The Love Paradox

Original Date: 26 Dec 2025

We come into this life to find love—to return to our true essence. In that search, we try to connect with other humans and animals, hoping to access the love within ourselves and to receive love from others.

In this effort, we try to fit in, to become somebody, to collect labels such as good, successful, beautiful, fit, rich, powerful—even kind, caring, helper, pleaser. In doing so, we build walls of identity around ourselves. Ironically, the very intention to connect creates separation through these walls.

This separation gives rise to frustration, anger, sadness, grief, depression, greed, and violence—in one word: suffering. To alleviate these feelings, we often turn to pleasure and distraction: drugs, social media, television, workaholism, money, higher titles, food, alcohol, people-pleasing, or even withdrawal. All of this happens in an effort to reconnect with our own essence—love—which has always resided in our own hearts.

To love and to truly connect requires courage: the courage to be vulnerable, to show up as who we are in every part of ourselves—the good, the bad, and the neutral. It requires loving all aspects of ourselves and opening to others from that place.

To love also requires being vulnerable to receive love from others, to recognize their attempts to connect in order to access the love within themselves—even when that love appears egotistic and self-serving. It asks for compassion toward the parts of love that are shadowed by the ego, and acceptance of one another’s flaws, knowing that we are all trying to return to the same source.

The human experience would be much easier, and suffering would be minimal—if not absent—if we approached life from a vulnerable place of simply being as we are. If we let go of shame around the bad parts, dropped the labels, and stopped constantly doing and becoming in order to be worthy of love.

If only we knew that we already are worthy—that we are already loved by our higher self, the divine, God, Allah, Koreynia, universal consciousness, or whatever name resonates.