Lesson 45: “God is the Mind in which I think.”
Today in this country lots of people celebrate a significant love. Lots of people equate this with a significant other or a spouse. But this is a time where we can stop in our schedule and take time to send each other hearts as an expression of sending love- lots of people use hearts to signify love.
This is the perfect day to learn about how to love. Valentine’s Day can be a time to simply give every one love. The Course teaches us to love everyone. We learn that this sense of joining with others energetically in the connection of love is the way we get to our salvation. We are learning how to love people in the way that Jesus teaches us in the Course. Leave no one out of the picture. Realize that all people are equally loved.
Special love•
We, often in partnerships or with spouses, can end up engaging in what the Course calls “special love”. Sometimes, in our human clumsiness, our attempt to be loving to another can sometimes be the result of putting them on a pedestal or treating them as better than we are as individuals. Or we treat them like they are better than other people. My experience of this is that sometimes people can affect us so much energetically it can feel a bit destabilizing and then sometimes we end up not staying grounded in our regular life healthy habits.
Sometimes we can lose track of the things that most helpfully sustain us. That feeling of love or what we experience as intense love can feel so good that in some ways we are happy to just sit and experience that love. Sometimes this can lead to neglecting our usual other relationships or our own habits that support us. Sometimes this love feels so powerful that we start to favor getting to experience it instead of carrying on in healthy ways with the lifestyle that keeps us balanced.
This is for sure an addiction. Because that love that we feel that is intense starts to be our only favorite thing. The Course is teaching us how to be careful to watch and catch special love when we start to do that excessively. What happens when we feel special love is that we often prefer to spend all of our time with that person and then we can neglect other people.
The world is a little tricky because we want to feel intense love there. Most people feel drawn to certain people and less drawn to people we don’t feel an attraction for. This is part of how it is to have human relationships. We need to forgive this with God’s help and put it right on that altar, and ask God for the support in making the relationship holy. What we want to do is practice how it feels to be in relationships that don’t have that huge draw initially. Then we can have this holy love of a brother and sister or family members or any people that we have a neutral feeling loving relationship (that is wonderful but doesn’t knock us out of our good lifestyle habits). Then when we become good at having this relationship then we can consciously choose to connect with people that give us more of a high. This is really just a matter of practice. We can be good at it in time. Further, the more we get solid in maintaining our healthy lifestyle habits, the more we will stay grounded in them even when we meet with people who really energetically give us a high.
Healthy Relationships˜
The Course just teaches us that this tendency to make certain relationships special is so common. What we want to do is really learn from the Course’s message about how to have a relationship- especially with God for example. Then we get more information about how to not make relationships special because the Course explains this. When we start to make that person better than everyone else, stop. The Course says that everyone is equally important and equally worthy of love. The reason we want to not have special relationships and to change them if we do- we look at them and pay attention to the way they make us feel- is because the other person that we deem as special will feel it it we give them favor over others. Also, it completely throws off our own alignment with God.
We want to appreciate people that make us feel a huge draw energetically and we can have relationships with them. Just catch our minds if we start to love them more than God. Loving them more than God means we have addictive tendencies with them- sometimes that we think about them more than is a healthy thing. We simply want to be able to maintain our lives in the most optimally healthy way while we have moments where we can sit in our gratitude and love for the amazing way they affect us. Stay focused in the moment- when we recall memories or fantasize about the future more than just a little then we are missing the present and this is often a part of special love.