by Johanna Fredericks, Bachelor of Education, Perth WA
The lies about Love that I have fallen for were exposed to me yesterday when I attended the Couples Workshop held by Universal Medicine. As it turns out, it wasn’t really just for couples, it was actually a ‘Relationship Workshop’ – about our relationship with self and our relationships with others.
We were asked simple and direct questions that, for me, exposed the false ideals and beliefs that I was holding on to around what Love is.
Because of these ideals and beliefs, which I hold only in my mind, I sometimes feel hurt when others don’t meet my idea of Love. When I come from my mind’s perception of what Love is or from what I was ‘told’ Love should be, I get tricked into thinking that I get hurt.
The biggest revelation for me during the Universal Medicine relationship workshop – one that I felt deeply to be true in my body – was that Love is from the heart and the heart is pure and it can never actually get hurt. I also got to feel very deeply that Love is universal, it is equal for all, it is a quality and an energy that we naturally are and can hold others in.
Even though I have been developing a deeper level of love in my body over the last 6 years, and I know that I AM LOVE and I feel the purity of true Love when I am connected to my heart, throughout the workshop I got to feel the depths of the absolute lies that I had been sold about Love in my life.
For example, in the past I believed Love was about:
- Meeting expectations,
- Doing something ‘nice’ for someone,
- Always giving up time, even if it was at expense to self,
- Recognition and identification,
- Buying gifts and making gestures for the sake of it,
- Not speaking up,
- Sex,
- Enjoining in emotional messes,
- Allowing people close to me to get away with treating me, at times, without care.
It was freeing to feel this, as I no longer carry the hurt because I now understand it.
And if we are all holding misinterpretations and expectations of what Love is, then our relationships are being affected greatly, because one person’s expectation rarely fits in with another’s. No wonder there is often a mismatch!
I also now know there are no limits or boundaries to Love in its true form. I got to feel the two versions of Love and they are polar opposites.
I allowed myself to see, with my eyes wide open, what I had been sold as Love and what I had fallen for. I held the two views side by side: what I had been sold and believed versus, what I know love to be and feel deep in me and in others. When I compared the two versions, I got to feel the great injustice of it all.
Now I know True Love is about (and the fact is, I knew this Love when I was little):
- Treating myself and another with tenderness, preciousness and a deep level of care,
- Consideration, understanding and appreciation,
- Feeling the quality of the movement in my body and the care in the voice,
- Getting called out when we are not being the Love that we are,
- Not holding back in expressing Love in action or word,
- Looking deeply into another’s eyes,
- Allowing fragility, true intimacy and surrendering,
- Holding Love strong and supporting others,
- Being interested in another and being patient.
Love for me now is also:
- About letting me know that I matter greatly,
- Supportive, nourishing and TRUE,
- Something each and everyone of us IS and deserves.
Today, I am more able to live in this amazing Love and know that it is there for us all, should we choose it! Through the consistent and unwavering true Love Serge Benhayon and those from Universal Medicine have shown me, and through Universal Medicine presentations and workshops such as the recent one on relationships, I’ve been able to feel Love in its true form and have been clearly shown that this Love can be lived every day. From this reflection I’ve also been able to feel that I AM LOVE.
Now I am deeply inspired to support myself every day to live the Love that I am, in connection to my heart. This love is so grand, I am forever unfolding, developing and deepening… allowing the Love that lives within me to be… and no longer falling for lies about love.
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
The true meaning of love is very different to the false emotional interpretation of love, ‘I also now know there are no limits or boundaries to Love in its true form’.
What I am able to do now is call out when I have not been loving, when I have said or done something that on reflection was not loving towards myself or others. Next is to catch it before I say something, to feel first if it is the truth or not. That requires a level of stillness within me so that I can become more aware of what is happening around me. I feel there is a way to live where we can see/feel something before it happens and then there are no surprises because we have read the energy ahead of time. When we live in space, time is on the back foot.
