Love is a guest - My take on relationships
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In this episode, Chandresh shares the idea of love from a different perspective. Rather than receiving love without conditions, we often take it for granted and put our terms and conditions onto it. We also chase it in other people and impose our idea of what love should be onto one another. As a result, love becomes an anxious and exhausting experience for everyone involved. In this episode, we invite the listeners to reflect deeper into how you experience love, and if you are able to receive and honor the presence of love as a guest in your life.
Have any questions or curiosities about your spiritual journey? Email Chandresh at askcb@leelagurukul.com.
Episode Transcript
Breathe in. Breathe out. Relax the heartbeats and take a moment to connect with your heart. Just feel the heartbeats, feel the strength, the warmth of your heart. And as you feel comfortable, remind yourself, love is not a relationship. Love is not what you do, love is what you are. Love is a state of your awareness. The more you experience love as a state of your awareness, the more you realize that the love you were seeking is abundantly, fully, unconditionally lives within you. I am Chandresh Bhardwaj, and this is Leela Gurukul.
Namaste everyone. I hope you're feeling well. I hope you're doing great. This week's episode is going to go into a bit of a personal journey for me, and I'm emotionally prepared to share that with you. I hope you are too. But before we go into it, a reminder that Leela Gurukul applications are now open. We opened applications to just the people on waitlist, but my hope and guess is by the time this episode is live, applications will be open to everyone. So if you're listening to this episode today, go to leelagurukul.com and apply for the Conscious Meditation program if you are interested in living life of calmness, clarity, and courage. And I feel like saying this because every time I release a podcast, I talk about Leela. Someone told me if you do not announce sales of your program or offering a few times a day, that means you don't love your program because you're not making that sales announcement in 50 different ways.
I really reflected on it for a day, a week or weeks now, and I think I can confidently tell you, I absolutely love what we have created in Leela Gurukul. It's shaping out to be the most beautiful offering of my entire life, and I'm really proud of, of course myself, to an extent, but the people, the team who's doing incredible work to make this vision come alive every single day. And I don't believe in hard-selling it. I feel if I share it in the most transparent way to you, the people that try, the seekers who are really ready and willing to go into cultivating calmness, clarity and courage, they'll show up. Because I know plenty of courses, memberships, and so on. You're bombarded with these offerings every single day, the temptations and this interesting twist in the tale, that you don't join my program, that's it. You're not going to be living a happy life after that because my program is the best program.
And I want to tell you, the Leela program is of course, really amazing, incredible the way I see it and the results I'm experiencing with it. The results, the testimonials we are putting out there as well on the website. But I don't want to use fear to invite you in. I want to use strength. I want to use invitation of courage. I want to use invitation of calmness to invite you in, because I truly feel that's what Leela is all about. Love, joy, playfulness, and not some circus that's created around fear that if you don't join it, you're going to miss out on the cool crowd. No you won't. And if Leela resonates with you, explore the program on the website, apply for it. Let's get on a call and then you and I will know if Leela fits to your vision and if it can help you and support you in doing that. And now let's get into this episode.
I decided to record this episode just 15 minutes ago, and I'm glad I'm doing it. If you really watch my Instagram postings and everything, I randomly mention that January episode is going to be this one, March is going to be this one, but they don't show up for months because I think the way I really work is this, that if I think about an episode and if it really, really moves my heart, I want to talk about it. And this is one of those topics today.
So, you must have heard me saying this few times, that love is not what you do, love is what you are. Love is state of your awareness. I read this first time in the tantra books when Shiva speaks to Shakti and he talks about how love is a state of awareness. But I would say I first experienced it through my nonnie, my grandma. And this beautiful experience I want to mention here. I was sharing about his teaching and my students were sitting there and this was before COVID. We were sitting in in-person gathering. And one of the students said love is a state of awareness. This is good. Beautiful. It sounds amazing. But how can you be loved this unconditionally? And then how can you love this unconditionally? Or what happened in your childhood that makes you feel this could be true, this is a possibility. And what I shared with her, I'm going to share with you. I spent the beginning few years of my journey of my life with my nonnie and my nana, my grandparents. Mom was teaching, dad was traveling, mom was a school professor.
So, there were circumstances, political unrest in the country. Plenty of things were happening. So long story short, my nonnie raised me for the first few years. I spent every single day with her, and that's where I started experiencing the seed of this unconditional love. And people told me that Indian parenting we have heard is strict, it's tough. So wasn't she strict with you? And I said, no, she wasn't. That's just the way she loved. And I believe that's just the way she was designed to love everyone, not just me. I mean, for a long amount of time, my ego really told me that only I am this special in her life. But plenty of things happened when I accepted and realized, this is just who she is. This is how she loves. But while I was sharing this with my students, I told my student in India, we have this teaching Atithi Devo Bhava, which means guest is God.
