LOVE

The entire world’s population in 2021 has forgotten what love is about and how we get it.  It has forgotten how to love and respect each other or we would not be violating one another’s rights to choose, to think and believe what we want and to move about as we want.  We would be standing up for our right to choose what is best for each of us and making our choices according to what we believe not what the TV is telling us to believe.

Here is the original blog post about LOVE from 2016:

In a subscriber supported, advertisement free magazine called  The Sun, I found a description of the concept of love, so powerful, so authentic, I feel compelled to share with you.  The description, which will follow, was written by Stephen Levine, author and teacher on grief, death and dying.  His close friend was Ram Dass and his writings were greatly influenced by the Hindu Guru, Neem Karoli Baba.  When he treated the sick and dying he used meditation.  There is nothing like the study of grief, dying and death to provide clarity on the most complex and misunderstood subject of love.   I have learned volumes from the many people, through my work with hospice, with whom it was my honor to witness their grief and dying process.  Stephen died in 2016 at the age of 78.  Here is his understanding of love from his life’s work:

“We use the word love but we have no more understanding of love than we do of anger or fear or jealousy or even joy, because we have seldom investigated what that state of mind is.  What are the feelings we so quickly label as love?  For many what is called love is not lovely at all but is a tangle of needs and desires, of momentary ecstasies and bewilderment — moments of unity, of intense feelings of closeness, occur in a mind so fragile that the lease squint or sideways glance shatters its oneness into a dozen ghostly paranoias. When we say we love we usually mean some emotion, some deep feeling for an object or a person, that momentarily allows us to open to another.  But in such emotional love, self-protection is never far away.  Still there is “business” to the relationship; clouds of jealousy, possessiveness, guilt, intentional and unintentional manipulation, separateness, and the shadow of all previous “loves” darken the light of oneness.  But what I mean by love is not an emotion, it is a state of being.  True love has no object.  many speak of their unconditional love for another.  But in truth one does not have unconditional love for another.  Unconditional love is the experience of being; there is no “I” and “other”, and anyone or anything it touches is experienced in love….[Love] is not a dualistic emotion.  It is a sense of oneness with all that is.  The experience of love rises when we surrender our separateness into the universal.  It is a feeling of unity.  You don’t love another; you are another. There is no fear because there is no separation.  It is not so much that “two are as one” as it is “the One manifested as two”.  In such love there can be no unfinished business.” –From Stephen Levine’s Who Dies?

Most of us want to fall in love because once we do it for the first time, we remember how wonderful it feels.  But falling in love is very different from love as a state of being.  Falling in love has a specific purpose for human beings while love as a state of being is the thing, whether you know it or not, which is the actual wind beneath the wings of each breath we take.  Coming out of the illusion of what love is and is not, is what we spend the greater part of our life trying to sort out.  Once we do, we realize we are never unloved, ever.  We are loved because we breathe.  Once you know and live this,  all the other stuff of life falls, with ease, into place.

I often have clients, students, friends or family or will insist that love is a feeling.  It was first published in Yoga Magazine in 2001 that the feeling to which these people refer is actually biochemical and designed to lead to procreation.  It is a hard-wired biochemical process that seduces us into believing that those feelings are love.  Feelings change as our biochemistry changes throughout life but love is ever present even within the conflicts we can’t seem to resolve.  We don’t fall out of love; our biochemistry shifts to allow our brains to engage in the business of relationships and life.  This is when the stuff of learning about love actually could begin, now that the biochemical illusion of love is done, but instead we get divorced, thinking love has died.

Love is a state of being and way of behaving. 

We live because we are love. 

Wind blows, rain falls, the trees grow and the flowers bloom because they exist in a state of love.