Finding Love Within
By: Mag Raine
Tags: Finding Yourself, Joyful, Disability, Love, Sadness

Photo by Gautam Krishnan on Unsplash

It’s not the end of the world to be disabled, believe me, I know, I’ve had cerebral palsy all my life. I know all the struggles, the stares, the cruelty, the laughs, the rejection, the physical barriers, the barriers of attitude. But I’ve come to see that this life is to teach me something about patience, compassion, understanding, and also to looking beyond the physical body and getting to the core of humanity which is the soul or the self within, Being disabled does not mean anything, anything can be positive or negative, it’s your own attitude towards life which makes it positive or negative. In a sense the cerebral palsy has been a gift.

A gift? You must think I’m nuts. It is a different concept certainly, but it is true that suffering is a great teacher of compassion. As a child I suffered from spasticity and a tense body that would not cooperate with my mind, now it seems a double whammy, because I also have back problems and hip trouble caused by the cerebral palsy, so I am in pain a good deal of the time.

Since people can’t readily understand my speech, I’ve had to develop patience in repeating myself, or finding other ways of communicating. I’ve developed a will to live my life as fully as possible and if that includes falling in love, so be it. I’m just like any other woman; I have all the same passions and desires, a need to be loved as well as a need to give love and to share my life with someone special.

Finding someone special is difficult, how many people will even take the time to talk to me and get to know who I am? How many will take a chance — how many can see beyond the physical issues? How many people can truly accept me as I am? Very few, and even fewer are the ones I will trust my heart to. I’m not just looking for a lover, but for the qualities I like; a friend… I finally met somebody who seemed interested in me and who also had all the qualities I look for.

It was exciting to feel that a man found me attractive, and to feel that he liked and cared about me more than just as a friend. It was always so electric when we touched, a sweet passionate fire would sweep through my entire body, and it seemed that he was always touching me in some way; whether to grab me at my waist and tickle me, or to give me a big hug where I’d be pulled off the ground and swung gently back and forth in a tight embrace. Sometimes he would just place his hand over mine to tell me to relax and take my time — and then there were those eyes of his, big clear blue eyes that looked at me with so much love sometimes.

He was there for me when my mother was going through treatment for cancer, perhaps that was the only reason he came into my life. Perhaps he did love me as a woman. Perhaps I asked too much of him too soon. I had never had a boyfriend, never been on a date, and never made love to a man. I realized at some point in my early thirties that what I wanted in my life is a man to share my life with. When this man came into the picture I just wanted him so badly, and I became addicted to the touching and I craved more and more of it and I just wanted him to love me so badly.

I know he loved me as a friend. To say that the man I loved didn’t love me is wrong. I know he loved me and liked me. He never said any harsh words to me, never deliberately or knowingly hurt me, (until he left the ashram to be with a girlfriend). He was a very patient and good humored soul. I just wanted to give him everything I could, wanted to be friends until the end of time. I’ve cried a lot these past months, and at times it felt my heart would break. My heart did break, but it broke open in a beautiful way so that I could love him in a very pure way, as well as my love for everybody deepened to a new depth; this is the true love, the true spirituality. For in all my pain, there has been something deeper and stronger sustaining me, I had to go very deep within my own being once again and discover my own love, find my own center.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

And in that center, in that love, there was no anger, no resentment, if I was angry at him, it was totally dissolved in that love, anger had no chance to build up. There was really nothing to be angry about, but the mind keeps trying anyhow. With meditation and chanting all my anger was being rooted out of me, dissolved and turned into love. A different kind of love. I was amazed to see how deep this love can go. I had been practicing meditation for over four years at that time and the love kept growing still deeper and deeper.

I kept wondering how much deeper this feeling of love can grow? How could I manage to hold it all in? It takes a certain kind of strength — you know how overwhelming it can be to feel love for one person, imagine feeling intense love for many people all at once. The love has to grow, the strength has to grow to hold it too. What’s growing is our awareness of our own inner source of strength, love and joy that happens through meditation on that inner source as well as divine grace, which can happen when we open our minds to great teachers and allow their words to root out or false notions of who we are.

