The wound is the place where the light enters you. -Rumi

There is a deep, pervasive emptiness from which I often try to run and hide. It permeates and weaves through so many aspects of my life, like a malignant web of blackness that darkens my vision and protects me from the very thing that I seek: Love.

Filling my time, my schedule, my mind with activities and tasks, I avoid looking into the emptiness. Yet it beckons me. It calls out and sometimes it seems to  swallow my being. Late last night I tried to avoid its call. I stayed out late, in the hopes of falling asleep before I could gain a glimpse at the emptiness. Instead, it fixed it’s fiery eyes on me and stared me right in the face, gripping my heart with its icy tendrils. It’s grip would not relax until I finally relinquished my fear and met its leering gaze. Once I acknowledged its presence, the real free-fall began.

It is interesting how disconnecting from Facebook, meditating and “Letting go” of my dream of a lover has helped me to find this barren desert in my soul.

In scanning last night through the YouTube videos of one of my favorite spiritual leaders, Teal Swan, I quickly happened upon a post called “Emptiness (How to Stop Feeling Empty)”, embedded below. This nearly 9-minute post helped me to begin to see many of the places in which I have turned away from love. I was able to see a new perspective of where I have been wounded, the moments where I was hurt by what I thought was love.

Love didn’t hurt you. Someone who doesn’t know how to love hurt you & you confused the two.

– Tony Gaskins, Jr

At my core, I know that love heals. To live the full truth of the healing properties of Love, I am looking through my “debris field” for all of the parts of me I have left behind; the parts that believe love hurts.

At the end of the video, Teal uses one of my favorite Rumi quotes to summarize the message she is conveying:

“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.” Rumi

Photo Courtesy of adamr at Freedigitalphotos.net