Wow, what an in-depth and truly insightful musing on love, Justyna! I especially enjoyed the part about impermanence and non-self: "if everything is in flux, then love, unbound by a single fixed self, can flow freely. To live without separation, to un-self, is to be love with all things."
Beautiful!
Also, when I was a teenager I had an appaloosa similar to the one in the painting. His name was Pepper! 😊
Thank you so much, Don! As I wrote in the Note, your words and kindness mean a lot to me :) And also, happy to hear about the horse — it made me smile to know you had a similar one!
It never gives up the fight easily! Fortunately for us, love has a way of loosening its grip, moment by moment :) Wishing you spaciousness in the unfolding!
beautiful: To love fully is to allow ourselves to be stretched, emptied, and remade. Fresh out of sesshin I'm touching in with this emptied and (almost, maybe) remade. Thank you, J.
Deep bow to you, dear Elena 🙏 Thank you for sharing this, and for your wonderful presence here.
I imagine you must be now feeling that quiet, expansive openness—emptied, yet brimming, which enfolds us when we dedicated ourselves to inner quietness sufficiently enough. Wishing you deep rest and integration in this space of return 🙏
As I navigate waters that call for this courage, surrender and trust you mention it is rich the way I feel blessed to have come across this beautiful piece. I feel a sense of solace. I feel a traveler who has gone deep and far along the same road I am about to embark on has just left a few trails, guidelines, gems and reminders along the way so I continue to trust the journey.
Thank you. This reassures, this brings perspective and this unravels the beauty that we can experience given we allow ourselves to.
Thank you, Justyna. This will inform my future actions, awareness and perspective. I feel blessed to have found this.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful reflection, Chelton! And I'm sorry for responding late — I missed your comment
I’m glad these words could offer a bit of perspective and steadiness as you navigate your own stretch of the road. It means a lot to know they’ll continue to accompany you in some way.
Wishing you clarity, trust, softness and strength as you move forward — and thank you again for meeting this piece with such presence 🙏
Great piece. Love your writing as always. //Like an untempered metal, a heart shielded from the heat of life becomes unable to be shaped by love.// 🥰 I’d be interested in your thoughts on people that can’t love and weaponise our love for their own gain. It seems the flow love needs is to navigate past these people and find a way to move on. I find the saying that ‘you can only love someone as much as you love yourself’ a hard concept to grasp.
Wow what a reply. It’s taking me a while to digest all this. Yeh I think I’m getting at attachment to another person rather than the universal love for all people. How you let that go, if you can or need to, as once you love someone that doesn’t go away. However when you’ve been brainwashed into thinking they love you through their words, hot and cold behaviour creating an addiction, being blinded by love, you start to question what you have been a part of. Removing our own projections of that person, that maybe you were the only one in love all along. That what they loved about you was how much you loved them? Without a healthy early attachment we confuse love for the butterflies a person can give us, when they may be a warning. Maybe we make love too accessible and the person takes it for granted. We become too easily manipulated. I think I’m much more in favour of quiet love now like you say. That if we are all frequency and only attract our energetic opposite what does that say about me and the space I was in? Growth inevitably leads to awareness, a person’s true character showing itself, honesty and love revealing what was hidden. Perhaps separation to follow another path is the only way to show what it is to be loved by oneself. Maybe there can’t be love between two people without service to a higher love?
I’m sorry, Jos, it took me a while to get back to you.
To touch on some points here ~
I believe we largely love others for how much they love us, for how they make us feel, for how they fill in our gaps. We seek others because we feel incomplete in ourselves. And love is well known to be one of the strongest addictions of all :) In separation from our beloved, we can observe how the mind behaves, desperately trying to recreate the image and feeling of what is now gone—either by intensifying the colours of memories and torturing us with them or by constructing hypothetical future scenarios. It is a maddening experience, but if approached with tenderness and perhaps even a touch of bittersweet humour, we can see it for what it truly is: the process of uncoupling, of recovering from the constant supply of the intoxicating substance personified by our beloved.
As for manipulation and making love too accessible—love is often wrapped in fear. Loving makes us vulnerable, exposed. We want to trust that the other won’t hurt us as we open our hearts wide for them to see their contents, to inhabit them, but we know very well it is a gamble, a great risk. We might, and likely will, be hurt. What we can do is ensure we take care of ourselves and tend to our own needs—even if that means walking away from a dynamic that ends up bringing us more harm than contentment.
