Life is hard. And it never gets easier. We just get better at dealing with it.
Many of us were never taught how to love. And many of us were never loved. So, I think it is beneficial that we talk about it and create a definition of what love is. And a framework on how to accomplish it.
In order to understand love, we first have to understand intuition. Intuition is pattern recognition. So you know something, you just don’t know how you know it. This is because it is your subconscious mind doing the pattern recognition. Jung talks about the introverted intuitive. They are ruled by their intuition, but they have no clue where they get this information from. It is because your subconscious is below your consciousness. If you knew your train of thought it would be apart of your conscious mind or logical brain. Intuition is pattern recognition and more often than not you will not know where it comes from because it is a result of your subconscious mind.
So you know how you have the feeling that someone loves you or does not love you in your gut?(Intuition is often felt in the guts, the center of the nervous system in our body.) You just know they love you. Or you know they do not love you. They may say all the right things. And they may even do things that you have dreamed of, but something tells you that they do not really love you. This is intuition and pattern recognition. Can you explain it with your conscious mind and logical brain? Often no, but it does not mean that this feeling or knowing is not right. It just means it is a result of a pattern.
Love is a verb. It is an action word. Love is a pattern of action. You can tell when someone loves you by the way they act over time and throughout a relationship. But what is the action of love? Love is the action of caring for someone. When you take care of someone, you are loving them. This doesn’t means wiping their ass or cleaning up their messes. It means taking into account who they are and what they need and want. And then often helping them get it.
For example, say you have a friend who is vegetarian and you want to go out to lunch with them. If you suggest a steakhouse, that is not very caring. However, if you create a compromise that is caring. So you ask them to go to a steakhouse, telling them they have an amazing salad with different homemade vegetarian soups everyday. And you say lunch is on me. This would be a compromise to get your needs(you want lunch from the steakhouse, but you want to go with your vegetarian friend) met while still caring for your friend and helping them get their needs met(vegetarian food). Even if you didn’t pay for the meal and they agreed it would be an act of caring, because you anticipated their needs, wants, and desires. This would be an example of a good friendship.
Love is the pattern of caring for someone over and over. And in order for it to be a pattern there cannot be any interruptions in the pattern. Because when a pattern is interrupted it ceases to be a pattern. It becomes random and unpredictable. So if someone cares for you here and there, but there always are those moments where you are like why did they do that? Or that was mean. Or who the hell do they think they are. Etc. This is a pattern interrupt. And the pattern no longer ceases to exist. A pattern is a predictable, recurring arrangement of elements.
Now let’s think about how to love ourselves. If love is the act of caring for someone in a predictable pattern, creating self love is about creating a predictable pattern of caring for ourselves. Which sounds pretty simple, right? But what would this look like in real life? It would look like doing things for yourself that make you feel better in the big picture and sometimes the small picture too. It means eating healthy and the foods your body needs, but it also means allowing yourself to have a treat occasionally that is not too unhealthy. It means going to bed at a reasonable hour so you get enough sleep, but also allowing yourself to stay out late occasionally when you are out enjoying yourself with friends. Or when you are watching a movie and don’t have to get up early the next day. Self love is about taking care of yourself in all ways. Maybe you need more home cooked meals, so you need to cook for yourself more. Maybe you need more sleep, so you need to sleep more. Or maybe you need to change your bedding or bed. Maybe you need to feel more comfort in life, so you get a fuzzy blanket. Maybe you need to say no to other people and say yes to taking care of yourself more.
Self care is not a one size fits all journey. And creating self love is the result of taking that journey to find the best fit for your self care. If you interrupt the pattern of caring for yourself, it does not mean you hate yourself. It just means you need to do better. Everyone makes mistakes. Would you be mad if someone you have loved for 20 years makes a small mistake and makes you angry? Yes. But would you end this relationship over this small mistake. No, probably not. Life is about give and take. Patterns are about predictability. And humans are fallible. Humans are not like math. When a pattern is interrupted in math, it ceases to exit. But that is not how patterns work in humans. We as humans do make mistakes.
However, what about when there are people like my family with cluster b personality disorders who hurt people on purpose? When someone intentionally hurts you it is a pattern interrupt. Because you can bet on this happening again. People do not hurt others on purpose just once and stop. It is a continuing pattern. So you have to ask yourself if you are willing to put up with a pattern of caring for you that will consistently be interrupted with intentional heartache and hurt? Some people can deal with that because it is all they have ever known. It is very different when someone makes a mistakes and interrupts the pattern of caring for you on accident, compared to when they premeditate it and do it on purpose. Two completely different scenarios and patterns.
What if you do these intentional hurtful pattern interrupts to yourself? I honestly cannot really answer this. I do not hurt myself on purpose. The closest I can come is being homeless and knowing I need to shower more, but not doing it. Because concentration camp showers make me sick for a week. I do not enjoy hurting myself. I do not enjoy hurting others. And I certainly do not enjoy others hurting me. If you are constantly hurting others, you cannot expect others to not hurt you. So maybe I am very rare in this situation. Because when I have a relationship it is to create a pattern of caring for someone. I like to take care of people. It makes me feel good. And I like it when people take care of me and I can count on them to do it.
I like having people in my life that I can count on. Even if it is in the covert world. It creates a kind of security I have not had for most of my life. This revolution has brought me a lot of love. Because I finally have relationships within the war games where I can count on people to care for me. And I hope they count on me to care for them as well. But there are always limitations. These limitations hurt because we want people to be able to change the world over night. We especially want them to change our worlds overnight. But we have to remember as humans we all have limitations. The war games often lead those of us with big birthrights to want to ignore our own limitations and the limitations of others. But limitations are not pattern interrupts, they are just apart of humanity.
This is what love is to me.