Your list of the things that love really is, shows that love is available to us all, in fact it is sitting within and dying to be felt and expressed. I can still walk around thinking that love is created externally- it either comes from someone or is made between special combinations of people. So it was based on exclusivity and that it came from external sources. These are not true. I have felt most the most loved, the most precious, the most cherished only ever when it has come from inside me and when I have felt my own grandness and preciousness; that fact that I am love.
Love does come from inside us, as we are love.
Love is far greater than behaviours done, items or words received. It’s a quality that is grander to feel than any of it.
Reading your lists, lies about love read like lies about ourselves. It’s like, how can we truly know ourselves if we are denying love? Coming to the truth of ourselves brings us closer to the truth of love, and vice versa.
Accepting that we are love, ‘I am deeply inspired to support myself every day to live the Love that I am, in connection to my heart.’
Reconnecting to true Love within the inner-heart is to know who you are.
Great questions Johanna, and may I add to this equation, starting with- Love? True Love? love? Unconditional Love / love, Universal Love / love, Songs about Love / love, “Love in its true form,” “Love should be,” and I Love / love you, have all been calculated, so we are stressed out about what Love can hold for us, and as True Love is in the being never the doing, the search starts from within our being or inner-most, esoteric and or Soul. And starting out being gentle before being Self-loving on the path to Love, holds us in good stead as every aspect of life has a different relationship with the simplicity of Love and our connection to our Soul!
Growing up I always used to find hearts everywhere, I would be walking on the street or helping my mother in the kitchen and a heart would appear. I used to draw them everywhere and seek them too actually, I would try to see the love in everything. As I grew up, it turned into desperation, there was no love in the interactions I was observing around me so I tried to seek love in symbolism more and more, when we got the internet I would constantly read about love, relationships and romance. Everything I did in my life was in pursuit of finding love, someone or something to match my knowing of what that word meant, and my God have I been satisfied when I met Serge Benhayon, the Universal Medicine team and the student body!
Seek and you shall find! And the teacher shall appear when the student is ready.
Someone told me that actually, I used to go to a yoga class in my gym a couple of years ago and a friend of mine really was in pursuit of her teacher, a guru that will help her to elevate to a higher state of being. I just went along for the stretches, yoga is quite good for that. One day I was waiting for her while she was talking to the instructor and he said to us exactly that, the student will find their teacher when they are ready. In that moment I thought, “pft, who can teach me something I can’t learn myself?” but I see what he meant, there will be people in our lives who can show us a different way, in such a way that Serge does. Something that touches you very deep inside, where there are no questions about the truth of it, where the knowing is so absolute that nothing can waver it. For me the teacher has been Serge, for others it may not be, but if we are open to learn in life our teachers will definitely show up when we’re ready.
Are we all not Teachers by reflection?
Yes, absolutely – I guess all of us can teach something to someone.
Absolutely, we are always reflecting something, do we not then have a responsibility in what we reflect.
Absolutely Viktoria, we all reflect and when we are living the True Wisdom from our essence or Soul this is definitely a reflection of the Truth of their Livingness, then as such it is felt so “in pursuit of finding love, someone or something to match my knowing of what that word meant,” I discovered Serge Benhayon. The Soul being Love it is our most divine reflection and should be where all teachings come from.
Ah so true Greg, our Soul is where all teachings should come from!
It has just been Valentine’s Day and I can feel how it has become so commercialised and is about buying presents and cards on one day of the year rather than working on living lovingly all year.
I love reading about what true love is, it is gorgeous and confirming to read all of the points, this stands out for me; ‘Being interested in another and being patient.’
True love has many aspects, like, ‘Treating myself and another with tenderness, preciousness and a deep level of care’.
I feel humanity has been sold that love is an emotion, this idea or picture is enforced in music, books, magazines, films, and marketing. Emotional love is everywhere, we are saturated by this energy so that it has become all we know. Having attended the workshops and presentations of Universal Medicine and coming to my own understanding that the way we live is actually the complete opposite to how we could be living. It then makes complete sense to me that we are living way short of the true meaning of love. This is why I attend the workshops and presentation of Universal Medicine and Serge Benhayon, so that I can feel for myself what is a true way of being with me and all others, and living this in a practical way, and what is not.
