Everyday Enlightenment, page 25
When attention is centered in the lower level of survival and fear, love manifests as lust, obsessive desire, and exploitation. When attention is centered in the second level of relationship and sorrow, love manifests as romantic sentiment and sensitivity, as bouts of pleasure and pain, fighting and making up—the stuff of romance novels and soap operas. When attention is centered in the third level of power and anger, love manifests as duty and fidelity—but also as control issues, struggles with self-discipline. You love at times probably experienced all three of these forms of love.
In rare moments of free attention, your awareness may rise into the heart, manifesting as selfless giving—the kind of unconditional love sometimes experienced by parents for their children. It is so rare for attention to establish itself firmly in the heart (without being pulled back to the issues of the lower three centers) that those who demonstrate such unconditional love over time are called “saints.” This ascension of attention from the lower three centers into the heart is what it means to awaken your heart. Such awakening manifests a gradual process of illumination as the light of attention enlightens the heart, resulting in more frequent waves of love.
Remembering to Love
The wisdom, the power, the courage, the love, the kingdom of heaven—are inside us. It's just that we forget. We forget to trust ourselves; we forget to listen; we forget to pay attention to the highest and best inside us. We forget because we've been sleeping, slumbering, dreaming, wishing, hoping, while love has been waking us, shaking us, calling us to open the shades and let in the light of awareness. It's time to take hold of our lives, time to accept ourselves, our world, and our present reality even as we aspire to our highest ideals
Awakening your heart produces a natural, graceful, expansive state of unconditional love—no strings attached. That means you cannot help but love, even when others do not love you back. It does not mean that you always feel an emotion of love or that you love every personality; it means that you have found the will to treat others with kindness and compassion irrespective of feelings.
In your higher moments, you may indeed feel deep and profound compassion, but you can't wait for or depend upon changeable feelings, which may appear and then disappear like long-lost lovers. Romance fades like the bloom of a flower, unless you cultivate it carefully through loving actions, so that it blooms anew.
Love Begins with You
one of the strangest delusions believed by many of us is that it is good to love other people but bad to love yourself. I suggest that the more you are able to see, love, and accept the one facet of Spirit gazing at you from the mirror, the more you will be able to love Spirit within others. If we are the same awareness shining through a billion separate forms, then all love begins with self-love. For the heart to awaken, it cannot exclude a single soul, including yourself. If you do not love yourself, how can you find the space to love others?
Self-love is a beginning practice of love. From self-love we learn to love another—a parent, a pet, a friend, a partner—from family to friends, to associates, to the larger world. There's no place like home to begin the practice of love. Home is where the heart is, and home is generally where the hassles are, too. What better place to practice loving without reason than that place where we cannot always find a reason to love?
If practicing love is not yet a priority at this point in time—if you have other gateways to attend to that seem more immediate and pressing—then attend to them. This, too, is the work of consciousness. Love yourself enough to forgive your humanity, and let yourself be. This allows love to grow. Love enough to trust the process of your life unfolding.
Keeping Love Alive
Some moments we love; some moments we don't. Since life is a series of moments, each appearing and disappearing, no one can truly promise, “I will love you forever.” Feelings come and go, change and fade—even the feeling of commitment. You may feel grief or rage, then momentarily forget as you laugh or wonder at something you see or hear. Acknowledge the reality of our moment-to-moment existence. Recognize that feelings fade unless restimulated, and use this to your advantage. Avoid restimulating undesired feelings. If someone leaves you, it may be wise to remove that smiling photograph from the desk or wall, at least until time heals the raw wound.
It makes sense to study successful people to find what qualities and behaviors they have in common and to model or duplicate their actions. After all, as you learned in Reclaim Your Will, it is not only who you are that makes a difference in life, but what you actually do. And if you do what others do, you increase your chances of getting similar results.
This approach to living also applies to the arena of relationships. Study the qualities and behaviors of longtime couples, especially those who report that they are still in love and happy together. Elderly couples like my parents, who have been married for nearly sixty years, have learned that making love is not just about sex—that love must be made and remade. Since love fades like any other feeling, thriving long-term relationships are nourished by restimulating feelings of love. The heart is not just awakened; it must be reawakened again and again. Based on my observations, experience, and research, longtime couples share many of the following behaviors that restimulate feelings of love:
• They offer kind, complimentary words of appreciation.
• They withhold words of nagging and criticism (or deliver criticism in a soft, gentle, considerate manner).
• They kiss or touch one another with caring and affection, whether or not the touch is sexual.
• They remain loyal and supportive friends.
• They express their feelings and needs.
• They frequently say “thank you” and “I apologize.” They forgive and ask forgiveness.
• They listen well and pay attention to the feelings and needs of their partner.
