A four-year-old’s breakup script, a chakra whose name literally means “unstruck,” and a line from a guru who says love isn’t even a feeling — three ways of pointing at the same forgotten truth: love was never supposed to be rationed.
A Four-Year-Old’s Script
“Stop ringing me Richard, you’re not the dad. I don’t love you anymore. I hate you now!”
Those are the exact words of a four-year-old playing a fantasy game, filmed during her day at school as part of an experiment into the secret lives of small children. I wondered where she could possibly have heard that. It could only have come from an adult, or a television.
As funny as the line is, it’s disconcerting to watch a young, impressionable mind already fluent in a tainted idea of what love is — conditional, revocable, something you can lose the second someone disappoints you.
It reminds me of a seven-year-old I taught in one of my children’s yoga classes. We were talking about love, and I asked the group whether they thought it was possible to love more than one person at the same time. Her answer: yes — as long as you kept it hidden from whoever you loved most, because loving someone else might hurt their feelings, and they might stop loving you back.
Seven years old, and she’d already built a whole quiet architecture for rationing love so nobody got jealous.
That kind of unconscious education runs completely against the true nature of love. Love isn’t quantifiable. But if you had to measure it anyway, you’d find it’s unbounded — overflowing, limitless — not a fixed pool you have to protect from running dry.
The Unstruck Heart
Anahata is the Sanskrit name for the heart chakra. It means “unstruck” — a sound produced without two things colliding, the way most sound is made. The name is a clue: whatever this chakra represents can’t actually be damaged by impact, no matter how much it might feel that way in the moment.
Most of us shield our hearts from vulnerability as though the opposite were true — as though enough hurt could genuinely break the thing doing the loving. We build protective narratives about who we are and what keeps us safe, then mistake the narrative for the truth. It’s worth asking honestly whether those stories protect us at all, or whether they just keep us from anything deeper.
Between the lower three chakras — survival, safety, ego — and the heart is a real distance. Fear is what keeps most of us circling the same familiar patterns instead of making that leap into something less controlled. But genuine love, the kind built on compassion, forgiveness and trust, asks for exactly that: vulnerability, and the release of a control that was mostly illusion to begin with. Difficult. And, on the other side of it, freeing.
Love at the Level of Ego
Here’s the version of love most of us actually practise, whether we’d admit it or not: love as something measurable. How much you love one person becomes dependent on how many others you also love, and in what ways — an obscure, quantifiable object sorted into little compartments of the heart, of which there’s supposedly only so much space. Want to add someone new? Better make room by removing someone else first.
The jump from that — ego-love, scorekeeping love — to something closer to the heart chakra’s actual nature is the hardest jump there is. We’re so attached to our ideas of what a romantic partnership is allowed to look like, the boundaries we’ve drawn around it, the behaviours we’ll tolerate or won’t, that love ends up being something granted when it suits us and withdrawn at will.
“Love is not happening. Love is being. Love is not an act. Love is existence. Love is not emotion, it is your very nature.” — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Once that actually lands, you move out of a place ruled by fear and control into something closer to what all of this has apparently been saying all along: that in love, more is always possible, not less. Not because you’ve found the right person to unlock it, but because it was never as scarce as ego made it feel.
What Love Actually Costs
I still think about that four-year-old, mid-tantrum, dumping an invented boyfriend over the phone. And the seven-year-old, quietly deciding love had to be hidden so it wouldn’t run out.
Somewhere between the innocence of childhood and the low-grade repression of adulthood, most of us absorb the same lesson those two children were already rehearsing: that love has to be earned, guarded, kept in short supply, or it’ll be taken from us. It’s not a truthful account of what love is. It’s a fairly accurate account of what fear does when it’s dressed up as love.
The real thing doesn’t work like that. It never needed rationing in the first place — we just needed evidence, and we made some children hand it to us before we’d believe it.
In expansive love,
Karmic Rebelle
Disrupt Karma. Restore Dharma.
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