Love, Expanding

“I don’t want to be validated. I want to be loved.”

--Kai Cheng Thom

Bleeding Hearts, Dicentra formosa. Beazell Forest, April 9, 2025.

Over the past days, I have been revisiting the writings of Kai Cheng Thom, one of the most passionate advocates for radical love I have encountered, and pondering the nature of love. What is it? If validation is a way of expressing love, of receiving love, then how does it differ? This has gradually blossomed into a perspective on expanding and opening love that mirrors my own process over the past few years. As with any of my writings, I make no claim to universal truth; let me know if it resonates with you and your own experience.

I. Validation of the Mind

Many of us live primarily within an experience of mind, a sense that our thinking ultimately determines and defines who we are. This is not the whole of our experience, of course, but it is often the top layer, the one that constitutes our identity, the one that tries to make sense of the other layers. This was my experience for about 25 years of my life, and I have described my experience of releasing the mind, a profound shift that I could only understand in retrospect.

A separate mind-identity is disconnected from love, from a true sense of interconnectedness and interbeing.

However confident we may pretend to be, at some level there is fear and doubt, a sense that the edifice of mind rests upon illusion, upon abstraction, upon beliefs and stories that we dare not question.

Minds seek to be competent.

Mind-validation – what feels like love – is in the form of evaluation.

I respect you.

Good job. You passed. You have exceeded expectations. You have earned this award. You have done so much for me.

Mind-validation must be earned, but this also means that it can be earned, that we have some degree of control. And so we can spend our lives striving to achieve, to succeed, to be good enough.

Mind-validation is fundamentally comparative. We are being assessed, by our friends, by our colleagues, by our families. If we are told we are good, that we have done well, then it is implicitly assumed that we could have been bad, we could have done poorly, and only by our mind-choices have we passed the test. Only by continuing to strive and to make the right choices will we continue to be validated. No matter how much validation we achieve, we remain insecure. We can never fully relax into being. We are never simply enough.

In my own insecure mind-identity, I strove to be the smartest, the top student. I sought to identify and fix problems before others were aware of them, which resulted in praise and validation for me while inducing self-doubt in friends and colleagues, in those who failed to notice the problems that I had proudly (and perhaps unnecessarily) solved.

II. Validation of the Heart

I have spent the last five months in a different sort of process, that I might call releasing the heart. Outwardly it has been separation from relationship, from marriage, but inwardly it has been an intricate sequence of dreams, experiences, synchronicities, insights, emotions, healings.

Culturally, we are steeped in the idea that we should find and choose our person, to have and to hold, till death do us part. And yet, it runs deeper than that. I thought I had disavowed any religious dogma, and yet still I found that I needed, deeply, to be chosen, committed to, to feel safe giving and receiving love. Gradually I have been coming to understand and heal my childhood experiences of tumultuous family separation, losing love, losing trust, not feeling seen, retreating from mercurial friendships and bullies, that gave rise to this need.

I well remember the day, almost 15 years ago, when I asked her, very tentatively: “do you think we would make a good couple?” By which I meant: I would choose you as my person, would you choose me as yours? And as we settled on “yes” and transitioned into partnership my body temperature dropped, I shivered, I felt a deep physiological shift. And something new opened. A safe, sacred container within which two shy, socially-insecure people could share love, fully relax into each other’s presence. This spell of joining, formed in that first moment of choosing, proved as strong as any wedding vow or threat of divine judgment.

For the most part, our connection felt resonant, joyful, as we each opened parts of ourselves that we had kept protected, closed – as we loved and laughed and slept under the stars in our backyard and planted gardens and tended bees. Gradually, though, we began to grow apart and to discover our more significant differences, and I also began to feel the edges of our container. It felt a bit as if we had fallen down a well together, or stepped into a soundproof room. Each of us often said that we wished to form deep and lasting and loving friendships with others, but we never quite managed to do it. We kept our hearts guarded, not with our minds, but with something deeper.

Heart-validation - which allows insecure love to open - is in the form of selection or commitment.

I choose you.

I will keep choosing you always. I will always be with you. I need your love. You are my spouse, my person.

Heart-validation cannot be earned, but we still have some level of control. By offering to choose someone who wants to be chosen, we can create a binding bond, secured by insecurity. And we can also choose to stay, even as we grow apart, if our fear of being unloved or un-chosen exceeds our discomfort in ongoing partnership.

If we need heart-validation, love feels heavy. The stakes are high. To feel an opening of love is also to feel the potential of its loss or rejection, and so eventually the all-important question must be asked: would you choose me? A no answer reinforces old patterns of love lost, raises shields higher. A yes answer feels joyful and creates instant relaxation but does not dissolve the wall, only brings another inside it, into a bubble of safety.

Interlude: Validation and Love

Is validation a form of love? I think so. When we respect someone, when we choose them above all others, we are giving a part of ourselves. We are seeing something in them that goes deeper than our own needs, our own insecurities.

And yet…

Valid-ation implies that we are invalid without it, that we are incomplete. When we perform validation on our calculations, we are making them real, making them whole.

What if we do not need others to make us whole?

What if we realize that, beneath all of our mind-identities and heart-wounds, we are already whole?

What if we can allow ourselves to heal until we can know our own wholeness?

Validation is love, contained. It is like water in canals and pipes, held behind dams. We can secure our share, pay our water bill, keep our gardens watered, as long as we have money, as long as we work to earn it, as long as those who control the valves choose to grant us access.

