SHARE YOUR POINT OF VIEW:
Draw your own MANDALA of LOVE
The cats in the center spread of The Cat Flap are forming a mandala. You can meditate on it and see if any new thoughts about life, love and relationships come to you.
I invite you to draw your own mandalas.
You can share them with me at Kristina@kristinahutchmatthews.com.
What do you think: is this story about love?
What feeling do you get from the center spread of the book, where the two stories merge, and the black cat and the white cat come together in the yin/yang configuration? Does this image make you think about love? Have you ever heard of the expression “my better half”? This is a phrase that is often used to describe a partner, husband or wife.
We are presented with the idea of the ‘better half’ in many of the first fairy tales that we enjoy. We absorb the message that another person will ‘complete’ us, and help us to find happiness.
Like most of the deeper issues in life, this message istrue, and it is false, at the same time. Certainly, we all want, and deserve to have, someone who loves and understands us completely and unconditionally. As humans, we crave deep connection with others, particularly a significant other, or ‘soul mate.’ When we find someone who can fill this role for us, it is as if we see the face of God before us; and we feel our own perfection being reflected back at us when we look into his or her eyes. It is a beautiful thing, and certainly one of the most powerful, compelling experiences life has to offer. This is precisely why this message comes to us in so many movies and fairy tales. When we see this story being played out time and time again, it reinforces our quest for this experience of love, until it becomes one of our primary drives as human beings. We are conditioned to believe that it is ‘sad’, or somehow a failure to be alone, or not in a relationship. As soon as one relationship ends, often the search to find a new one begins.
But what if the mission we are on is not really to find another person at all? What if the real journey in life is to discover our truest self? Imagine how good it would feel to be able to identify all our good qualities along with the bad ones, the things that come easily to us and the things that cause us to struggle, all our tendencies, proclivities and idiosyncrasies, in addition to those things that make us geniuses. It takes time to learn these things about ourselves, but this is what life’s journey is all about. And once we can truly own, accept and love every part of ourselves – the darkness; the light; the places of quiet reflection just as much as the places of action; our inner world and our outer reflection; the masculine side and the feminine side. ... All of the opposite drives and polarities that exist within ourselves.... Then – and only then – will we be truly whole.
And perhaps it is only once we come into greater wholeness that we are capable of a truly healthy, balanced relationship with another person. A relationship based in freedom and unconditional love becomes possible -- even inevitable.
