What Love Is

by Nick Ralls

I decide to seek out lessons which show me what love is... and do not spend too long in the class of what love is not. I wish to be a teacher of love although I will not beat myself up when I show others what love is not. I just know the direction I am heading in: what love is!!

SO LOVE is the lesson.

And we both teach it and learn it.

Let's consider this day just how we are teaching love. What sort of teacher are we? At times it is inevitable that we will be showing those around what love is not!

People will be able to see that we are not the perfect role model... they really don't want to behave in the way that we are behaving. Even although we have lost our way in the garden of love we are still able to teach others about themselves.

Of course, when we are being this type of teacher we do not enjoy the experience... and neither do our students.
You have met this sort of teacher in your own experience at school or college.

The man or woman who is impatient, intolerant, aggressive, heated and all the things that good teachers are really not.

We are all like that at times.

And part of our journey is accepting our own humanity... we cannot always come from a place of what love is because we are not only trying to healing others but we also have a good job to heal ourselves.

It's being human.

Of course, we come to an acceptance over time that being what love is not really does give us a hard time and it is a bit dumb to keep repeating the same old non working behaviours.

So we grow.

Now at other times, we are the teacher who shows what love is. This is when we become the love that we so wish to see in the world.

At this point, we are a teacher who puts smiles on the faces of others with our compassion, our kindness, our joy and our happiness.

We are infectious.

This is the sort of teacher whose lessons are enjoyable for the student. We have met these too in our classes as we progressed through school and college.

These are the teachers with a big heart.

We teach from this space when we are seen to be practising acts of random kindness, when we are patient, understanding, when we listen, when we reach out and touch. So it can be worth appraising just how much of our time is spent demonstrating to others what love is and how much is being out of love and showing what love is not.

In this respect as we evaluate just how we can bring more loving experience into our lives, we can also assess as a student what classes we are showing up in.

Are we choosing the classes that give us the experience of what love is? Or are we spending far too much in that space which really isn't about love at all and just how long do we want to stay there before we realise this is not a good place to be in.

For too many of us we just stay too long in a space that is not love. We are just prepared to put up with the same non loving pattern for just far too long. It can take us just too long to remove ourselves from those people who make us feel bad.

It can take us too long to absent ourselves from an environment that does not make us feel peaceful and harmonious. It can take us far too long to move away from the battle zone or the shores of discontent.

We don't have to clock up hours and hours and hours of the same old lesson. We can move onto a different lesson.

The best lessons are the ones that are fun, joyful and happy. Remember those when you were a real life student?
Now we can choose them in our life.

It is the difference between going with the flow and going against the tide.

Consciously, each moment of our lives we can choose to either stay in the fear zone or we can step out into a new way of living and experiencing which is all about what love is.

We can fall in love, may be for the first time in a long time.

And just as we experience those ecstatic feelings from time to time about another human being, we can now experience those feelings about ourselves and our lives.

When we feel blissful, we will know we are in love.

So what sort of a teacher of love do we wish to become in this moment..and what sort of student?

Make our journey as teacher and student joyful, loving, happy, harmonious and blissful.

It's best that way!

Copyright Nick Ralls 2009