What if we instead choose rivers, wells, springs, choose to trust in the rain, to plant crops that grow deep roots to thrive through summer drought? What if we allow ourselves to move to follow the water, to flow with abundance rather than enduring through scarcity?

III. Free Love

I’ll tell you a secret.

My first adult experience of love, of intimacy, was with someone who was married, someone woven into my life for a brief few months before a planned cross-country move, someone who could not choose me. That made it safer. The all-important question need not be asked. We could share, affirm, explore, connect, go skinny-dipping in prairie lakes with the bittersweet knowledge of transience. I could inhabit the present knowing that I would neither be chosen nor unchosen, that life would simply carry us apart.

I feel, through my healing, through releasing the mind and releasing the heart, that I am becoming whole.

Love is feeling lighter, and I am also beginning to see the love that has been all around me, that I have not allowed myself to feel because it did not come with commitment, with choosing. I have been reconnecting with old friends.

I cannot yet say what relationship, intimacy, family will feel like in this space, what it means to explore bonding without binding. But I can say what love feels like. Love that is free.

As I have opened myself through my writing, through sharing skills and passions and creativity in community, I have found resonance. I have found those who are telling the same stories in their own way, who are moving through parallel processes of healing, who are practicing their devotion to a living Earth through growing food and flowers, through saving seeds, through tending sacred fires, through writing.

Free love is expressed as affirmation or mirroring.

I see you.

I see and honor the being that you are. Your words resonate within me. Your ideas and creations inspire new possibilities. I affirm you. I reflect yourself back to you. We are weaving the pattern together.

To love freely is to surrender, to trust, to accept that there are no guarantees. To love freely is first and foremost to love ourselves, to choose ourselves, so that the love we receive feels like spring rain rather than water to a parched throat, so that we do not feel a need to cling, to attach, to demand more, so that we ourselves become a fountain, a wellspring, giving love to others without expectation.

IV. Radical Love

Many of my friends are angry and afraid, in this time. They are taking to the streets with their signs and chants, demanding change, demanding justice. And I find myself sitting on the fence, trying to discern whether this is a movement based on fear and othering or whether it is a movement based on love.

I have learned, through the covid and cancel culture years, that what people say is love and what feels like love are often very different things. I have learned how easy it is to become one of the outcasts, simply by holding a different perspective on a Very Important Issue. An issue that probably didn’t matter a year ago and won’t matter again a few years from now.

To those who are wondering, waiting for me to join a protest or choose a side, I say this:

I do not share your fear.

I cannot join in your petty namecalling, in waving fElon and tRump signs.

I refuse to condemn my neighbors who marked a different box on their ballot.

I do not see this as a war, a battle, a struggle, a resistance.

But…

I will join a revolution

I believe everyone is worthy of love

I believe we can have enough food and shelter and dollars for everyone

I do not care what legislation is passed

I do not care what the rules are, or the supposed penalties

I do not want to ask permission

I will not comply

If we know what we want

Then let us stop shouting about it

Let us stop demanding that someone up there fix it

Let us simply make it so.

If we feel we are powerless, under threat, then we shout and fight. We affirm solidarity with our team and denounce the other. We allow our team and its worldview to shape our own. We allow our reality to be sourced from outside.

If we feel whole, grounded in Earth and seasons and cycles and gardens and farms and community, then we can transform. We can be the change we wish to see and dare the authorities to stop us, force them to be the ones who flail and shout.

We can practice radical love. We can love even those who are so committed to their narratives that they would attack us, hurt us, treat us as enemies. We can see in them the same wounding, the same need for belonging that we ourselves have felt, have been working to heal.

Radical love is expressed as seeing beyond, seeing within.

I see the light in you.

I will not allow you to hurt me, or those I love. I will set firm boundaries, which might feel to you like battlements, but I will not declare you other, enemy, opposition. I will speak to your heart, when there is an opening. I will collaborate with you, where we are in agreement. I will show my humanity, my love to you, so that we might begin to see through our differences, so that I am not mirroring intolerance back to you but am showing you a different path, should you choose to take it.

To embrace radical love is to know that within each of us is a spark of divinity, a soul that wants to be validated, to be loved, to be whole. To embrace radical love is to honor that truth while accepting that we cannot change others, cannot force them into spiritual growth. That we may sometimes need to set boundaries as firm as estrangements and restraining orders and concrete walls. And yet through all of that we can still love ourselves enough to love them too.

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I will close by sharing from two of my favorite advocates for radical love.

“We must love ourselves. We must encourage love – love that is radical, love that digs deep. Love that asks the hard questions, that is ready to listen to the whole story and keep loving anyway. Love for the survivors, love for the perpetrators, love for the survivors who have perpetrated and the perpetrators who have survived. Love for the community that has failed us all. … We can choose to consume each other, or we can choose love. Even in the midst of despair, there is always a choice. I hope we choose love.”

Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love, 2019, p. 91.

For anyone who has struggled with the contradictions within social justice communities or who simply needs a reminder that radical love is always a choice, even in the face of trauma and pain and discrimination, I highly recommend Kai Cheng’s book and Substack.

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The Rough and Tumble is perhaps the most underappreciated band in the country. I discovered them at the tiny neighborhood grange hall a year ago, and their beautifully simple Carry You helped more than anything to anchor me through the pain and doubt of separation and releasing the binding of love. Their writings are unflinchingly committed to radical love, as is much of their music. Love Them Too is an anthem for this time.