The Gifts We Offer: Evidence of Resistance to Love

I have this dream. A dream that has at the center of it two beings—you and I. We are both playing a very long game, a game that if won brings us all into the transcendence of Unconditional Love (enlightenment). In this game there are distractions and illusions that pull us away from the goal of attainment—of winning.

The proof lies in the gifts we offer. Forgiveness, compassion, and tolerance are evidence of our resistance to winning—to love.

An Invitation to Listen

Close your eyes and ask yourself one or all of these questions:

What is love?

What sort of love do I crave?

Is the love I crave tainted with bitterness, avoidance, deception, or delusion?

Now sit in awareness—listening. Listening for an authentic answer. This might hurt. It might cause old feelings to emerge. What it will do is show evidence of resistance or compliance.

As an answer arrives or doesn't arrive, just be with that. Notice where it came from. Did it come from the mind? The heart? The belly? The throat? The genitals? Maybe it instantly arrived from nowhere—a knowing.

This listening is important.

Why We Must Listen to Everything at Once

The mind can be deceitful. The throat needy. The genitals guilty. The belly angry. The heart full of old pain. The knowing influenced.

This is why one must listen to everything at once. The answer must come in coherently, aligned, and in unity—otherwise it might be compromised.

Not acting or responding immediately is also important. Some areas will scream with aggression, authority, vengeance, or self-importance. Listen to everything all at once. This approach removes the tendency to submit to false inner authority.

The wounded parts of ourselves are like karma being fed so that they might remain. These wounds were birthed from trauma. They survive only because their existence is tied to an old story. With this story, they commit to a life of their own and work tirelessly to stay 'safe' in an existing victim loop—a loop tinted with hope and negative experiences that appear as a saving light.

The wounds believe they are alive. They have a savior complex. They do what they can to thrive, telling you fear-based stories to keep you tied to their existence, to their surviving.

This is why listening correctly is so important. Listen with everything all at once so that truth might find a way to your ears.

Why This Listening Matters: Recognizing False Love

When we listen to everything at once—when we refuse to let any single wounded part dominate—we begin to hear something uncomfortable: the ways we've been calling our resistance "love."

The wounded throat wants to offer forgiveness because it needs to be seen as gracious. The wounded heart offers compassion because it's afraid to fully open. The wounded mind tolerates because it's safer than truly accepting. Each part has its story, its justification, its strategy for survival.

But when you listen to all of them simultaneously, you hear the discord. You notice that what you've been calling love is actually a carefully negotiated compromise with fear.

This is where the real work begins—recognizing the gifts we offer that masquerade as love but are actually evidence of our resistance to it.

The Gifts That Are Not Love

I am and have always been either reticent or blunt. I either accept others' paths to awareness or cut straight to the truth of their false beliefs—cutting the linear path many of us have curved into a circle so that we might loop in an existence that feels familiar and safe.

This path is a path of resistance—resistance to love.

You might think this is generalizing and false. That's the issue. You are thinking.

Here are some ways to identify whether you or someone around you is in resistance to love. A truth: we are all in some way addicted to resistance to love, and that addiction is evident in the strategies we use to cope with our limited ways of communicating, relating, and being.

Forgiveness

We forgive because we judge and blame. Forgiveness is the moment we are able to articulate something beyond those heavier states. It is evidence of a shift toward love.

But it is not the end. It is transition.

Forgiveness is still tainted with judgment—a blend of judgment and an awareness of love. It's an awareness from the body that without this transition, we judge ourselves and can no longer love ourselves.

Forgiveness is not unconditional love. It is proof we were withholding love in the first place.

What have you forgiven that you now use as evidence of your evolved state? Notice how that forgiveness still carries the memory of your original judgment.

Compassion

We have compassion because we don't fully love. This emotion swirls with more love than judgment but is yet tainted by a slight bit of judgment.

This blend is not transition but fear—fear to let go and completely offer love. When one offers love, one accepts the conditions that caused the other person to "need" the compassion. It is the failure to allow the mind to love all completely, even the dark and shadowy parts of life.

Many people mix compassion with sympathy or acceptance, mistaking limited understanding for unconditional love.

What about yourself do you have considerable compassion for? That's where you're still withholding full acceptance.

Tolerance

We tolerate because the mix of judgment and love is highly unequal. Tolerance is mixed heavy with judgment, showing up as a profound lack of love for self and others.

There would be no need to tolerate if another or yourself were loved fully for the thing you are tolerating.

Tolerance says: "I will allow you to exist as you are, even though I judge it." This is not love. This is conditional acceptance dressed up as virtue.

What about yourself do you tolerate? That's where you are refusing to love yourself.

Love and Light

If it is all "love and light," deep down it is all avoidance and resistance to love. It is false love.

This is judgment wrapped in spiritual bypass. By insisting on "light," we are inherently judging darkness as wrong, as something repulsive that needs to be transcended rather than integrated. By declaring ourselves beings of "love and light," we are condemning shadow, pain, and difficulty as less than, as obstacles rather than teachers.

The insistence on positivity, on bypassing darkness, on transcending shadow—this is not love. This is fear of what love actually demands of us: full acceptance of all that is, including what we've deemed unacceptable.

"Love and light" is ultimately tolerance masquerading as unconditional love. It says: "I will focus only on what I judge to be good, pure, and elevated, and I will call my refusal to engage with shadows 'spiritual advancement.'"

Unconditional love doesn't need to declare itself light. It simply is. It loves the darkness as much as the light because it recognizes both as necessary, both as whole.

What We Actually Want From You

We don't want your compassion.

We don't need your tolerance.

We don't crave your forgiveness.

We crave your unconditional love.

Just ask a child: Would you rather my tolerance or my love? Would you rather my forgiveness or my love?

Yes, you can offer both. But here's the truth: with unconditional love, there is no need for forgiveness, tolerance, or compassion. These become unnecessary when love is complete.

The Practice

So how do we move from these tainted gifts to actual love?

We stop performing virtue. We stop congratulating ourselves for forgiving, for being compassionate, for tolerating. We recognize these for what they are: evidence that we were judging in the first place.

We listen—to everything, all at once. We allow the wounded parts to scream without letting them dictate. We notice where we are withholding love and calling it wisdom.

We stop making love conditional on someone earning it through acceptable behavior, proper apologies, or changed circumstances.

We love what is. All of it. Not because it's right or good or light, but because it exists.

This is terrifying. It means loving the parts of ourselves we've exiled. It means loving others without the protective buffer of judgment. It means dissolving the identity we've built around being the person who forgives, who has compassion, who tolerates.

But it's the only way through.

A Final Caution

When all the shadow workers—those who are the real frontline workers of unconditional love—are no longer accepted in society, society has become evil. It has submitted to the darkness.

Not the darkness of shadow, pain, and difficult truth. The darkness of denial. The darkness of performing light while refusing to see. The darkness of calling resistance "love" and judgment "compassion."

The ones willing to descend, to meet you in your mess, to love you without requiring you to be palatable first—these are the ones doing the actual work of love. When we exile them in favor of those who offer only positivity, forgiveness, and tolerance, we have chosen comfortable delusion over uncomfortable truth.

This is the greatest danger: a society that has agreed to call its resistance "enlightenment."

The Questions That Remain

Are you willing to give up the gifts that prove you're evolved, enlightened, or good?

What would remain if you stopped performing virtue and simply loved?

Are you willing to simply love without the evidence trail of your spiritual progress?

This is where the real work begins.