Your Love is a Temple

Heartbreak is something we’re all very familiar with. It’s never fun, and though we do survive it, no one is sitting around wishing for it to come along again. Yet we all look for love, lasting love, the kind that doesn’t make you feel like all your insides were just shattered with a jack hammer.

Ah, if Cupid had an evil twin brother, wouldn’t it all make sense – but he doesn’t. So just remember in love…during love, after love ends, before love can begin again – your love is always a temple.

Ritual
Maybe you’re thinking, “My love is not a building.” Fair enough but here’s what it means. We all carry, give and receive love all the time. Love is not just an emotion that comes out of us or our hearts or minds. Our love is its own entity, and we need to treat it and respect is as such. And we need to make certain that others have the same respect for our love.

When you enter a place of worship, whether it is a church or Jewish temple, mosque or Buddhist temple, there is often a ritual when you enter that displays your respect. Perhaps you cover your head or you put blessed water on your forehead or light a candle and say or chant a prayer or meditation. In some way, you show respect to the divine.

Every day in everything you do, you must show yourself and your love that same respect. Maybe you don’t feel comfortable enough to stare off into your mirror shouting I love you to your reflection (though it works for some people!) but try not being so hard on yourself at least one day a week. You don’t have to be Stuart Smalley, but you get the gist. Pay homage to yourself and your love daily.

Respect
Places of worship demand respect. Whether you take off your shoes on entering or whether you maintain a clean sanctuary, we all know the disrespect and judgment that comes from those who desecrate places of worship. You wouldn’t want to see graffiti on your local church or a fire set to the Buddhist temple in your city right? So don’t let others desecrate your temple. If someone enters your space and shows that they are not fit to worship there, tell them kindly that you have too much respect for yourself to put up with that. We all give people the benefit of the doubt but if you are pouring your love out to someone who is consistently disappointing you, lying to you or breaking commitments, you are allowing your temple to be desecrated. Only you can put a stop to that.

Intruders
But still heartbreak happens. Maybe we saw it coming, maybe it came out of nowhere but someone you loved and trusted, someone you let into your temple, decided to go in and break all your beautiful vases and stomp on your fresh flowers, while lighting all the candles… setting fire to all the beautiful tapestries you’d thoughtfully hung in your temple. You get the picture.

Sure sometimes relationships don’t work but there is a responsible respectful way to handle things and destroying a temple is not one of them. This can be so painful. All of a sudden our beautiful sanctuary is a mess. All the things we took so much care in have been damaged. So we mourn the wreckage, we sit there in disbelief, but eventually we need to clean up the mess.

Healing
When you’re ready, get in there and pick up the pieces from the broken statues and glue them back together, find ways to fill your temple again with love. Talk to friends, write about it, meditate and let yourself heal. Ask yourself for forgiveness for taking a chance and forgive the person who hurt you. It sounds hard and often times all we do want is to wish ill on the other person, but if you can truly forgive them (which doesn’t mean you have to talk to them in person or let them back in your life either) you can truly move on. Once you feel everything is whole again, you can begin to allow others in again. Take care to remember your love is divine and special.

“My brain and my heart are my temples…” – Dalai Lama