Growth, as you write, reveals where we still need healing, where our wounds call in those who will mirror and magnify them. I believe we can learn to love ourselves within a relationship, but I agree that periods of solitude are indispensable to the process. They teach us how to feel “enough” within ourselves. They show us where we feel incomplete and call us to fill those gaps—not placing the burden of this impossible task upon another.
😊 That’s ok. I wasn’t expecting a reply. Cognitively I can see the good and the bad. I know I was being used and manipulated. I know it had to end for me to see my worth and that I deserve more but my heart still hurts from the process. Maybe it’s nostalgia. I’m imagining it was better than it was - a common side effect of gaslighting and my own projections. I thought love was living through hard times when actually it was just abuse and destroying me. 😔 I also know I completely lost myself in the relationship and so can’t have been a healthy partner. I’ve relived the exact trauma my parents put me through with my ex, and have had to learn and unlearn so much as a result. How to heal my nervous system and let go of all the pain within my body, so I can free myself from the fear. Surely this has to be better for me and my kids in the long run and maybe that was the whole point. It has certainly made me realise my own shortcomings and become closer to God. You are right I was asking the impossible from a partner. I needed to be forced out to have a different perspective and I have to learn what loving myself means. As you say I need solitude for that.✨
Deeply grateful, Jos, for you taking the time to read and for asking such important and difficult questions!
Let me try to answer them to the best of my ability.
In my view, everyone can, and yearns to, love. Many of us are simply too afraid to open into the vulnerability that love requires, so we shield ourselves with behaviours that often appear hurtful, rude, selfish, or upsetting to others. I won’t go too far into hypothetical scenarios here, as I’ve learned that it's often best to stop where the other person asks us to—if they push us away, we listen. More often than not, their actions are reflections of their own insecurities and fears and say little to nothing about us—unless, of course, we’ve done something hurtful to them, in which case self-examination is necessary.
That said, I don’t want to overlook the real pain caused by those who manipulate love, bending it into something that serves only themselves. Love, by its nature, flows freely; it is not something to be controlled, hoarded, or used as a weapon. When someone exploits our love for their own gain, it can leave us doubting whether love itself is safe to give. But love does not diminish because someone struggles to receive it with care. It remains ours to offer, though sometimes the wisest thing we can do is to offer it from a distance.
In my own challenges of this nature, I’ve learned that completely withdrawing love from others is never the right answer. After all, how can we command love to cease when it is the very essence of our being? The truth is, we cannot help but love. However, as I mentioned, some people are to be loved from a distance; they don't need to be a part of our lives if they hurt us. Moving on—letting go of attachments, arrangements, and commitments—is sometimes necessary for our own well-being (and often theirs too). But that doesn’t mean we must stop loving them. The key distinction here is between holding onto attachment under the name of love and truly loving someone despite their actions. I choose my words carefully here because I don’t mean to suggest staying in harmful relationships or justifying another’s behaviour for the sake of love. Deep love is full of wisdom; it seeks no harm—neither to those we love nor to ourselves. It also doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. At times, it is the strongest when it is quiet.
As for the saying you mention, I suppose it as a question of the depth and vastness of love. We can, of course, love others more or less than we love ourselves, but self-love gradually softens us into the recognition that no being is separate from us. True self-love, I found, often comes after we’ve been humbled beyond self-delusion—when we’ve seen that we are capable of both the terrible and the beautiful. Standing in this truth, we can embrace our whole selves and, in doing so, recognise another within us: sharing with respect both their faults and virtues. This is when we can love more fully and honestly.
Softening and deepening into ourselves, we also come to understand that no one else can make us truly happy, fulfilled, or loved. We stop placing that expectation on others, and in turn, we offer ourselves more kindness and warmth, whether in a relationship or not. This often inspires others to do the same. When we love ourselves, our worth is no longer tied to how others perceive us, which allows us to love without excessive fear. In that sense, I do believe we can only love another to the extent that we have learned (and dared) to love ourselves.
I hope this is helpful! Please let me know if you'd like me to explain something more :)
Wow, what an in-depth and truly insightful musing on love, Justyna! I especially enjoyed the part about impermanence and non-self: "if everything is in flux, then love, unbound by a single fixed self, can flow freely. To live without separation, to un-self, is to be love with all things."
Beautiful!
Also, when I was a teenager I had an appaloosa similar to the one in the painting. His name was Pepper! 😊
Thank you so much, Don! As I wrote in the Note, your words and kindness mean a lot to me :) And also, happy to hear about the horse — it made me smile to know you had a similar one!
