Living Love
Love is divinity
Love is energy
Love is in & through all things.
Love is what everything is made of.
Love is sensation & action.
Love is emotion & expression.
Love is thought & intention.
To live Love, we have three entwined tasks:
~the practice of self - love
~the development of our capacity to
share love with others
& learning to dance with the
universal flows of Love.
To live Love, we have only to Be,
we have only to Breathe.
ajaye
What are the desires of your heart? Do you know? Many of us have been taught and socially conditioned to notice and respond only to the desires we’ve been told are valid, or to surface, conditioned desires that are little more than an itch to scratch. We may feel cut off from the desires of our heart, or be aware of them but believe they are too big, or that we are not worthy.
Another message has long been out there, expressed again and again by artists and spiritual teachers:
Listen to your heart.
You may wonder if this is just a metaphor, or an instruction to be led by the
emotions... which everyone knows will get you into trouble! It sounds like
a well-intentioned but impractical suggestion, tantamount to checking your
brain at the door.
Though children are still widely taught that the heart is just a pump made of muscle, science has known for some time now that the heart is much much more. Discoveries from various fields combine to illuminate the astonishing truth, so long intuited and so often dismissed: The heart is the major center of intelligence in human beings!
Joseph Chilton Pearce sums up some of this research:
Molecular biologists have discovered that the heart is the body’s most important
endocrine gland...producing and releasing the major hormone ANF which effects
every operation in the limbic structure, the ”emotional brain”. This includes the
hippocampal area where memory and learning take place, and also the control centers for the entire hormonal system.
Neurocardiologists have found that 60 to 65% of the cells of the heart are actually
neural cells, not muscle cells...whose ganglia are linked to every major organ in
the body, to the entire muscle spindle system that uniquely enables humans to express their emotions.
Biophysicists have discovered that the heart is also a very powerful
electromagnetic generator. It creates an electromagnetic field that encompasses
the body and extends out anywhere from eight to twelve feet away from it...All
indications are that it furnishes the whole radio wave spectrum from which the
brain draws its material to create our internal experience of the world.
Listening to the heart is a very real, physiologic as well as spiritual process. But how? We have been taught to separate our body and brain, taught to
exalt the mind over the emotions, taught to view Love as just an emotion and the heart as just a pump. The brain in your body and the brain in your head are designed and intended to work in a harmonious, mutually responsive state of interaction, but we have been habituated into thinking only from the neck up, or conversely to reacting without thinking.
Still, most of us would answer the questions “ Do I desire to improve the flow of Love in my life?” and “Do I want to learn to listen to my heart?” with a heart felt “Yes!”
Learning to listen to your heart is actually a precise and teachable process. One of the few fields articulating and demonstrating this is Focusing. It has been my privilege to teach and practice this profound and accessible process for nearly two decades. I invite you to contact me, or refer to the links on this website, for further information about how you can move forward to learn to bring this very special mode of inner communication into your life skills repertoire.
Let us further consider the concept of Living Love. This is my term for a kind of flow surfing state in which Love is moving freely in and through you while at the same time you are emotionally and energetically supple and aware enough to move with it.
The energy of Love is an energy of movement, nowhere static, not even at the centre of an atom. In many ways similar to electricity, when this energy is moving freely along appropriate channels it does no harm and infact empowers.
However neglected, obstructed or inadequate channels can lead to various kinds of injury, damage and the cessation of the needed flow of energy to accomplish specific tasks.
When Love / life energy circulates appropriately within and between individuals and their environments we are far more apt to be able to navigate and fittingly respond to the tides, challenges and opportunities of life - physical, mental, relational and all the rest.
The Trinities of Love
There are two trinities - the Three Aspects and the Three Attentions - which help us to understand, monitor and enhance the flow of love in our lives.
They are trinities because, although they can be understood and considered separately, they are inextricably interrelated, and everything that effects one affects the others.
The Three Aspects are:
- The practice of Self Love -our relationship with our deep Selves is
fundamental to our experience of love as a whole. - The development of our capacity for Shared Love with others - intimacy,
communication, relationships with family, friends & community. - Learning to dance & flow with tides of Universal Love -the ability to sense transpersonal connection, to experience our love for & oneness with all that is.
