article on love (also from the yoga journal)

What Is Love?As much as we might like to, we can't force love to happen. But we canunderstand its many levels and connect more easily to its source.By Sally Kempton
www.sallykempton.com. http://www.yogajournal.com/views/1194_1.cfm

"I know love is there," my old friend Elliot said. "My question is,Why is it that so many times, I can't feel it?"We were in the middle of a workshop I teach called "Exploring theHeart." Elliot had recently lost his father, and so I asked him, "Areyou talking about something specific?""Of course," he said. As he told me the story of his father's death, Ifelt a deep sense of recognition. The questions his experience raisedare essential ones, questions we all deal with as we probe that mostfundamental and yet elusive of all human feelings: love.Elliot and his father had been polite strangers for nearly 20 years.Yet when the father became seriously ill, the only person he wantedaround him was his son. "I knew we'd been given our big chance to openup to each other," Elliot said. "I kept thinking, 'Now he'll finallyget who I really am! We'll bond, and I'll be able to feel love for himat last!'"The problem was that Elliot couldn't dig out a single nugget of lovefor his father. He wanted to love him. He knew he should love him. Buttheir history together had formed such a habit of disconnection thathe felt nothing at all.How Love FeelsSo Elliot did the only thing he could think of to close the gap. Heasked himself, "How would I act if I did feel love for my father?"Then he acted on the intuition that arose for him.Elliot realized that when we really love someone, we're attentive toeven the smallest minutiae of that person's existence. So he practicedpaying close attention to his father.

"I wondered where that love came from," he told me. "Was it a rewardfor taking care of my father? If so, why wasn't it there when I neededit, so to speak?"I realized that behind Elliot's questions was an even deeper set ofquestions, ones that plague us all. They go something like this: Iflove is real, why doesn't it feel the way I've always heard it wassupposed to feel? Why can't I feel it all the time? And why does loveso often feel lacking, or painful, or both?

Love Is a Many-Leveled ThingMost of us have been confused about love all of our lives. In fact, weoften begin the inner life as a search—conscious or unconscious—for asource of love that can't be taken away. We may have grown up feelingunloved or believing we had to perform heroic feats to deserve love.Our parents, the movies we see, our cultural and religious milieu giveus ideas about love that go on influencing us long after we haveforgotten their source. When we read spiritual books and encounterteachers, our understanding about love can get even more complicated,because depending on what we read or whom we study with, we getslightly different takes on what love means in spiritual life.

Some teachers tell us that our essence is love; others say love is apassion, an emotion that leads to addiction and clinging.

Is love somethingwe have to feel, or is it enough to offer kindness and direct positivethoughts toward ourselves and others? And how is it that some teacherstell us that love is both the path and the goal, while others seem toignore the subject altogether?In spiritual life alone, the word love is used in at least three ways,and our experience and understanding of love will differ according towhich aspect of it we are thinking about.

It is only when love gets filtered through theprism of the human psyche that it begins to look specific and limited.It becomes veiled by our thoughts and feelings, and we start to thinkthat love comes and goes, that we can feel it only for certain people,or that there's not enough love to go around. We can't help doingthis.Our senses, mind, and ego, hardwired to give us the experience ofseparateness and distinction, set us up to think that love is outsideus, that some people and places and things are lovable and others arenot, and furthermore that love has different flavors: mother love,romantic love, love of movies, love of nature, compassionate love,sexual love, love of the cozy feeling of being under the covers at the end of a long day.In short, if the

Great Love is naturally unifying, our individual,human experience of love is subject to change and loss, moods andtides, attachments and aversions. It doesn't matter who or what welove; at some point, the object of our love will disappear from ourlife or disappoint us or stop being lovable, simply because change isthe nature of existence. So individual love is always touched withsuffering, even when the love we feel is "spiritual."I once heard someone ask a great spiritual teacher, "Will loving youcause me to suffer the way I've suffered from loving other people?"The teacher replied, "If you love me in the way you've loved otherpeople, you'll suffer." He was saying that as long as we think thatlove comes from something outside ourselves—even from God or aspiritual master—we are going to experience pain.

To say that our individual experience of love can be unsatisfying orchangeable or incomplete is not to say it is less real than the GreatLove. It is the Great Love, which has simply been subject tofiltration. The practice of yoga is about removing the filter, closingthe gap between our limited experience and the experience of greatnesswe all hold inside. That's the whole point of contemplativepractice—especially the practice of loving.Love as SadhanaThe third kind of love—love as a practice—is the medicine for theterrible discrepancy we sometimes feel between our sense of what lovecan be and the actuality of our ordinary experience of it.

Thepractice of love—actions and attitudes that create an atmosphere ofkindness, acceptance, and unity in ourselves and in those around us—isnot only the basis of spiritual life, it is also the basis ofcivilization. We can't always feel gratitude, but we can remember tosay thank you. We can't always like other people, but we can try topay attention when they talk to us and help them out when they're introuble. We may not feel good about ourselves all the time, but we canpractice treating ourselves gently, slowing down and breathing when wewant to rush, or talking back to our inner voices of self-criticismand judgment. When it comes to daily life, feeling love may actuallybe less important than acting loving.

How would I act if I were feeling love?—you willeventually discover the practice that helps melt your frozen heart, sothe love that always hides behind our emotional barricades can showits face. One of my students, caught in an argument with her stepson,asked herself, "How would I be if I really felt love right now?" Theanswer that came up was "relaxed." So she practiced relaxing with thebreath and was able to talk with her son without the clutch of fearand judgment that had been polarizing the two of them.Connecting to the Source of LoveOver the years, two practices have helped me reconnect to the sourceof love. Both cultivate the feeling of unity. And both are based onthe insight that the best way to bypass the ego, which cuts us offfrom love, is to learn how to undermine our feeling of separation.The first is the practice of recognizing that the awareness in anotherperson is the same awareness that is in me. Years ago, I had to workwith a demanding, critical, narrow-minded boss. One day, when she wasbeing particularly prickly, and I was especially aware of mydiscomfort in her presence, I gazed into her eyes, focused on thelight reflected in her pupils, and reminded myself that the awareness,the life force, the presence that was looking out through her eyes wasexactly the same as the awareness that was looking out through mine.Whatever differences there were in our personalities, our mental andemotional states, she and I were the same on the level of pureawareness. Not different but one.It amazed me to see how quickly the feeling of alienation andirritation disappeared. The practice of recognition became thestrategy that allowed me to work comfortably with this woman, and Ifall back on it now whenever I feel the absence of love.

Not feeling loved ourselves, we pass on our sense of lackto others, so that even when we try to give love, what comes throughinstead is anxiety or clinging. Yet, as Rumi says in another of hisgreat poems, love is always there, always available, always ready topour itself out to us. Whether you actuallyfeel this love or not, keep imagining that it is flowing toward youand into you.Another way to receive love is to imagine that just outside the windowof your room sits a compassionate and loving being, someone wise andincredibly forgiving. This person is watching you through the window;her glance protects you and surrounds you with sweetness.Allow yourself to receive the love that is flowing toward you fromthis being. If thoughts come up to block it—like "I don't deservethis" or "This is just an exercise; it's not real"—notice them and letthem go as you might in meditation, saying, "Thinking," and thenbreathing the thought out. Your only task is to receive.When you open your eyes, look around you with the thought that thelove you have been contemplating is still flowing toward you fromwhatever you see and from the air itself.In truth, it is. The Great Love, the love that is the kernel ofeverything, is present in everything, peeking out during every momentin which we feel a spark of tenderness, appreciation, or affection.Any glimmer of love is a spark from that fire and leads us back to it.