Love, Freedom, and Aloneness by Osho
Osho's Love, Freedom, and Aloneness has been a trusty companion on our recent travels. Learn how to expand your definition of love, free yourself from attachment, maximize freedom within your relationship and deepen your sense of self.
In this book, Osho explores humans' tendency to sabotage their own freedom and the freedom of their partner due to insecurity, fear and societal pressures. This book will teach you how to value and nurture freedom, as well as embrace being alone. Osho emphasizes self-love and prioritizing one's own happiness-- you can only love someone else after you fall completely in love with yourself! You have to become who you want to be, or be on the path towards it. "Without becoming yourself, you will never feel contentment; you will never feel at ease with existence. You will always be in a condition of missing something."
Every human being is a mirror for one another, so if you don't have good feelings inside, the outside world will not reflect goodness either. You will also only see as much as you are willing to be seen. Osho explains, "Relationship is a mirror, and the purer the love is, the higher the love is, the better the mirror, the cleaner the mirror. But the higher love needs you to be open. The higher love needs you to be vulnerable. You have to drop your armor, that is painful. You have not to be constantly on guard. You have to drop the calculating mind. You have to risk. You have to live dangerously. The other can hurt you; that is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you; that is the fear in being in love....Go into it, suffer love, because through the suffering comes great ecstacy."
Osho's ideas are very radical; he doesn't believe in marriage because he feels putting law and restrictions on a relationship is in extreme opposition to the free-flowing nature of love. Even if you are happily married and have different beliefs entirely, reading this book has really allowed for a new and expansive definition of LOVE, one that does not include attachment. He says, "Love is the only freedom from attachment. When you love everything you are attached to nothing." Osho views love as a gift we all have to offer. "Love is a by-product. When the spring comes and you suddenly start flowering, blossoming, and you release your potential fragrance--sharing that fragrance, sharing that grace, sharing that beauty is love." The key to awakening this gift in a relationship is through intimacy and not hiding. "Love needs intimacy, and only when you are intimate does the other become a mirror."
Osho teaches us to appreciate our lover or partner as an ever evolving human, and to greet them with new eyes each morning. Too often we take each other for granted, and life becomes monotonous and boring. "It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful.... Explore again, start again. Exploring each other, unaware you will be exploring yourself."
This is a book that will live on the bedside table as an amazing resource. We strongly encourage you to get a copy for yourself... very glowy reading to you xx
We'll leave you with this beautiful gem:
"What breathing is to the physical body, love is to the spiritual being. Without breathing the body dies; without love the soul dies."
Love, Freedom, and Aloneness by Osho
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