What Separates Us From Love?

What Separates Us from Love?

When we ask what separates me from love, it usually means we’ve tasted it and felt the ache of losing touch with it. So, here’s the truth: Nothing truly separates you from love. In the deepest teachings, from mystics, poets, and awakened ones across cultures, love isn’t just a feeling. It’s the fabric of reality. The forgetting and remembering it for what it truly is, is the greatest love story of all time. It is only an illusion that you could be separate from love. But still, that illusion can feel so real, so heavy. So let’s explore the veils that seem to fall between us and love:

1. The Belief in Separation

When we believe we are a separate, isolated self, cut off from others, from the world, from Source, we forget that love is our nature. We start seeking it outside, as if it’s something we must earn or find, rather than something we are. “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” – Rumi

2. The Mind’s Noise

The constant thinking, judging, fearing, controlling. The mind tries to protect us, but in doing so, it often pulls us out of the present moment, where love and everything actually lives. Not in the past, not in imagined futures. Here. Now.

3. Pain and Trauma

When we've been hurt, especially early in life, we learn to close, to protect our hearts, to numb. We build walls where there was once an openness. Love doesn’t leave us, we just stop feeling safe enough to let it in. Behind and within the numbness, love is still there. Patient.

4. Shame and Unworthiness

The belief: I’m not lovable. I’m too much. Not enough. Broken. These are some of the deepest veils. But they are learned. And they can be unlearned. Love doesn’t ask you to be perfect. It asks you to be real.

5. The Ego’s Grasping

Ego tries to possess love. To label it. To make it conditional. But love isn’t something we get - it’s something we recognize, something we become. When the ego lets go, even for a moment, love flows freely.

You’ve never been separated from love. Even in your darkest moments, it was there, quietly waiting. The journey isn’t to attain love… but to remove what blocks its light. And that’s the real inner work: not becoming more but remembering more.

Put another way, we may refer to the Vedanta Wisdom Tradition which describes five causes of suffering:

The Five Kleshas:

What Separates Us From Love?

1. Not knowing who “I” is

2. Grasping and clinging to something that cannot be grasped. 

   • All energy is in a state of flux and change. We cannot grasp or hold onto that which by its nature is in perpetual motion. 

3. Being afraid of impermanence. 

4. Identifying with a false, habitual restrictive self (ego identity). 

5. Fear of death. 

Note: #2-5 above are resolved in the recognition of #1. 

“Who ‘I” is, or “Who Knows?”.  

• “I” is that in which all experience occurs. 

• “I” that in which all experience is known.

• “I” is that which transforms itself into all experience. 

• “I” is that in which all experience subsides. 

• “I” is the infinite awareness behind everything. 

  • Without awareness, stillness, silence, no-thingness, it would not be possible to experience or relate to anything. 

  • The space before thinking, perceiving, and creation, out of which “it” arises. 

  • “Be still and know that I am God.”

Experience can be divided into the following:

• Perception: sound, form, color, taste, smell, and texture 

• Interpretation: how we interpret a perception, a thought.

• Feelings and emotions

• Imagination and memory

• Intention, choice, desire, volition

“I” is, or ‘Who Knows” is: The source of perception, interpretation, feeling, emotion, imagination, memory, and intention.