To answer your question: I am willing to follow my love all the way to unselfing, but my ego is not ready to give up:)
It never gives up the fight easily! Fortunately for us, love has a way of loosening its grip, moment by moment :) Wishing you spaciousness in the unfolding!
oh dear Davor, what is your ego? Where does it hide? How is it like? Can you describe it?
I only know you are a wonderful human, we all human have ego, can you love your ego as I love you, as life loves you, selflessly?
beautiful: To love fully is to allow ourselves to be stretched, emptied, and remade. Fresh out of sesshin I'm touching in with this emptied and (almost, maybe) remade. Thank you, J.
Deep bow to you, dear Elena 🙏 Thank you for sharing this, and for your wonderful presence here.
I imagine you must be now feeling that quiet, expansive openness—emptied, yet brimming, which enfolds us when we dedicated ourselves to inner quietness sufficiently enough. Wishing you deep rest and integration in this space of return 🙏
awww such a wise and beautiful ode to love, to existance, to selfflessness Justyna!!!
My humble perspective on your question:
you are,
everyone else is,
who thinks otherwise?
what is that?
Thank you for reading and for sharing your thoughts, Forrest! :)
SOOOO BEAUTIFUL! Thank you so much for sharing this delicious work! ❤️
Thank you so much, Pamela! So grateful for your presence here and your kindness! 🤍 And I'm sorry for such a late reply, somehow I missed your comment
This is timeless.
As I navigate waters that call for this courage, surrender and trust you mention it is rich the way I feel blessed to have come across this beautiful piece. I feel a sense of solace. I feel a traveler who has gone deep and far along the same road I am about to embark on has just left a few trails, guidelines, gems and reminders along the way so I continue to trust the journey.
Thank you. This reassures, this brings perspective and this unravels the beauty that we can experience given we allow ourselves to.
Thank you, Justyna. This will inform my future actions, awareness and perspective. I feel blessed to have found this.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful reflection, Chelton! And I'm sorry for responding late — I missed your comment
I’m glad these words could offer a bit of perspective and steadiness as you navigate your own stretch of the road. It means a lot to know they’ll continue to accompany you in some way.
Wishing you clarity, trust, softness and strength as you move forward — and thank you again for meeting this piece with such presence 🙏
The gratitude is mutual.
Beautiful. Thank you. ❤️
Somehow I missed your comment, Lee! I'm sorry. Grateful for your kind words and you taking the time to read ❤️
Thanks; a timely invitation to be and to flow. Beautiful
Grateful for your words and your presence, dear Peter 🙏
Great piece. Love your writing as always. //Like an untempered metal, a heart shielded from the heat of life becomes unable to be shaped by love.// 🥰 I’d be interested in your thoughts on people that can’t love and weaponise our love for their own gain. It seems the flow love needs is to navigate past these people and find a way to move on. I find the saying that ‘you can only love someone as much as you love yourself’ a hard concept to grasp.
Wow what a reply. It’s taking me a while to digest all this. Yeh I think I’m getting at attachment to another person rather than the universal love for all people. How you let that go, if you can or need to, as once you love someone that doesn’t go away. However when you’ve been brainwashed into thinking they love you through their words, hot and cold behaviour creating an addiction, being blinded by love, you start to question what you have been a part of. Removing our own projections of that person, that maybe you were the only one in love all along. That what they loved about you was how much you loved them? Without a healthy early attachment we confuse love for the butterflies a person can give us, when they may be a warning. Maybe we make love too accessible and the person takes it for granted. We become too easily manipulated. I think I’m much more in favour of quiet love now like you say. That if we are all frequency and only attract our energetic opposite what does that say about me and the space I was in? Growth inevitably leads to awareness, a person’s true character showing itself, honesty and love revealing what was hidden. Perhaps separation to follow another path is the only way to show what it is to be loved by oneself. Maybe there can’t be love between two people without service to a higher love?
I’m sorry, Jos, it took me a while to get back to you.
To touch on some points here ~
I believe we largely love others for how much they love us, for how they make us feel, for how they fill in our gaps. We seek others because we feel incomplete in ourselves. And love is well known to be one of the strongest addictions of all :) In separation from our beloved, we can observe how the mind behaves, desperately trying to recreate the image and feeling of what is now gone—either by intensifying the colours of memories and torturing us with them or by constructing hypothetical future scenarios. It is a maddening experience, but if approached with tenderness and perhaps even a touch of bittersweet humour, we can see it for what it truly is: the process of uncoupling, of recovering from the constant supply of the intoxicating substance personified by our beloved.
