“You open your heart knowing that there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible.”
~ Bob Marley
When I stop to think about feeling loved I smile. My wife shows me every day, and reminds me, that to feel loved only requires that you love others. She shows me this by doing all those thoughtful little things she does, the things men tend to either not notice or take for granted. It is fascinating that whenever I take her acts of kindness for granted, then I do not feel loved, which is on me and not her.
For such a simple question, “share a positive example of where I’ve felt loved,” the answer can get extraordinarily complex. I think this is because we are mere children, evolutionarily speaking, and our hearts and minds still operate in ways that are divided, we are run by our EGOS. For me to feel loved by another human being suggests an entitlement attitude that can be exceedingly egocentric. In fact, we constructed a new psychological paradigm around this notion, that each of us deserves to feel loved.
In terms of my personal cosmology, I am a two-bit player in the psychological revolution that has taken place. An individual, just like you, who since Copernicus has been placed at the center of the universe; the Sun (ego) being the central point, or focus of our concern.
“Do you know how lovable you are?” This is a rhetorical question that a psychotherapist might ask, at the opportune time in a session. It isn’t meant to be answered affirmatively on the spot necessarily, Instead the question evokes a sense of wonder, a challenge perhaps, to consider the possibility that “Yes! I am lovable!” The phrase enters and nestles somewhere deep within the soil of the soul, like the seed of a tree for example: ash (Mars) or myrtle (Venus). There the question and the possibility grow — for many years to come. It is, when well placed, what therapists call a generative question. A gift that keeps giving.
Sociologically, we all might get along better if we actually felt loved, but there is a problem with this Copernician view that puts Self as the Central Point of it All. (☉) Psychologically we may still be enmeshed within a Ptolemaic framework, Venus and Mars, locked in orbit around us (🌎), and the Moon (☽) shielding us from the greater illumination and overpowering emanations of the Sun, until a point in time when we are better prepared, TO FEEL TRULY LOVED.
The Sun represents our identity and the force of ego we project to the world, along with the Moon (the reigning need of the personality); together the Sun and Moon can represent up to 80% of the personality. This is the essence of looking through the psychological lens of astrology. But the Sun also symbolizes the Divine in esoteric traditions, and as the Bible suggests, we may not yet be ready to fully appreciate this illuminated view:
“You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
Exodus 33:20
Therefore, the seed (the Self) still needs a shield (ego/Moon) to guard against the full blaze and glory of the Sun (the Divine Self). The day will come when this shield/ego is no longer necessary, but like a parent to a child in the back seat of a car, on a long journey, who needs reassurance that the destination is near, and endlessly asks: “Are we there yet?”
In a word, no! We are not there yet so stay buckled in and try to understand that this is why you need to feel loved in the first place. We might call it shared narcissism. Although we might not consciously identify with the limitations imposed on us by this psychological, and traditional Ptolemaic point of view, we seem to remain for the most part self-centered. The Copernician Revolution fundamentally changed everything but in psychological terms the advance simply moved the goal posts. Our IDENTITY and Self is not, at least in an Integral Framework, the CENTRAL POINT.
Thomas Merton makes clear in his essay on Love and Living, that in modernity our view of love is decidedly materialistic and shallow. We are needy. But needing the wrong sort of attention when our self worth becomes attached, psychodynamically, to the stuff we own, our incomes, and what we do, instead of who we are.
Merton’s answer was in observance of his faith and the belief in a life hereafter. In his effort to position his way of believing in God as somehow superior to other religions (Hinduism or Buddhism for example), and on the pretext that reincarnation is based on a false religious idea that is incapable of surrendering, that clings to old traditions and is afraid of letting go. There may in fact be more evidence for reincarnation than there is for a life hereafter, but that would be too large a digression for this post.
Where Merton excels is in the way he discusses love through a spiritual lens, and suggests that there is more to life than we can measure in material terms. He puts emphasis not on the love we take, what makes us feel loved, but on the love we make (to paraphrase Paul McCartney), whether we make others feel lovable,
This morning my wife and I were discussing my youngest sister who passed away suddenly a year ago today. And as soon as I mentioned my sister’s name this beautiful cardinal came and sat on the branch of a tree outside my office window. He sat there the entirety of our discussion, and then was gone, just like that.
My sister was like that in life. She would show up for others when they most needed someone to show up. She would make you feel loved and most importantly make you feel lovable in such a way that the feeling would stay with you like the image of a winter cardinal landing on an ash or a myrtle tree.
HVA
💚🍀
Hudson Valley Astrologer 
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