By Danielle Loveless, Australia

Like many, when I first met Serge Benhayon, his family, and other students embracing the esoteric way of living, I felt something very different, I felt much more in my skin or at ease with myself. I later realised that although these people felt different, they were just ordinary people getting on with life. 

As I spent time with Serge and his family I began to feel truly met and loved, but what I was really feeling was that I was starting to truly meet, love and accept myself, in a way I had never done before. This was all very confronting. Feeling the love wasn’t confronting, it was that I hadn’t felt such love with my close family, partner or the people I had known for many years. I had to admit that the ‘love’ that I had previously felt was not love, but recognition and attention or ‘emotional love’ that I had strived for my whole life. But all I ever really wanted was to feel true love, to meet the love within myself and feel this with others.

To this very day I am still letting go of the need for the emotional love that is so familiar from the past. Looking for certain body language, certain eye contact, or words or physical actions that indicate to me that I am being loved or liked by someone. If in that moment I am not truly feeling what is there, then this is where the problems begin, because I either miss the fact that love is actually there, or I miss the fact that there is something more harmful under the so called love, and I take all of this on instead.

The other harm I see in wanting emotional love is the constant program being played by me, doing or being what I think is needed to try and get what I need to see or experience to feel the so-called ‘loved’. This prevents me from being myself or being able to relax and respond to life naturally, and instead I am constantly analysing or on edge. It is also a very unloving way to be with others, because it is silently demanding them to be a certain way so I can see what I need to see to feel loved. Ouch!