As for manipulation and making love too accessible—love is often wrapped in fear. Loving makes us vulnerable, exposed. We want to trust that the other won’t hurt us as we open our hearts wide for them to see their contents, to inhabit them, but we know very well it is a gamble, a great risk. We might, and likely will, be hurt. What we can do is ensure we take care of ourselves and tend to our own needs—even if that means walking away from a dynamic that ends up bringing us more harm than contentment.
Growth, as you write, reveals where we still need healing, where our wounds call in those who will mirror and magnify them. I believe we can learn to love ourselves within a relationship, but I agree that periods of solitude are indispensable to the process. They teach us how to feel “enough” within ourselves. They show us where we feel incomplete and call us to fill those gaps—not placing the burden of this impossible task upon another.
😊 That’s ok. I wasn’t expecting a reply. Cognitively I can see the good and the bad. I know I was being used and manipulated. I know it had to end for me to see my worth and that I deserve more but my heart still hurts from the process. Maybe it’s nostalgia. I’m imagining it was better than it was - a common side effect of gaslighting and my own projections. I thought love was living through hard times when actually it was just abuse and destroying me. 😔 I also know I completely lost myself in the relationship and so can’t have been a healthy partner. I’ve relived the exact trauma my parents put me through with my ex, and have had to learn and unlearn so much as a result. How to heal my nervous system and let go of all the pain within my body, so I can free myself from the fear. Surely this has to be better for me and my kids in the long run and maybe that was the whole point. It has certainly made me realise my own shortcomings and become closer to God. You are right I was asking the impossible from a partner. I needed to be forced out to have a different perspective and I have to learn what loving myself means. As you say I need solitude for that.✨
Deeply grateful, Jos, for you taking the time to read and for asking such important and difficult questions!
Let me try to answer them to the best of my ability.
In my view, everyone can, and yearns to, love. Many of us are simply too afraid to open into the vulnerability that love requires, so we shield ourselves with behaviours that often appear hurtful, rude, selfish, or upsetting to others. I won’t go too far into hypothetical scenarios here, as I’ve learned that it's often best to stop where the other person asks us to—if they push us away, we listen. More often than not, their actions are reflections of their own insecurities and fears and say little to nothing about us—unless, of course, we’ve done something hurtful to them, in which case self-examination is necessary.
That said, I don’t want to overlook the real pain caused by those who manipulate love, bending it into something that serves only themselves. Love, by its nature, flows freely; it is not something to be controlled, hoarded, or used as a weapon. When someone exploits our love for their own gain, it can leave us doubting whether love itself is safe to give. But love does not diminish because someone struggles to receive it with care. It remains ours to offer, though sometimes the wisest thing we can do is to offer it from a distance.
In my own challenges of this nature, I’ve learned that completely withdrawing love from others is never the right answer. After all, how can we command love to cease when it is the very essence of our being? The truth is, we cannot help but love. However, as I mentioned, some people are to be loved from a distance; they don't need to be a part of our lives if they hurt us. Moving on—letting go of attachments, arrangements, and commitments—is sometimes necessary for our own well-being (and often theirs too). But that doesn’t mean we must stop loving them. The key distinction here is between holding onto attachment under the name of love and truly loving someone despite their actions. I choose my words carefully here because I don’t mean to suggest staying in harmful relationships or justifying another’s behaviour for the sake of love. Deep love is full of wisdom; it seeks no harm—neither to those we love nor to ourselves. It also doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. At times, it is the strongest when it is quiet.
As for the saying you mention, I suppose it as a question of the depth and vastness of love. We can, of course, love others more or less than we love ourselves, but self-love gradually softens us into the recognition that no being is separate from us. True self-love, I found, often comes after we’ve been humbled beyond self-delusion—when we’ve seen that we are capable of both the terrible and the beautiful. Standing in this truth, we can embrace our whole selves and, in doing so, recognise another within us: sharing with respect both their faults and virtues. This is when we can love more fully and honestly.
Softening and deepening into ourselves, we also come to understand that no one else can make us truly happy, fulfilled, or loved. We stop placing that expectation on others, and in turn, we offer ourselves more kindness and warmth, whether in a relationship or not. This often inspires others to do the same. When we love ourselves, our worth is no longer tied to how others perceive us, which allows us to love without excessive fear. In that sense, I do believe we can only love another to the extent that we have learned (and dared) to love ourselves.
I hope this is helpful! Please let me know if you'd like me to explain something more :)
Thank you, Kevan, for taking the time to read—and for appreciating! :)