LOVE
“I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates. Love liberates. It doesn’t just hold—that’s ego. Love liberates.”
In the lead up to St.Valentines day the shops are already saturated in the pinks and reds of consumerist love! It inspired me to write this blog on Love - what love is and what love isn’t.
Every year, usually on my birthday in September, I pick a theme for my year ahead. It’s usually a topic that I want to dive deeper into in order to improve an aspect of my life. This year going into 2024 my learning will be around the ideas of silence, surrender and rest. Between 2022-2023 I was studying the concept of love. The reason behind wanting to study this topic was mulitfold. I wanted to improve my relationships with others. I wanted to improve my relationship with my parents and as a knock on effect I hoped this would impact my future relationships with my own children. Of higher priority however was my relationship with my husband as we had hit some difficult territory in our twenty years together.
Western love is saturated with typical romantic Disney influenced love stories of fast love and happily ever afters. It’s a love of give and take and a strong neediness attached to it. In contrast Eastern concepts of love are focused more on initially understanding yourself and your patterns in order to let go and open yourself to a universal love.
The Yamas and Niyamas that I came across in my Yoga studies provided me with a values toolkit and I began to apply these concepts to the concept of love. (I have blogged on each of the Yamas and Niyamas here on this website if you want to learn more). Ahimsa (kindness/no harm), Satya (honesty) and Aparigraha (non clinging/non attachment) were values that I attempted to incorporate into each day and each interaction in order to open myself up to a greater understanding of love.
The Buddhist concept of love, took me longer to get my western head around. Thich Nhat Hahn summarises it best in one of his talks which I came across on Insight Timer. (I’ll provide a you tube link to this talk in the resources below.) Buddhist love focuses on four elements of true love: maitri (loving kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (joy), upeksha (equanimity). I’m still getting my head around these concepts and trying to put them into practice. My experience so far with this love is that it gives to every being without expecting anything in return, but not in a martyr kind of way. The source of our own love must be present first in order to truly love others. This love allows for you to disagree with a persons values and choices whilst still loving the person. It is a compassionate rather than an empathic love. For me it highlighted the need to be secure in my own source of love first. With this love there is a knowing that a person is held in love by the universe or God or whatever you believe in, as is everyone else. Therefore there is no need to cling to or want love from others. Love passes through you in your interactions with others and may help others heal if they are suffering. It’s a beautiful concept. As the year went on and I began to dive deeper into this, I realised that I really didn’t love myself very much at all. Jesus said ‘Love thy neighbour, as thyself’ but what happens to your neighbour if you don’t know how to love yourself?
The Western concept of self love has been pushed in the media as spa days and eating chocolate with a glass of red wine. As wonderful as these much needed time outs are from the drudgery of the treadmill of life, true self love is best understood from more of an Eastern concept and from the older western philosophies such as Stoicism. Eastern concepts tend to be non-dualistic and Stoicism tends to be dualistic. I have found by studying both that I have gained a better understanding of how to be the person I would like to be in this world.
Understanding myself and my patterns through observation of my reactions in interactions with others, journaling, self reflection and meditation was the first step. I have had to get to the root of my own lack of self love and need to be loved through psychotherapy. Practicing giving love with no expectation of anything in return through charitable acts or simple daily acts of kindness was a second step for me. The third step was applying the concept of non attachment to my core relationships and to my beliefs. The fourth I am still working on. Surrendering to something bigger than myself. I’m not quite sure what this is yet but I have returned to prayer and lighting candles. I am spending more energy on my meditation and mindfulness practices. I am reading books which look at this topic.
In trying to understand something more you might come across the darker side or as Carl Jung put it the shadow side. Valentine, for example, was beaten to death and beheaded for his beliefs, but we don’t talk about this on St. Valentines day. I always assumed that the shadow side of love was hate. However if love is an act of liberating then the shadow side of this is clinging. In the last two years I made a new friend and as we got to know each other better this shadow side emerged. I hadn’t had a connection like this in a long time and I began to cling hard. I’ve learned some difficult lessons in this new relationship about what love is and isn’t. Suffering, conflict and cognitive dissonance has very slowly and painfully taught me how to let go. Sometimes the darker sides of ourselves and the dark times in life help us to learn and grow. Suffering results in a sort of cleansing. It highlights that change is required. The challenge for me now is in the acceptance of the poor choices that I made in this relationship and to try not to push away the experience or distract myself from it. If I want to change I need to accept that the dark sides of me exist even if I never believed before that they could. Love isn’t about being perfect. When we make a mistake we can be compassionate with ourselves, pick ourselves up and start again. We may need to start over multiple times before the lesson is learned.
Love is not the Disney or Hollywood whirlwind that has been imprinted in our brains from a young age. This love is pushed on us by consumerism in the lead up to St. Valentines day. Love is an active state. There is a responsibility attached to the concept of love. We are social beings and are dependant on others as they are on us. This dependence need not be be one of neediness and clinging but one of learning and growing. Love grows in the choices we make in our interactions with every person, every day. This includes how we interact with ourselves. Self love is not self gratifying or selfish it is freeing ourselves from our patterns, our addictions and need attachments.
This weekend I finished a book by Arthur C Brooks called ‘Build the life you want - The art and science of getting happier’. Towards the end of the book he guides the reader to ask this question before acting - ‘What is the most loving thing to do right now?’
“To heal you have to get to the root of the wound and kiss it all the way up”
Resources and References
Four elements of true love by Thich Naht Hahn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKWIeQXCKvU
Build the life you want - The art and science of getting happier. Arthur C Brooks and Oprah Winfrey