Why did I seek love in the first place? What was it about joining with a man that made me feel I was whole? Couldn’t I feel whole when I was alone? Whole and healthy and strong within my own self? The happy answer is yes. Yes, I can feel happy, healthy, strong and whole within my self while I am alone or when I am in a relationship. Everything I desire from a relationship can be found right within my own self. The reason I craved love, the reason I sought love from a man was because I wasn’t tapping into the wellspring of my inner self which is the one and only source of love, joy, peace and happiness I will ever find. If I can’t find these things inside myself, then whatever joy or love I happen to find in another person or object will always only be temporary. This is important for everybody to know.

When I saw that the relationship could go no further than a friendship, and I saw what it was doing to me, though I still loved him very much, my mind started to spin and I asked myself hundreds of questions.

~~~~~It’s not easy not to have expectations, desires, hopes and dreams. Our culture has taught us to believe that we need somebody, somebody to care about us, somebody to give us that love which many people are so hungry for. These concepts have been ingrained in you and me from the time of birth. In romantic love or in exclusive love, there is always fear; fear of rejection, fear of losing the person we love, although in truth we never really have that person. In divine love however, there is no fear, there is only that love.

Actually without that longing for joy and love there can be no longing for God or however we conceive our highest aspiration, whomever we pray to. We really long for love which is unconditional love. For there to be a light side, there must also be a dark side, otherwise we would not search for light, for joy or love. When we practice meditation, or find our inner strength we reach a point where we are naturally joyful, loving, and in tune with the music of life — totally at one with the universe.

Through meditation on the inner self, I have found I can tap that never-ending source of love and joy, and when I tapped that inner source I realized I was already whole and complete within my own self. Even though I live in this body, I am not just this body. I then realized that love and joy don’t come from others, nor can these things really be given, but they can be shared. And it’s that sharing of love with another that I long for, sharing of life’s joys and sorrows, sharing quiet time together.

My mother did not give birth to a child with cerebral palsy; I was born perfectly normal. However, I did sustain brain damage as an infant while I was ill with Jaundice. Cerebral palsy is brain damage to the central nervous system which controls all the muscles in the body and how they interact with each other. Growing up with disabilities was difficult, but there were also good days and moments of joy and elation, as well as the frustrations, the struggles.

If I truly want to be happy, if I want to know divine love, I must first know and love myself in the deepest sense. By loving myself as well as the self of all, I can love others much more fully and deeply than I used to experience. I AM HAPPY, happier than I’ve ever been in my life and my happiness continues to grow.

Photo by Charles Postiaux on Unsplash

I am here in this physical plane to grow and evolve into my highest potential which is a state of great peace and love. And to help me evolve and grow, I must go through certain situations, and so I must learn the lessons of true love and compassion, which is why I fell in love with the man, and other men since then. Have you ever thought about it really? Why do we fall in love? What is the purpose of falling in love?

I will tell you what has come to me through my introspections; When I fall in love, it means my heart has opened up to someone — for whatever reasons — I had only a limited amount of love most of the time for a small number of people, but when I started on a path of meditation, I started feeling more love for everybody on a universal level, then one day I saw this man and boom, I thought I was “in love.”

The truth is that what I was responding to was a reflection of my self, the man may or may not feel the same way, right? It was all in my own consciousness that this love was taking place, the other person hasn’t yet crystalized in my mind as ‘real’. I realized later that being ‘in love’, and loving him were two different things. The love within ourselves goes beyond the carnal desires, beyond the quirks, to the essence of the soul within, the self within, divine love is not exclusive love for only one person.

Time — and meditation on my own inner source of strength have healed the wounds of hurt and disappointment on more than one occasion since the 1980s. Just because these relationships did not turn out as I had hoped, doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. I am determined to get on with my life.

Photo by Cody Chan on Unsplash

Each day is a new beginning, another chance to renew my connection with my own source of inner strength and love, and a chance to help others. When my spirit is hurting, I take refuge in nature; in the trees, in the grass, in the wind, in the water flowing by.

Tamar Raine 1984/2020