In the world of yoga and spirituality, one hears a lot about love, and how it is the answer to all spiritual questions and the way to enlightenment. No kidding: as I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve received four emails in my inbox about how “anything other than love will split us from God,” how we should “learn to be extensions of Mother Earth’s love” in this world, how we should choose to “align with a loving consciousness,” and signed “in love and light.” Yikes.
It’s not that I disagree. I can hang with the reality that we are all One, and that light and love permeate this fabric of Oneness, like all the great mystical traditions propose; indeed, I have been blessed to experience this reality in numerous and powerful ways in my lifetime. But as a human being, I don’t always feel that way. Like yesterday morning, when I listened to one devastating news story after another on NPR, becoming nothing short of enraged and dispirited. Or this morning, when I woke from a disturbing dream into an emotional funk and then had another driver knowingly cut me off and nearly kill us both as I drove to a yoga class. By the time I sat on my mat, I was in no place to take in the sweet teacher’s reminders to “love yourself” and to “love your life.” Yes, that’s there, too, but sometimes the love is simmering on the back burner while my other emotions are boiling on the front one. Someone pointing out that I can turn up the flame on the love pot doesn’t magically make the other pot disappear.
What then?
I read something the other day that suggested that love isn’t a feeling one has, but one’s willingness to be present with what is. I like this definition of love, as I feel like it honors my divine capacity–as well as my humanity. As human beings we’re not always going to feel warm and cozy and adoring—we’re human! We have bodies that experience pain, we have egos that keep tempting us to react rather than respond, and we have brains that want to judge as much as our hearts want to love.
Not to say that sustained presence is necessarily any easier than sustained feelings of love (!), and not to say that there aren’t many other ways to consider love, but speaking from my non-enlightened state in the midst of countless emotions, love as presence seems a whole lot more realistic—and interesting—than love as emotion. What if I could stay with myself through an entire yoga practice, not checking out when I felt the old familiar feeling of discomfort or judgment arise? What if I could give myself the permission to express my anger with another person, rather than stuffing it and pretending everything is ok? What if I chose not to ignore the despairing events in the world, hoping that praying for others and thinking good thoughts is enough?
Outrage can make the world shift. Grief can breed astonishing creativity. Fear can inspire great acts of courage. But only if we’re present to feeling outrage, grief, and fear, among countless other emotions.
Through being present with what is, we’re acknowledging what is real, and since love is the ultimate reality, couldn’t we say that being present—even in the emotions that we don’t want to admit we have—really is being love?
Another interesting way to approach the presence of love is from the physical sense.
What happens to the energy that makes up our body/consciousness when we discover the presence of love? Is there not a detectable physical change — in not just our physical bodies/chemistry, and in our conscious/subconscious structures, but also in the ‘empty’ space around us? I can only speak from my limited personal experience, but I can say that the presence of love is something I’ve always been able to identify with in a very physical manner; not just of self, but in my surroundings as well. As a hypothetical example relating to what you’re saying, when I ‘feel’ or ‘experience’ the presence of love, I not only feel lighter in body, but the air smells and feels ‘lighter’, as does the way my eyes interpret the light wherever I am at the time, etc. The way my body interprets all my physical senses changes when I am aware of what I believe to be the presence of love.
Another interesting wrinkle is the point of increased intensity of physical interpretations of love’s presence when there is a mutual understanding of that presence between more than one soul simultaneously. Some may find clarity of consciousness in these situations, but not outside of them, hence the relatively universal yearning for the presence of love.
You’re of course absolutely right that outrage, grief, serendipity, fear, courage, hope, despair and so on, are all just as important to mindfully attempt to channel as love. You can’t have the yin without the yang, and all that jazz.
Anyway, I don’t mean to stain your beautifully written words with my completely uneducated opinion, but I wanted to chime in because I enjoyed this post and the reflecting I’m doing after reading it.