Barriers

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

We’ve all heard about “looking for love in all the wrong places”. It’s such a commonplace experience that it’s become a cliche. Why do we look for love in all the wrong places? Where is the right place to look for love? Why can’t we ever find enough love in our lives? It’s because all we know is conditional love. We have all had a broken heart at some time or another. We have all encountered people who didn’t love us enough.

Because we all know what it feels like to be rejected, to be hurt, we have put up barriers inside ourselves to try and protect us against being hurt in the future. Deep down, we expect to be hurt by the people we love. Sometimes we are so afraid of being hurt that we simply stay away from other people; which, of course, guarantees us that we won’t find the love we need and deserve.

Sometimes we are shy. Sometimes we are cocky, perhaps boastful and arrogant, in an attempt to convince ourselves and others that we beleive other people will like us, which has the effect of making other people not like us. Sometimes we just plain resent everyone for not loving us before they have had a chance to figure out for themselves what they think of us. There are all kinds of different barriers we erect within ourselves to try and prevent being hurt. And they all backfire on us, making us more hurt than ever.

Love is all around us, if we are brave enough to cast aside our doubts and fears. It is our barriers against hurt that are preventing us from finding the love we crave. Once again, the greater the risk, the greater the reward. It is when we take down our barriers and become most vulnerable, that we find the love we thought we never could.