When I read the list of the true love points it’s a confirmation of our basic human nature.
It is great to read this; ‘ Love is from the heart and the heart is pure and it can never actually get hurt.’ There are so many saying about having a ‘broken heart’, but actually our love is intact and we can always love no matter what has happened to us in the past.
This feels so true; ‘I also got to feel very deeply that Love is universal, it is equal for all, it is a quality and an energy that we naturally are and can hold others in.’ We are so often taught that love is outside of ourselves – this type of love for me never worked. I have felt love from within and this type of love is always there and is not dependant on other, it is simply our choice to feel and live this love.
It is so amazing to let go of things that are not love and make way for space to live the true form of love.
Many people have false ideas and beliefs about what love is, ‘Because of these ideals and beliefs, which I hold only in my mind, I sometimes feel hurt when others don’t meet my idea of Love.’
“The biggest revelation for me during the Universal Medicine relationship workshop – one that I felt deeply to be true in my body – was that Love is from the heart and the heart is pure and it can never actually get hurt.” This is a major realization and one that makes me wonder why we talk about how our heart hurts when it cannot be hurt. There is more to the science of hurts than we realize.
Love is a lot more simple than we think it is and can make it out to be.
There are so many songs and stories about how much love hurts. Yet the article presents that true love is pure and cannot get hurt. I have found that when I get hurt it shows me that I had a picture of how things should be and an attachment to it being that way. This is what causes the hurt, not the purity of love that needs and wants nothing.
In effect we hurt ourselves, by having these false ideals and expectations; whereas ‘Love is from the heart and the heart is pure and it can never actually get hurt.’
We have been sold so many lies about what love is. And when you really tap into them they simply do not make sense. When love is the heart, how could it beam out to just one other person? Love is a beholding, in every direction for everyone. And that, I want to deepen more and more.
Certainly, there are many lies and false beliefs about what love actually is, ‘ if we are all holding misinterpretations and expectations of what Love is, then our relationships are being affected greatly, because one person’s expectation rarely fits in with another’s’.
“Love is from the heart and the heart is pure and it can never actually get hurt.” It is actually us who hurt ourselves especially when expectations don’t get met, when we live from love with no expectation no pictures or images we have true love, anything else is only a misinterpretation of love.
Do we love ourselves no matter what? No matter what we’ve done or haven’t done, said or haven’t said.. no one else can give us the love that we crave and deserve because we are it, already. It feels like we only crave love when we’ve disconnected from ourselves and our natural innate connection to it. When we’re ‘with ourselves’ i.e. fully in our bodies and not off in our heads, we can feel that connection much more strongly: nothing to do, nothing that we need, just a surrender and a letting go to feel the depth that’s already there, and that we’re already held in.
Your words are medicine to me right now Bryony. We sometimes certainly put conditions to love ourselves, trying to better what we did in the past or beating ourselves up is not the way…just surrender, letting go and feel to live naturally the love we already are. Thank you
Falling for the lies of love is the worst you can do. So what we can do now, is to actually go back and feel all the lies we have accepted and call them out for what they are (nominate) and actually express what true love is from our heart, every step along our way back to Soul. The door where evil dwells is only possible if we do not seal it with love and appreciation.
If you feel someone else you can feel the love and connection that is already there all of the time. Quite often we choose, or are perhaps in a hurry through life where we overlook this, which is a shame. Then it’s also easy to see differences instead of the equalness that is there.
These are great points. Love is who we are and not conditional on anything. The expression of love can be conditional but is it then still love?
True love is nothing more than the All that it always is, and nothing less.
It’s the lies and believing in them when we know the truth that hurts rather than the truth hurting us.
Yes, lies first numb us and then embarrass us when we are forced to see the truth.
This reminds me of the saying ‘truth hurts’, but it would be more correct to say ‘lies hurts’.