• They maintain a sense of humor about themselves.
• They value and consider their partner's needs not as less or greater, but as equal to their own.
• They demonstrate sexual caring, compatibility, and communication.
• They accept their partner's imperfections rather than trying to control or change their partner to suit their own preferences.
• They have their own interests and friends, give each other the space to pursue those interests, then share their interests with one another.
In light of this wisdom of longtime partners who have kept the lamp of love burning, here are some simple practices you can do:
• Make sure to kiss or embrace your partner (and children) every day.
• When appropriate, give your loved one(s) a one-minute back, neck, or foot massage. (Can you spare one minute to keep love alive?)
• Do something special on birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine's Day, and also spontaneously surprise your loved one with a flower, a note, poem, or book—a tangible sign of your love.
• No matter how busy you are, especially if you have children, make a date to go out together, even if it's just for a walk, at least once a week.
• When your partner is upset with you or just feeling blue, ask questions, then let your partner speak and just listen. Look for things to appreciate and offer words of kindness, praise, and affection.
• When you must complain, use the word “I” more than the word “you”—such as “I have a hard time with this” instead of “You really frustrate me when you…”
• Be quick to offer thanks and equally prompt to apologize; make your comments specific rather than general—such as “Thank you for making my favorite meal” instead of “Thanks for all the work you do” or “I apologize for telling Burt what you had asked me not to tell him” instead of “Sorry I talk too much.”
According to the U.S. Forestry Service, embers can burn all winter beneath the snow; the same is true of the embers of relationship. As long as a single spark remains, couples can reawaken the fire of a love that seems to have died. Sometimes love is smothered by criticisms, nagging, or belittling or doused by a thousand little hurts. Words of gratitude, appreciation, apology, and sincere forgiveness reignite the fires of passion and devotion.
Love as an Action
Talk is easy, but love is difficult. Awakening your heart requires more than sweet sentiment or fine intentions. It requires time, energy, and attention—treating your loved ones with the care you offer to honored guests. We cannot build relationships on words or feelings alone. True love is not feelings or flowery words; it is action. Love is as love does
You now understand that you have no more control over feelings of love than you do over the weather. You cannot fall in or out of love just by willing it. But you can control behavior—you can behave with kindness, care, and compassion whether or not you happen to feel loving in a given moment. This is the beginning of unconditional love and unreasonable happiness.
As it happens, the words “love” and “happiness” express the same state of being, with the same physiological fingerprints; the same chemicals are secreted in the bloodstream. When you love, you feel happy; when you are happy, you feel loving. To awaken the heart is to be unreasonably happy. As you master the will to act loving—to show kindness and compassion in any moment despite feelings to the contrary—you develop the capacity to give unconditional love.
Conditional and Unconditional Love
Conditional love is attached to one particular person to the exclusion of others. This is the beginning stage of love. It may include positive feelings of deep, tender regard, of passion, affection, and solicitude, arising from kinship or from devotion, desire, attraction, fondness, or warm personal attachment, which can fade over time
In marriage ceremonies we promise to honor, love, and cherish till death do us part, but such promises are unrealistic. Ask nearly any divorced couple. Because conditional love is personal, attached to specific qualities, appearance, and other attributes of a particular person, when these qualities, appearance, or attributes change or fade, so can the love.
Until we move from conditional to unconditional love, stores will be full of books and techniques to help struggling, suffering couples wondering whether or not to stay together because they don't feel fulfilled.
Unconditional love has no bounds, limits, strings, or conditions. It loves without reason, whether or not it is loved or even appreciated in return. It asks for nothing but gives what it can. It may be tough or tender, but it is always kind. It values the lives of others as equal to—not less or more than—one's own.
And unconditional love extends to all souls, even while living with one chosen partner. Loving everyone does not imply having sexual contact. As most of us have intuitively learned, sexuality best serves our spiritual evolution within a single, committed relationship. We can express nonexclusive love to friends, acquaintances, and other members of our human family without threatening the sanctity of our primary relationship, which remains the exclusive domain of sexual intimacy.
Parenthood serves as a primary theater and school of unconditional love. Words we have all heard uttered with great solemnity at wedding ceremonies apply most universally to our love for our children, whom we love fiercely, with all our hearts, for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health…till death us do part. Our children teach us how to love more than we could ever teach them.
If you can love even one other person with a fierce, sacrificial, unconditional generosity of spirit, then you can love many as you learn to cast your net of love wide enough to embrace all people as your children, as your brothers and your sisters. This is no idealistic wish; this is a preview and prediction of your destiny.
Transpersonal Love: The First Mystical Practice
True love is rare, but it exists, and not just in fairy tales. Each of us has known moments of true unconditional (unselfish) love, pure altruism. Such love draws you upward toward the higher planes of experience, the meeting place of flesh and spirit, wher you contact the higher self described in the ancient traditions. Thus love is the first mystical practice.