Guest is embodiment of divine. So you honor your guest with love, celebration, care. You welcome them, you celebrate them. And I said when I started staying with my nonnie, I was just so little. And because there were some unusual circumstances that made it happen, she must have thought maybe my grandson will be with me for maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe few months. Maybe she thought I was a guest in her presence. And she wanted to just celebrate this guest. But the guest stayed for years there. And that made me realize, this is how we love our guests. This is how we are taught to welcome guest. When a guest comes to your house, and if you like that guest, if the guest doesn't abuse the freedom, the welcome, then you treat them well. You don't control them. You don't demand things from them.
You honor them. When you host your birthday party, you invite all of these people. So some of them scream, some of them dance, some of them dance really crazy, and you still celebrate them. Some of them don't dance at all. They don't want to speak to anyone, and you still hug them. You still celebrate them because that's how you welcome your guest. But the moment you start to realize this guest could stay now, this guest may not leave, then you start to exercise your terms and conditions. You start to teach them how to live around you, how to behave around you. And my father always says, he says, whenever you say goodbye to anyone, say as if it's the last goodbye. When you hug someone, hug as if this is the last hug, because life is fragile, it's unpredictable. You never know how you would meet next time, or maybe you won't meet that person next time.
I remember meeting my friend, Megan, before COVID started, and I had such a great chat with her. And this was a week before COVID became official. And then I didn't see her for two years. And I realized what a beautiful memory. I didn't see her for two years and yet, I'm just holding that warmth, that love in my heart for all these months. This is just how the love got to happen. You got to experience love as a guest, because if it's not a guest, then you start taking it for granted. Then you start controlling it with your terms and conditions.
In my experience of life, I've seen plenty of times that when people say, I love you, most of the times, what they mean is I need you. I need you to fulfill some vacuum. They could also mean that I feel empty in my heart. So let me squeeze some happiness in the name of love and fulfill my heart. When I experienced it personally, plenty of times, when I saw it happening with the people around me, it taught to revisit love, it taught me to reflect love beyond calculations. It inspired me to look at love as a celebration. And it was through these realizations, I came to the conclusion that if I'm not able to love people in my life as a beautiful guest, then something is not right. Something is not in alignment. And when you start loving someone as a guest, of course the mind is going to bring fear.
The mind will say, what if this person hurts you? What if this person takes you for granted? The first step is to experience this love within you so deeply and unconditionally that the people you attract, they honor you. They want to be part of that celebration. Because if you are crying inside, if you are chasing some idea of love inside, then these are the kind of people you will attract. Either they'll take advantage of you, either you'll be attracting people who are too guarded or who will be blindly over-giving and no one will be served or loved in the end. You'll feel betrayed, abused, and taken for granted. But when you change the reality within, when you truly start to experience that love is a state of my awareness. I am love. And this love is not a hidden craving for lust. This love is not a hidden craving for anything else.
It's simply love in its complete pure infinite consciousness, that's when things start to change. Only then you are qualified to extend this love to others. And right now, maybe some of you are thinking, I wish someone could love me like this. I wish I could be a guest in someone's life and they love me like that. Again, wrong perspective. Wrong way to look at it. Forget about the others in this equation. Don't worry about the external, focus on the inner. Don't worry where the love is addressed. Think about if the love is flowing within you. Don't worry about the lover, focus on love. And I noticed, because my nonnie was designed to love this way, she would always honor everyone as a guest in her life. I noticed whenever guest would come in her house, they wouldn't want to sit in the living room or in the guest room.
Everybody wanted to sit around her, everyone. People who knew her, people who didn't know her, my school friends, every single person would gather around her. And now I realize, I go back to my memory and I realize what a beautiful energy to radiate that everyone wants a piece of that energy. And how sad that in modern times, in these times, we have reduced love to a calculation, to a game plan where you have to play manipulative games to offer love and receive love. Because the answer is it's actually not love, it's psychological manipulation, we are playing with everyone.
I'm going to end this here. I hope this helped you. I hope it inspires you to look within and redefine how you experience love within and how you will be giving love to others. And those who feel are ready and willing to dive deeper, I'll see you in Leela Gurukul. Do explore the program, apply, and I cannot wait to chat with you. May the teachings of tantra continue to guide you and heal you. And I hope Leela Gurukul helps you to unlearn the old and embrace the unknown mystical possibility unfolding for you. To support this podcast, share it among the seekers who are ready for the next step in their spiritual act.
Useful Links
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