Each of these aspects requires Three Attentions:
Nourishing: actions & thoughts which support & develop the already well & functioning aspects in ourselves, our relationships & our world. Nourishing maintains & supports our ongoing functioning.
Healing: repairing & regenerating damaged channels of love where the flow of love has been reduced or blocked by wounds, scars, false beliefs or conflicting values. Healing repairs our wounds and restores health.
Celebrating: making room for the rejuvenating energies of joy & thankfulness to honour & mark our milestones, accomplishments, & the gifts of life. Celebration develops our capacities to recognize and attract that which is soul satisfying and profoundly pleasurable for us.
Understanding Love as energy and the heart as a generator and receiver of energy leads to the further insight that hate is not the opposite of Love, fear is.
As Joseph Chilton Pearce explains,”at the first sign of anxiety the brain shifts its functions from the high, prefrontal lobes to the old defenses of the reptilian brain.” This literally interrupts the communion between the heart and forebrain! Some of the science behind the importance of birth healing work has to do with the way the emotional state experienced by the mother translates to the fetus and infant, and sets a priority ratio between the hind
and forebrains.
Remember it is the forebrain that communicates with the heart or body brain. These ratios continue to be influenced through life, and birth healing and/or stress reduction & coping work helps to restore a healthier priority ratio.
Ironically, the energy of fighting against fear, or being afraid of our fear serves only to keep us in that severed loop. Compassion and acceptance of our fears are the energies that allow them to melt and morph into insights on our heart’s most tender desires.
Five years ago, I was trying to find my way forward from the ending of an engagement. The relationship had held so much love and promise. Yet my partner’s persistent depression and growing aggression coupled with my own disappointment and fearful withdrawal had made a minefield of the powerful energies between us, and it had become impossible for me to stay.
Although I had not entirely lost my sense of self, I had lost contact quite completely with my heart’s desires.
As soon as possible, I set to work. I hosted a weekend retreat with a wonderful manifestation teacher from California, Jane Bell. Shortly after, I
dedicated a beautiful blank journal to “the discovery and acknowledgment
of my heart’s desires”. There I recorded multiple aspects of my journey and processes, and it has become a treasured record and resource. I love to look back and see how my desires came into focus and one by one into form.
It was a journey that started out sorrowfully and heavy, and became fun,
joyous and tremendously empowering!
For the desires of your heart..., which are always in harmony with your highest good and life’s purpose, to come to realization they must first be heard and seen, then loved and treasured, and then we must learn how to allow ourselves to receive; how to get out of our own way! Compassion towards the process - towards our own set backs and shortcomings- keeps the heart generating the kinds of intelligence and integration that in turn begin to exponentially assist our progress.
So consider the desires of your heart. One simple and effective exercise is to begin making uncensored lists of 100 wants wishes and desires, things you’d like to have or do, places you’d like to visit, skills you’d like to master. It’s surprisingly hard to come up with 100, and in fact I have never managed it. The point is to give yourself permission to include the
smallest and largest desires. These lists are not the place to judge the worth of individual desires or even try to determine which are heart’s desires and which are conditioned desires.
Keep making the lists, and after a few passes through, those that have deeper meaning for you will start to float to the top of your awareness.
You’ll start to notice them because of how they make you feel, THERE, in
your heart!
Simultaneously consider the health of the trinity of aspects of Love in your personal life at the present time. Consider the allotment of the three attentions to each of the three aspects. Ways of strengthening and enhancing the flow of love in your life will become apparent to you, and as you put them into action the felt results will encourage more progress.
Love is far more than any of the emotions which bear it’s name.
Love is far more than the state of being in which we feel openhearted, compassionate, connected. Love is the very energy of life, the energy all things - even the densest of physical forms - are made of; the energy whose circulation
animates, rejuvenates and heals all levels of being.
In simplest terms, Love is the energy behind, in and through everything, and the flow or circulation of Love is essential to every aspect of our personal, interpersonal and global health.
May you be richly blessed on your journey of Living Love, and with each
step increasingly become a source and channel of blessing!