Transpersonal love represents a paradox of two apparently incompatible ideas. Transpersonal means “transcending or beyond the personal,” whereas we normally think of love as very personal. (How would it sound to say, “I love you, but it's nothing personal”?) Transpersonal love takes us beyond our egos, beyond the separate self. From that awareness you look with love upon all souls, wrapping them in a cloak of kindness and compassion. You love all women through your wife, all men through your husband, all children through your children, all people through your friends. In those moments that awareness awakens your heart, you find the will to act in a loving manner despite your moods, feelings, or preferences.
Love and Will
The bridge of will transforms love from something you seek to something you bestow, from dependence on changeable feeling to reliance on compassionate behaviors. But feelings, as you know, are fickle and undependable. Feelings of passion, commitment, and desire may turn to indifference, jealousy, and animosity. True love cannot wait for the right mood; it is fanned by the fires of your actions. When you can show love, act compassionately, behave with kindness whether or not you feel that way, you will know the plateau of human maturity. This does not mean you behave as a saccharine saint, but that even occasions of anger, criticism, sadness, and other natural feelings you may express are genuinely rooted in love. If your spouse, child, friend, or partner is yelling at you, blaming you, you are not likely to feel love and compassion for them in that moment; still, you never lose the power to act with kindness
In the practice of everyday enlightenment, the process of awakening your heart, love and happiness are no longer passive feelings you hope or wish or wait for. Love becomes an action; happiness becomes a behavior. You love without reason and behave with unreasonable happiness.
This practice takes getting used to and bears repetition: To awaken your heart, you do not have to (nor can you) consistently generate loving feelings—you only have to behave with loving-kindness. The saints also felt anger, sorrow, and fear, since no one can control their feelings; but they spoke and acted with love, and that is what made them saints. In any moment you behave with loving-kindness even when you don't feel like it, you have ascended, for that moment, to sainthood.
This is the great secret of love: Loyalty is not something you feel; it is something you do. Kindness is something you do. Fidelity and friendship are things you do. This is why love is the greatest and most difficult spiritual discipline of all.
It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than “Try to be a little kinder.”
—Aldous Huxley
Love as a Spiritual Practice
There can be no spirituality without loving-kindness. The benefits of sitting alone in one's room meditating on a blue light or on ultimate truth are far less than forming an open relationship with life, moment to moment. Everyday enlightenment is, above all things, a loving embrace of the moment. It is possible to practice such love in everyday life while shopping, riding on a bus, making dinner, or working with colleagues or clients
In the fifth gateway, Tame Your Mind, you learned that you have some degree of control over where you place your attention. Using this ability, you will find it possible to use your voice, touch, sight, hearing, and even thought as forms of everyday spiritual practice.
Your heart is not just a muscle in your chest; it is also the mystical center of love. You can love as, from, and with your whole body and being, but every culture I've visited associates love with the heart. That muscle, quietly beating, pumping life through your body, is the center of love. Even children know this. One evening several years ago, while at a gathering of friends, I found myself sitting next to a three-year-old boy as we listened to a master cellist from China. On impulse I asked the little boy where he felt the music. “Here,” he said matter-of-factly, touching his chest, “I feel it here.”
The heart is God's calling card. It beats the rhythms of the mystery of life, hope, inspiration, and love. Normally you have your attention not in your heart, but on your thoughts and actions. By placing your attention in your heart while speaking, seeing, hearing, touching, and thinking, you engage in a simple form of meditation to awaken your heart.
The theme from the beginning of this book has been the liberation of attention. This is the goal of the twelve gateways not just in and of itself, but so that your attention is free to rise into the heart and so you naturally speak, think, hear, touch, and act from the heart. Until such moments occur spontaneously, you can practice everyday enlightenment by placing your attention in the heart and experience love's awakening.
• Right now, instead of focusing your attention on this page or on your thoughts, place your attention in your heart. Feel your heart. (It may help to place a hand there at first.)
• Are you aware of a subtle shift in the quality of your awareness when you become aware of your heart? Notice this purified form of feeling above fear, sorrow, or anger.
• Notice that it is not a difficult or esoteric exercise, but rather a simple act of remembrance you can do instantly, at any time or in any circumstance.
It is known in numerous ancient spiritual and mystical traditions that we first connect with and experience the love and inspiration of our higher selves at the heart center—not in the realms below. Love, as I have said, is the beginning of mystical practice, the first stirrings of unity, of transpersonal life, where the language of the spiritual teachings, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, begins to make sense. Thus this simple practice can change the quality of your life, to the degree you remember to do it.
