Where is the Love?
What compass do you use when making your decisions? Do you rely on logic and intellectual capability? Do you listen to your heart or you follow your “gut feeling”?
I find it quite interesting that in the past, body sensations were mostly used to describe feelings or to justify decisions. We used to have our “heart set on something”, “wear it on our sleeves”, or “pour it out”, we might as well “get something off our chest”, “have butterflies in our stomach” or scream “at the top of our lungs”. Body introspection seems to be so old, that it is cast in our language.
Nowadays many decisions are based on intellectual analysis. We put pros and cons lists together, “analyze” the advantages, “think about” things, “dissect a statement”, “cut to the chase” and trim our choices to fit our mind. We often act solely out of ration and not out of a deeper mind – body connection. And the more we do this the more we forget to hold space for ourselves, for our feelings and to deep dive into how a decision or a thought affects with our body.
This purely rational course is something that often leads (me and others) either into fear or into panic. Once a situation is getting “off our hands” or an unwanted feeling starts to rise, the rational analysis filters stop working, the picture gets blurry and there is nothing else to hold on to anymore. At this point is difficult to start hearing what the body wants… On the other side, the deeper we sink into introspection, the more we can feel if a decision or a direction is right. And this introspection and the feeling of right or wrong developing out of it, has nothing to do with the mind… Its more what we would call intuition and funny enough the origin of the word intuition is the Latin verb “intueri” translated as “consider”. How often do we consider what or body tries to tell us while making our decisions?
Now I will try to make the connection to the love part, before this all turns into a linguistic lecture…
Love is, according to the yoga philosophy (and I would dare to say according to all spiritual knowledge) one of the strongest instances. And while nowadays we learn to see love as the stuff happening in any good movie -including the related drama, obstacles, and happy end- it meant way more in the past. Or maybe I should say it was a totally different concept, since this whole “you belong to me, and I belong to you”, “you complete me” and “I can’t breathe / Until you’re here with me” sounds more like obsession, possession, and attachment than Love. And while attachment and possession are characteristic to the ego, Love is free, universal, and connected to our true nature. The ego fears, being left outside, left behind, left in the dark and getting lost, while Love is that deep feeling of connectedness and of trust. And coming back to the beginning of the post, while the ego fears and thinks, love feels and trusts.
So where is the Love? I guess this question calls for a very personal answer… Love is that feeling of space and warmth in my chest after practicing the heart melting pose. Is the openness, joy, and lightness I often feel while being at my favorite beach. It means giving up, into the difficult practice of self-love, instead of pushing (and punishing) myself into self-vengeance. Is the feeling of being connected to others, recognizing, admiring, and celebrating the way they live life with authenticity, purpose, and commitment. True Love means seeing with the heart, identifying with its knowledge, and living life from this connection. Because Love is the place where fear is absent, the heart is open and the spirit runs free.
It is all beautiful in theory, and while one might think I am on my path to enlightenment. The truth looks quite different… I am lucky enough to have indulged in this feeling… while I am mostly caught in the process of losing myself, crashing into my ego, being stuck into fear, and somehow finding my way back into Love. And my way into Love mostly leads through mindfulness and yoga practice, into introspection and spending time in nature. It is through mindfulness that we can reconnect to the voice of our body, feel its essence, and find ways to see the world with an open heart. Through Love we can “walk on clouds”.
Maybe someday our paths will cross, we will see each other through our hearts eyes and recognize that we are all on the same journey of finding Love. Maybe we will succeed in our quest and for a couple of valuable moments we will experience it. Maybe we will understand then, that cherishing the path we walk together is the most important part of our journey…