gifts and their ways. Hope and wish that today, on this everyday Valentines day, they are in love, with love and they are happy. What else could real love be, but the wish for someone else's happiness.

Loving acts are acts done out of love, because of love, and without the expectation of love in return.

Humility is important as well. To get past the Ego is to cut away the rough edges of vanity, which hurts and disturbs those one meets in life. Vanity is separateness. Truly loving individuals will recognise themselves in others, and rather than judge them as less, they appreciate the mirror. It is of no service to yourself or your relationship to judge another as less or more. It is expansive to acknowledge our own humility. So many of life's stresses can be extinguished at the source, if we are able to recognise ourselves in others.

Devotion means that our lover's happiness becomes a high priority. This is the demonstration of our love. There is nothing more important, nothing more potent, than the small acts of our devotion. We dedicate every circumstance we can to their improvement and happiness.

Chris Walker is a world leading change agent, an environmentalist and author of more than 20 books. Born and bred in Australia, he consults to people and organisations throughout the world on improved relationships, health and lifestyle through the application of the Universal laws of Nature. The result he offers is that we stay balanced, share loving relationships, work with passion, enjoy success, and live our personal truth. To learn more about Chris?s work and journeys to Nepal, visit http://www.chriswalker.com.au