Love and Spiritual Awakening

There have been more words and music written on the subject of ‘love’ than any other and reminds us of Shakespeare’s immortal words, “If music be the food of love, play on...” Love is also the one topic that arises over and over again, during readings. It is what we seek most and recently, during a radio interview spiritual consultant, healer and teacher, Joylina Goodings was asked to do a soul reading on a global level about the meaning of 2011 for us all. And the words that came to her were divinity, peace, perception, unity and…unconditional love. Here she shares with us the full meaning of this most ‘loving’ message from on high…

‘Divinity’ is who we are and what we come to manifest into the physical. ‘Peace’ is a quality that is within each of us which we can access to aid our perception. As we perceive and experience unconditional love within ourselves, so we are able to perceive and experience it within others and thus our whole world sees and experiences both the differences and the similarities as a whole, uniting us in love. We are all divine beings in human bodies on a journey of developing unconditional love. It is only through unity that we can bring the peace and love we each eternally seek into existence. As we raise our individual consciousness to the experience of the love within, so we express that love without and raise the conscious awareness of our species and the collective consciousness of all things, including our planet, as we move further towards manifesting the peace and love of the great spiritual awakening and ascension that is currently taking place.
 
But what does this mean for us, individually? What actually is ‘spiritual awakening’? Being spiritual is not about developing your psychic, clairvoyant or healing abilities. It is not about being able to communicate with angelic realms. It is how we chose to live our lives. Our soul journey is to manifest divine energy into our physical world. But what is divine energy? All religions have said that God is love, there is only love - yet still we seek it. Love gives us our greatest pleasure and often our greatest pain and this is the paradoxical world our souls chose to incarnate into. It seems we can only know something by understanding its opposite. Before we are born, as a spirit, we know only unconditional love. As a human we know a whole range of emotions which we experience as physical feelings in our bodies. We could not know light if we did not experience darkness, we cannot know love if we do not experience its opposite.
 
Love is a powerful energy and can move mountains. We do so much in the name of ‘love’ and it is wielded as a power for good. We seek love throughout your lives, firstly from our parents, siblings, extended family, then from romantic relationships. We always seem to look for it outside of ourselves first. Sometimes, during readings, when people ask if and when they will have children, I ask, ‘What will a child bring you?’ The answer is invariably ‘love’. They will have someone to love and they feel they will be loved unconditionally by their children. Yet love is always within us, we wish to share it, but mostly, we just need to feel it. It is usually assumed that hate is the opposite of love, but is it? It too is a powerful energy and can be used in any way we choose - often to power revenge or destruction in some way. But both love and hate contain a magnitude of energy and it is that energy we then choose to use in either a positive or negative way. In reality the opposite of love is indifference. When there is no charge of energy left at all.
 
Because we seek to experience love all the time, once we have it we fear the loss of love so much that the fear of losing it then motivates our behaviours and our actions. Love, once freely given and received, can never be lost as we can remember the experience, the ‘feeling’ of love time and time again. Yet our fear of loss often governs how much and how often we are prepared or allow ourselves to feel love. How many times have you waited to see what someone else thinks of you before you decide to care a little? How often do you feign indifference to make sure you don’t get hurt? How often have you pushed love aside and refused to experience it? How often have you said, “I never cared anyway?” These are all defenses against the pain we experience when we don't allow love into our feeling bodies and our consciousness. As a soul I believe we are ‘one’ with everything, as a human we experience separateness and thus long for unity.

When a child comes into the world it is ‘one’ with its mother. It feels it is the centre of the universe and it is not until the child reaches two that it begins to notice that it is a separate person from those primary care givers around it. Because of the child's feelings of being the centre of everything it also begins to interpret the behaviour of those caregivers in relationship to the love it knows from being in spirit. A child will usually relate the smiles and cuddles from mummy as being loved and cross words and finger wagging as being unloved. This forms the thought that one has to be good to be loved. That you have to please those caregivers if you are going to be loved becomes the miss-assumption made when we are so young, then governs our every thought, word and deed as adults as we seek the unconditional love we feel we no longer have.

If we want to experience love and live in a loving world then we have to allow our ‘self’ to love, to feel love in its many forms. We need to let love in and to experience love in our daily lives. But how do we live in a loving way? Many of us find it very easy to love unconditionally those who are less fortunate than ourselves. When there is a world disaster we feel the natural compassion and unconditional love for those souls who are affected. But do we ever feel that compassion for ourselves? Those types of events make us very grateful for our own lives. So focus on that gratitude, feel that love for all the little things, rather than worrying about what may or may not be in the future. When we are coming from a place of fear of loss, we are in fact letting our imagination run wild about thoughts of sometime in the future. We are giving a meaning to an experience that may or may not have meaning. We are saying to ourselves that this is good and this is bad. The sun comes up every day for most people, that is normal and we make it mean that it is good. I remember a time when I felt the sun had no right to come up and it was really bad. I was giving meaning to something that had no meaning and over which I had no control.

Yet we try to control love all the time. We think if we are good and please those we love we will be loved in return. But love cannot be controlled. How often do we try control those we love most. For instance, take a relationship between mother and daughter or father and son. The arguments start, the anger, the frustration because ‘they’ cannot see our point of view. As the argument continues each soul says things they don’t mean and start hurting each other as much as possible, even though in reality they love each other and really just want each other to be happy. If one soul chooses to consciously stop the acceleration of anger and chooses to say, “Yes, I love you”, the energy is shifted from anger, frustration and hurt to acceptance, often joy and humour. We each have this in our power at all times. When we focus on what is good about each other then it grows and so do we.

If we enjoy experiencing love in the present then we can experience it always. For it is only the present that we have to experience. We all find it so easy to love the collective unconditionally but loving each other, those closest to us let alone ourselves seems so much more difficult and yet the two are the same. If we want to experience more love in our lives we need to be loving now, in the present. We need to feel and express the love which is within each and every one of us to each other now, in the moment. To consciously choose a loving action rather than a revengeful re-action and thus manifest unconditional love and bring it into this physical world - that is our purpose, and that is spiritual awakening . Then we will find peace within and with everything, reaching an acceptance that will allow us to step fully into the present. Love is the key, so let it be…now.

Living with Soul Tip - Love yourself as you would have others love you. Love others as you would have them love you and as we will do this we will be creating a better world for us all and for our children. How do we do this? One way of experiencing more love in your life is to let go of judgment. As you stop judging something or someone as good or bad then so you accept them as they are. As you accept others then so they can accept you. You can respect each other as different and acknowledge the divine spark of love within each.

© Joylina Goodings 2011
www.joylina.com