Brandon Bays on Love
By Brandon Bays
There has to be a willingness to allow the heart to be broken open a thousand times, and a thousand times more, for the vastness of love demands all of you. We cannot hold anything back from love: there must be a willingness to offer all of ourselves into the fire – even if it breaks our hearts; even if we are devastated by the power and immensity of its beauty, there must be the willingness to allow love to ravage us. For it is in the offering of our complete selves into this love that we fall, and in the falling that we are given wings and are free to soar on the wings of grace in the embrace of love.
There can be no half measures when it comes to love. Either you fall in completely or you flounder endlessly, grasping for something just out of your reach, and you taste only a small fraction of its immensity. Love simply requires all of you. And when you hold back any part of yourself from this ocean of love you end up denying yourself the joyous blessing of plunging into the infinite and swimming in grace.
It is not like you can say to love, ‘Oh, I’ll give this much of myself, but no more,’ for the part you hold back will have a life of its own … it will fester and keep you feeling separate from the vast ocean of the infinite, constantly craving for it in its entirety.
I suggest you drown – for the only route into love is to surrender completely, even if your emotional dam breaks. There must be the willingness to offer yourself utterly so that all parts of you are totally exposed, including your so-called shadow parts that you are not so proud of. There must be a willingness to expose even the parts of you that are scared, greedy, wanting, insecure, unworthy, angry, frightened, needy, jealous, raging – grace is going to want all of you in your entirety, good, bad and indifferent. To experience real love is to offer every last bit of existence up to it. In the willingness to expose all of yourself to love, all of grace floods in, surrounding, suffusing, permeating you.
Love requires absolutely everything.
For many of us, even contemplating opening up and allowing all parts of ourselves to be exposed to love is a terrifying prospect. Often, we haven’t even exposed the truth of our pain to ourselves, let alone offered it up to the dazzling, magnifying light of love. And yet, your very retreat from exposure is a retreat from love.
Love and exposure go hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other. Yet in the exposure of everything, all love is experienced to be surrounding, embracing and infusing everything that is brought into its light.
There are so many people who, in feeling the immensity of love’s power resist its force and close a part of themselves off, as if to protect themselves from its intensity. But when they shut down to love, separation from life begins and a dull numbness can result: numbness to emotions, numbness to all of life, and an inability to find one’s way back into love.
Be open to love, and know that sometimes right in the centre of its heartbreaking pain. all you can do is ask for more heartbreak, to turn it up, to open your entire being wider into it – for truly, the only way out of the pain is to go deeper into it. You have to be willing to say ‘yes’ to heartbreak, to surrender totally and pray for more. For as you let go completely into it, with no holding back, your heartbreak is realised to be love itself. And like a river held back by a dam, when you let the dam break, the falling in is experienced as a rush of ecstasy as self merges into self.
It would be a gift if we all experienced this heartbreaking love, for it is the very nature of love to break through all our barriers of resistance and open us into an ocean vaster than could ever be imagined.
There is another requirement love has; not only does it want all of you in complete surrender, but it shows up when you expose everything to yourself. When you are willing to shine the light of love onto the parts of yourself that you are not proud of – onto the unaccepted parts, the unloved parts, the unwanted emotions; when you shine the light of love into all the darkened corners of your soul, including the hidden, unwelcomed corners, love will begin to suffuse them, embrace them, permeate them – until you are left as nothing but love itself.
These parts of ourselves, like shy, unwanted children deserve to be welcomed into the light. They need it in order to experience true freedom.
So, to experience infinite love there must first be self-love, and that means welcoming every part of yourself into the open, into total acceptance. It’s when we welcome these frightened children out into the open and accept what is here, that all healing can commence, in every aspect of our lives.
To heal, you must be willing to expose your true feelings in their entirety to the all-accepting light of love. Everything is welcome in love. Love is not picky or choosey, it loves absolutely everything.
On the final morning of a recent retreat, a beautiful, radiant man from New Zealand stood on stage to celebrate his birthday by opening himself to the fullness of the love in the room. I had instructed everyone to share openly with him what qualities they saw in him, and asked him to open and receive their praise. People began to call out what they saw, ‘I see strength,’ ‘I see vulnerability,’ ‘I see tenderness,’ ‘I see wisdom,’ … They shouted from various corners of the room, ‘I see intensity,’ ‘kindness,’ ‘laser-like intelligence,’ ‘peace,’ the list went on and on.
Sitting next to him on the stage, I could sense that it was beginning to be too much for him to hold: it was like he was subtly bracing himself, not allowing the words to fully penetrate; as if he couldn’t quite allow in all the beauty that was being reflected back to him. His body, though open, was also a bit stiffened; as if he was afraid he might lose control or break if he really allowed the truth to reach inside him.
Quietly, I whispered, ‘I suggest you drown. You can’t hold back this tidal wave with some imagined shield. I suggest you surrender … just drown in the love.’ And something broke – a chink cracked open and, in one moment, all armour crumbled and fell away. Tears started streaming.
With no barriers there, the room became an ocean of love – unbridled, unguarded love. He was sitting there for all to see in complete unguarded exposure, and everyone was welcome to reflect back to him what was truly there.
‘Ocean of love,’ someone said. ‘Innocence,’ said another. ‘All love,’ I said quietly, ‘All love.’
And so it is: all love is here the moment complete and total exposure happens.
To experience true love there has to be a willingness to have your heart broken by it a thousand times, for it is in the letting go into its force that the heartbreak itself is experienced as love. Then love is realised to be not a personal love, but an omnipresent field of love that permeates all of life. It’s embrace is never ending, infinite and complete. And in this love you rest as total completion, utter peace, soaring freedom.
You are love itself.
The time has come to surrender completely. There is no escaping love – for it is everywhere. The time has come to surrender to freedom.