Challenges with Love

love chakra Its funny how life is sometimes. When i changed my name to Ife (meaning Love in Yoruba) i didn’t understand how profoundly it would impact on my life. In Africa a name is supposed to mean something to the holder: a tendency or aspiration that the person is meant to live up to.

I’m discovering that love is challenging. Most of the time the love we show is about our expectations mostly. Recently i found that Ife can be found in the language and people of Lugbara

(Arua, West Nile Uganda) and it means to give, which is interesting because most of the time we do not Love to give but to receive. Its tricky because when you are loving people tend to see this as a weakness and seek to take advantage. However its not about allowing yourself to be a doormat, but allowing the universal love to enter us and flow outwards into the world.

I question myself, especially when it comes to relationships. If I am filled with love do I love only one person? This seems to be a dilemma for many people as we don’t want to share. If we love its only meant to be for one person at a time. This has become the societal standard and if we go beyond loving more than one person the names we get called are numerous  and all of them highly negative.  Do i sound like a hippie? Im not talking about having sex with everybody which is usually the association made with Loving.

What I’m talking about is the ability to Love to destroy arrogance, egoism, anger, hatred, lust, jealousy,envy and fear. To witness these emotions, to understand myself and to question why they occur.

We live in a world of duality e.g. good/bad and we seek to define our experiences through this very narrow lens.

Questions we need to ask ourselves before we act are

1. Am I doing this out of love?

2. Is it necessary for my spiritual evolution or does it contain elements of greet and egoistic desire?

3. Am i doing something for this person because I love them and want to love that person through my actions or am i doing it because i expect them to love me in return and to make me happy by their being grateful to me and doing something for me in return?

The path to Love is not an easy one, but through meditation I am learning to understand myself or i should say my personality and to separate that from my soul which is where i truly want my love to spring from.