Do you feel loved?
Is there a difference?
We can only feel love if we are open to feeling it.
Are you open to feeling love?
If you aren't, what is it that gets in the way?
If love is the tendency towards openness, flow, radiance, energy, expansion, life, light, joy...
then what blocks love must be the tendency to oppose those things:
closedness, stuckness, hardness, darkness, stagnation, compression, heaviness, inertia, passivity...
How do we find love?
The feeling cannot be gotten directly, if it is experienced as absent.
The feeling/experience can be our goal, but the feeling is not the means whereby we "achieve" or "get" it.
We must stick to principle, relying on our clear intentions, well-directed and appropriate thoughts.
We must stop thinking/doing the thoughts/actions which block love,
and instead aim our thoughts/actions in the direction of the goal.
Then, with trust in the means-whereby and faith in the processes of the Self,
We wait patiently, with calm acceptance of the present conditions, for the fruits to ripen and love to bloom.
Some people are fortunate to feel the joy of love most of the time. Most of us, however, experience periods of dryness, times when joyful love is not felt. In times like that, the following thoughts may prove helpful:
- I am aware that I am unhappy, not feeling love.
- I am free to feel unhappy and loveless.
- I know that happiness and love are possible.
- My goal is to enjoy and feel the happiness that comes with experiencing love.
- I am blocking love.
- I am stopping.
- I am not blocking love's joy, light, and flow.
- I am open to love.
- I am allowing love to flow through me.
- I am allowing myself to feel love.
- I am not expecting an instant result.
- I am waiting, allowing, trusting.
- I know that love is here, now, within me and all around.
- I am open to experiencing love.
Hi Jennifer.
ReplyDeleteIn English, unfortunately, the word love is used to denote a huge array of things, from personal/interpersonal feelings to spiritual experiences. For the most part, love is a transitive verb; there's a subject and an object. You seem to be writing about love as a thing that happens in the absence of a lover. That makes your first three questions essential to answer. Especially the third: is there a difference?
How would you clarify this for me?
With love,
K
Hi Kevin,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your insightful question! In musing about it, these are some of the thoughts I'm having:
- I think the experience or understanding of love is something so personal, with so many possible layers, feelings and interpretations, that it is difficult or impossible to define it in a way that someone else will understand exactly what is meant in the moment.
- In my post, I was speaking ambiguously so that the reader can apply whatever meaning he/she wishes to this word. I think the directions work no matter how one conceives of the word love; whether it is meant to be personal or interpersonal or suprapersonal, a verb or a noun.
- I agree with you: for there to be an awareness of love, there must be a subject and an object, since love is about the attraction and union of "separates". Therefore, there is always a lover and a beloved, but sometimes this lover is not a specific human being. In fact, sometimes the object of one's love is simply Love Itself.
- That said, I think that the ultimate aim of love is to unite with--to become--that which one loves, and then there is only One, only One Subject, and all is Love, without a second. One loves in order to become Love.
- In the last analysis, and ideally speaking, there need be no distinction between the spiritual experience and personal/interpersonal feelings of love. In love, everything is unified. Love is love is love. Love is everything. I realize that this is a very idealistic way of looking at love, and sometimes I am told that I am wrong because I am mixing different planes together (which is quite possibly true), but this is how I tend to look at it when I think about love. To me, this Ideal Love is the Goal not to be lost sight of.
To follow up on Kevin's comment and question, here are two examples of different (?) types of love to which one can apply your questions:
ReplyDelete1) The mystical saint-lover (directly applicable to the experiences of Santa Teresa de Jesus) has a period of dryness. She loves God, but she does not feel or perceive that she is loved back. That period of dryness may also include her not feeling love for God herself.
2) The human, "romantic" example of unrequited love: she loves (feels love for) him (a man, not God), but he has no "feelings" of love for her.
Is there a difference?
I forgot to write about the third question, "Is there a difference between feeling love and feeling loved?".
ReplyDeleteI think that, ultimately, there is no difference, although it depends on whether the suprapersonal Love is kept in mind. For instance, I can feel love for a specific person and not feel loved back by that specific person (or vice versa), and yet feel loved in the process of loving. Because if I am truly loving from/with my whole being, I connect with and become Love Itself. When I love in this way, I love myself, and as a consequence I feel loved.
I think that perhaps it is crucial not to limit our definitions of love or our beliefs about what it is or isn't, always remaining open to something mysteriously greater, if we want to feel/know/be Love.