An Interview with Gina About Love and Relationships PDF Print E-mail
Post by Gina Lake   
Monday, 26 April 2010 12:00
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Listen to a 1-hour interview of Gina Lake on April 25, 2010 speaking about love and relationships, based on Gina's new book Loving in the Moment, hosted by Laura Katleman-Prue, author of Skinny Thinking

Below is a taste of what was in that interview:

Laura: Why are relationships so challenging for most people?

Gina: Relationships are challenging because we bring so much conditioning to them. By conditioning, I mean hopes, fantasies, expectations, and desires. We have so much we want another person to do for us—fulfill our fantasies, expectations, and desires, and if they don't, we are angry with them and feel judgmental and critical of them. Those judgments prevent us from loving them and cause them to judge us back and not feel loving toward us. So, the root of difficulties in love and relationships is our conditioning—the desires we have for someone to be a certain way in order to please us. This is conditional love—right? "I will love you if you behave and look a certain way, and I won't love you if you don't." Conditional love isn't love, and relationships don't work when love is conditional.

But our conditioning doesn't have to limit love in this way. If we can see that our expectations, desires, and fantasies are not important—that we don't need these met to be happy and to have love in our life, then we can experience the other person just as he or she is, rather than as someone who needs to look and act a certain way for us to be happy and feel loving. When we can just meet others, free of our ideas about what we want them to be or what we want from them and free of judgments, then love has a chance to flow from us to them. And love is more likely to flow to us from them as well. So relationships are challenging when we're trying to get something from others or trying to change them to please us, and they work when we're not doing that, but just being present to them as they are showing up in the moment.


Conditioning is really the only thing that interferes with love because we are all, by nature, loving, but our ideas about what we want others to be like interfere with our ability to feel that love. Love is our natural state, and when we aren't paying attention to our thoughts about ourselves and others, then love naturally flows from inside of us to whomever we are with.

Laura: This is a pretty different way of looking at relationships than the usual self-help books on relationships that suggest ways for getting someone to love you and getting what you are looking for in a relationship. Are you suggesting that it's possible to love anyone and that it doesn't matter what a person looks like or behaves like?

Gina: It's possible to love anyone because love is essentially a choice. Love is ours to give to whomever we choose to give it to. Our conditioning prevents us from giving it more freely. We pick and choose who to give love to based on our judgments of other people. Without those judgments and the tendency to withhold love based on our ideas of what is lovable and attractive and worthy of our love, we would just love, because it is our nature to love. That doesn't mean we would choose to have a relationship with just anyone, but we do have the capacity to love anyone.

What happens is that when we are in a relationship with someone, we block our love from time to time because we are angry with that person for not living up to what we want that person to be, and that doesn't have to happen when we see that we can choose to love that person even in those moments when he or she is not so lovable. Love is in our power. It is ours to give. It isn't something others make us feel. The only reason it seems that way is because we tend to feel love only when others are meeting our desires and expectations. But we can feel love even when others aren't meeting our expectations if we can learn to hold our desires and expectations lightly—not make them so important.
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