I feel it’s important to hold myself as truly being of love so we can then empower myself to call out all that is not of love such as an emotional outburst or contraction. Otherwise I am illuded by the fact that that is me when it is not.
Thank God for Serge Benhayon consistently living and moving in true love, such a powerful reflection that confirms to us that we are equally this too.
A very beautiful blog. Thank you Johanna Fredericks.
I love reading this blog as it helps me let go of snippets of ideals of what love is even though it is not.
“Love is from the heart and the heart is pure and it can never actually get hurt” – I get that in truth there’s no hurt but our conditions on God is such we use hurt as an alibi for us not to be who we are in full and when I play that game I feel dented.
Purity cannot be touched by human beings. It also defies images.
“I also got to feel very deeply that Love is universal, it is equal for all, it is a quality and an energy that we naturally are and can hold others in.” – Great to express this as so often love is presented as being something reserved for a special few, but like you say I can see now how love is truly something that we can hold everyone equally in. That doesn’t mean we sleep around or have to do things the same with everyone, there will be those whom we spend more time with and are closer with naturally, but energetically speaking we can love everyone equally…
It is clear that we have conditioned love to be such a minimalistic version of its true grand that what it is commonly considered now is actually a form of self abuse.
We have changed love to fit what we think it should be and when it doesn’t work, we blame love for what has ‘gone wrong’ or even a broken heart, so called. The heart does not break, what breaks are our misconceptions and fanciful notions.
If we want others to bring us our expectations we will just be disappointed all the time.
But if we make our relations about offering the building of love and honoring each others value, we have a whole different experience being together.
“…because one person’s expectation rarely fits in with another’s. No wonder there is often a mismatch! – This sure explains a lot about difficulties that arise in relationships when each person comes into it needing the other to match a certain picture of what they deem is the ‘perfect’ partner in a needy way instead of allowing the qualities that Johanna has mentioned are true love into their lives. I know that whenever I have approached my partner from the standpoint of wanting her to be a certain way in a controlling manner, it has been because I am doing it in a way that protects me from feeling something or out of a lack of acceptance of myself on some level that comes out by not accepting her completely as well.
Yes indeed it is Linda – beautifully said. There is no greater marker of truth than that of our body, as such highlighting the great value and wisdom in developing a loving relationship with our body.
The thing about love is that in developing a relationship with the love we are within, we are building a relationship with a quality the not only confirms who we are but also honors who we all are in essence. As such we are able to meet each other in equalness and with an openness to learn and inspire one another, giving rise to evolutionary relationships.
Just taking this to another level, it was shared yesterday in a workshop that if we have ideals and beliefs in one relationship we can not but help infiltrate all other relationships with same brush. With everything being one life, every relationship effects the all.
Johanna, great article thank you, I now know what true love is and it is so different to what we are commonly bought up to believe love is, for me now being understanding, caring and gentle with myself is true love and being this way with others feels like true love also, I used to think love was only between a man and a woman, rather than us actually naturally being love and being able to be loving with everyone.
The other day I found one of those beliefs about love in myself. I had the belief that the other person should pander to me when I am feeling not so good, and when this did not happen I felt very let down, even though I felt the other person was actually allowing me to be grand even when I feeling not so good physically. Yet because it was in contrast with the picture I had about ‘love’, I felt angry because I felt exposed for having an untrue version of love in my life which felt not so nice. Because there are many more of these moments to come in my life, it is about learning to understand why I took on such a belief and letting it go from there.
Johanna this stood out for me today
“I sometimes feel hurt when others don’t meet my idea of Love. When I come from my mind’s perception of what Love is or from what I was ‘told’ Love should be, I get tricked into thinking that I get hurt.”
Then when we feel hurt we do not trust love and so I feel it’s a huge game being played by our spirit to keep us in the separation and away from that which we actually want the most – love.
‘I also now know there are no limits or boundaries to Love in its true form’. This is gold Johanna, and reminds us of what’s possible when all our movements become loving – love has no end, it is continually expanding and unfolding.