A Smile for Love? How we Learn to Leave Ourselves

by Lee Green, Perth

As a baby we are without doubt at our most vulnerable. We have nothing to do but just be the baby that we are. We are moved, fed, bathed, clothed and loved for being this small bundle of a person. There is no pressure here, no dance to perform, no getting it right or wrong – it is just who we are and where we are at.

Soon though, that ‘just being’ is ever so slightly disrupted. We become aware that mouths move at us, wanting us to perform in some way. In an instant it goes from “Look, he is smiling…” to “Come on, smile, come on, smile for mummy, for daddy”. So here it is, the first choice ­– stay with just being, or start doing what is asked for.

I wonder how many of us click here, realising that when we ‘do’ stuff, we get stuff back. Smile and I get a smile, or a laugh, or a look that says LOVE, rather than that love I first felt, that was so warm and yummy, that asked nothing of me. I had to ‘do’ nothing for it!

What is going on?

All of a sudden I don’t get love unless I smile?

Something is not right!

Then the real stuff starts: “Come on, hold it” and “Hold the spoon” and “Feed yourself” – all for a LOVE I first got for just BEING.

There is something amiss.

We change ourselves from this lovely being into a circus performer, doing tricks for a perceived love that wants us to fit into the same box that everyone else is in.

For what? Is it so the people asking us to ‘do’ can feel more comfortable? Is it because in this exchange they don’t have to feel the love they left behind when they chose to play ball with this perceived love?

Is it possible that we all deeply know true love?

When a baby is born there is no imposition, no need, just a being-ness felt by all. How powerful, that a baby can reunite us with that love that we all know – a window back to where we are from. How do we handle this?

Do we let it be or, because we left that love within us and started to perform for ‘love’, do we go about teaching our children how to leave it too? We speak of the hurt and pain in the world, yet how painful is the realisation that we, as humanity, go out of our way to separate another from their true love?

How painful is it that in order to get ‘love’ we have to do, or perform; shape-shifting the love we already are so that we are not recognisable. We get pushed, pulled, torn, twisted and broken in the process. The hurt this leaves becomes the part we live from and desperately attempt to make better for the rest of our lives.

Truly, what is going on?

I was 35 years of age when alcohol, drugs, over-work and chasing material salvation brought me to a stop and made me look at the fact that the life I was living was not ‘it’. It was not loving or caring on many levels. I was making choices that were really band aids to mask and melt away the pain of the hurt of me not being ME; of not being a man in the true sense of that word; of being alone.

So I began to uncover the lovely man I am – naturally so, within my relationships at home and with colleagues and friends. It is a work in progress and it happens with the support of Universal Medicine and the inner knowing that I was a beautiful baby and I am now a beautiful man. It happens because I choose to let me be without needing to perform. I am coming back to that original love, the warmth I knew as a baby for being just me, scrummy yummy all of me.

Now that’s a choice worth smiling at.