love and intimacy is the cause of all our happiness and sorrow; our well-being and sickness, and of all our pain and healing. To give up one is to give up the other. If you deny yourself love for fear of the pain, you would undoubtedly be depriving yourself of all the ecstasies too. Surely the high that love alone can swing you to is worth the risk of pain?
   And then, there is a beauty to even the pain that love brings. Its beauty lies in the depth of emotion we experience and to the way we respond to it. Some of our most beautiful poetry, songs and art have been the result of emotional turmoil resulting from rejection in love. In fact many creative artists work on perfecting the art of wallowing in melancholy. The world’s greatest love stories have ended in pain and separation. Does that stop us from idolising Romeo & Juliet, Tristan & Isolde, Heer Ranjha or Paro Devdas?
   There are those who say that love never ends. Two individuals may choose to end a relationship, yet if they truly loved each other, the love lasts beyond their togetherness. It is an emotion that you can revisit and wrap around yourself as a comfort in times of loneliness and despair. Love imbues two individuals with a sense of wellbeing, happiness and confidence that rest of the world cannot penetrate. And when they separate, why must they also give up all the positive strokes love brought them?
   Whether or not you are able to smile at shared happy moments later and retain the positive feelings really depends on the way two individuals choose to end their relationship.
   Dr Brian Weiss in Only Love is Real, the book Princess Diana read just before she took off on her last holiday with Dodi, explains that love is a powerful, reuniting energy. If you believe in love as the be-all and end-all of our existence; as both the beginning as well as conclusion of the journey of life, you would agree that we need to go through any number of relationships in life because we learn our life’s lessons through them — “forgiveness, understanding, patience, awareness, non-violence…We have to unlearn other traits, such as f e a r … a n ge r … . g r e e d … h at r e d … pride… ego which result from old conditioning.’
   If that’s so, then the very purpose of the beginning and ending of a relationship must be to enable us to learn valuable lessons. And, if we don’t understand that, we would be doomed to a series of loves that keep ending in grief!
   Love sharpens our senses and mental faculties. It increases our capacity for giving as well as receiving emotion. Love brings with it enlightenment and a lightness of being. And when love creeps away, it leaves us with a depth of emotion that is just as meaningful and necessary to our existence, to the very fabric of our lives…
   I hold it true, whate’er befall;
   I feel it, when I sorrow most;
   ‘Tis better to have loved and lost
   Than never to have loved at all.
   — Lord Tennyson

 by       : vinita dawra nangia

source : timeslife.

What we have created individually and collectively is a world where we believe we are each a separate entity from one another and separate from the very planet that sustains us.
   Because we believe we are separate, we go by the philosophy of “I have to look out for myself,” therefore, i will do whatever it takes to ensure i have enough of whatever i desire. If my desires impinge on your needs, my desires take precedence, because i am better than you. That is how our world is run today.
   We believe in a system that says i can go outside myself into the physical world and do the things it takes to provide me with the possessions that i lack to make my life better and make me happy.
   For too many of us this system does not work. Material possessions and being better does not seem to bring us inner peace and happiness. These concepts are elusive when you try to achieve them by going outside yourself into the physical world.
   Think about this: Inner peace. Just the very sound of it tells us where to go. You can’t find it outside of yourself; you have to go inside. You have to go to your inner source. The source that gives all of us unbelievable resources, strength and guidance is present in all of us to use on our life journey. We need merely go inside ourselves to find it.
   The key is to go inside yourself and reconnect with your spirit. You see, we are all made up as a threepart being; mind, body and spirit. We are born into this world in perfect balance.
   As we begin learning the ways of our journey we try to live in this balance. But when we encounter the external world, we find that our parents, teachers, and friends, with the
best of intentions, impart on us their interpretations of this physical world, along with all their rules and expectations.
   The spiritual side of us does not conform to these external parameters, but eventually we prioritise our lives around the external rules and expectations placed upon us by others and begin to lose the balance of our spirit in our day-to-day living. We become more and more controlled by the mind and the body.
   So the mind, controlled largely by the ego, and the body, which we identify as our entity, are subject to the physical world with the total ability to create and adapt to it as we like; that is, with “free will.”
   And adapt we do. We buy into the separation mentality that says, “My body and existence is different and separate from yours, and so I must do what is best for me.”
   Only by bringing the spirit back into the equation to create a balanced mind-body-spirit being do we come to understand that we are not separate at all, but that we are all one. Because we are one, what we do to another, we do to ourselves.
   It is the wonderful golden rule that we all know, but which we rarely live by: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
   Wow! Can you imagine what our world would be like if we actually lived by the Golden Rule?
   You can’t live by the golden rule if you thinkthat you are separate from everyone else. Only within the paradigm of oneness can the concept of the golden rule be achieved. This is what nuts and bolts Spirituality is all about.
   When you change the way you live your life you begin to influence others in the way they live their lives. It is in this conscious change that we collectively influence how the human race evolves.
   We are at a crossroads on this planet. We have created the ability to make this planet unlivable to the human life form. If we continue down the path that we are on now we could see this happen in the not too distant future.
   Our present belief system has taken us to this point in our existence. Only a change in our belief system will determine whether we will continue on a path of destruction or allow us to follow another path toward a more enlightened existence.
   You are totally at choice as to which belief system serves you. You can believe that you are separate from all things or you can believe that you are one with all things.
   You are always at choice in what you believe and how you create your life. Nothing has changed.
   The key is to be aware of and understand what serves you, and what does not serve you. It is then up to you to create your life by making conscious choices as to what serves you best.
   The choice is yours. It always has been and always will be.