Redefining Love
Emotion 2 - Love
"While fear keeps you closed and safe, LOVE opens your heart and sets YOU free." - Joseph
While love is the opposite of fear, it shares its dual nature. Just as fear can be your worst enemy or best friend, Love also has two opposing qualities. Before we discuss true love, it is wise to view the other scope of love. This scope is named pleasure, a significant difference from the true nature of love. Pleasure is quick moving, seductive, and does not last. Love is receptive and everlasting. Pleasure is conditional, whereas love is unconditional. In true love, there are no strings attached. It just is. Pleasures distract YOU from developing true love. With love comes respect. With pleasure comes disrespect.
Love can be tricky to notice. My favorite example of of it hidden nature is found in a parent’s love for their child. If they notice their child playing with something that may harm them, the parent takes away the object. Out of love. Not love for how they will feel, rather love in what is True. To the child, it looks and feels a bit different. Love is grounded in Truth. Sometimes the truth isn’t so fluffy.
Speaking of Truth, love is grounded by most in the region of the heart. The heart, stated by ancients and moderns alike, is the place of intelligence. In this, we see where love is cultivated. That is, within. If you struggle going within yourself, and providing love to yourself, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to provide love to another. Typically, if one isn’t grounded in a sense of Self love, they are led, consciously and unconsciously, on a search for love outside. This results in a pursuit of pleasures, going through people, places, and objects without any sense of real connection. It is an unhealthy extraction to try and find the love that has been available within the entire time.
The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.” –C.G. Jung
Jealousy is a key sign love is lacking. Jealously is the perception someone has someone or something you do not have or wish to have. Obviously, it is a sign of disorder within your heart, which is then projected on another. Through this, you can begin to do inner work to see what is causing this reaction. Uncovering your jealous triggers will help tear the veil off your heart, and in doing so you may begin to feel the love you’ve been searching for your whole life.
“To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.”
To truly love, you must love yourself first. If not, you may end up on a burning drive of pleasure which will burn through everything that you touch. When love is cultivated, rather than its opposites of fear, jealously, and desire, you begin to seek Truth, experience, and create. When fear is turned into your great teacher, it leads you to LOVE.
The Formula
Defining Love
Triggering and Expressing Love
Responding, Not Reacting, to Love
Making Love Work For YOU
Redefining Love
Defining Love
Definitions
(Merriam-Webster): “Strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.”
(Dictionary.com): “A profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.”
(Cambridge Dictionary): “Providing and showing strong affection or affection and a strong attraction.”
(Wikipedia): “Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection, to the simplest pleasure.”
(Oxford Dictionary): “An intense feeling of deep affection.”
We concluded the redefinition with fear that EMOTIONS are ENERGY. As fear provides a retraction, love attracts. It is magnetic. If you think about a magnet, love is when there is a union. The resulting feeling of this union (whether it be based in Love or desire) is affection, a word that comes up in each definition. An affection is grounded in attachment. This is where love gets a bit tricky to define. There are many things that we attach to that bring us sensations of “love,” yet are rooted in the desire for Love.
In all, love unites. It is an attractor. It is personal and directed in both our inner and outer world. We love people, places, things, and idea. With that, it is time to breakdown Love.
Triggering and Expressing Love
Triggering Love
From the definition above, it is important to highlight the attractive and uniting nature of Love. While many projections of love are outwardly oriented, the true grounding of Love is found within. In the introduction, Love was attributed to the heart. This is KEY. The heart is the seat of ALL wisdom. In this, we notice the POWER of Love. While the “thinking” side of the heart can be found in forethinking (intuition), the “feeling” aspect of our heart is found in Love. If we notice all emotions out of love, whether they are grounded within the heart, or the EGO’s desires, provide a path towards our heart, we begin to see what true Love has to offer.
Through Love, we can begin to see our Self. If a trigger of love arises, find out where it is rooted. Is it a desire our of the EGO’s constant search for Love, or is it the real deal. Remember, desires fade. Think about this… If you ate that meal you LOVED out at dinner every night, how long would it last? With this, it is wise to look at these distractions with a new lens. They are triggering a part of YOU that needs tender care. Instead of burning through your desires outwardly, plunge into your depths to see what lies behind the scene. Burn through your desires, as ultimately the true desire is your Self.
Energetic Expression
I continue to play off fear, as it truly is a great opposite to Love. While fear takes our energy, rather a fight or flight sympathetic nervous system response, Love provides energy and is expressed as a parasympathetic response. Love brings peace. Love lowers stress. Love brings one up. Love heals. Love can move mountains. Love in found within, and manifests without. It overflows. It is a great connector; connecting YOU, I, or EGO to Self. In all, Love is the energy found when MIND and BODY are still, at peace, and UNITED.
Responding, Not Reacting, to Love
Reacting
Love is tricky. This is a theme throughout the post. In that, responding to love can be rather difficult. Love has two sides, one grounded in Love and the other desire. If we blindly follow Love, we will become a victim to its blindness. Love is blind, and at that, it can blind you. Love, again arising from within, causes us to act in the world. Without sights set without, blinded by the pull of the material world, Love can lead us right to evil. Instead of blindly reacting, step one is beginning to look within.
Responding
Responding requires a certain amount of self-reflection and awareness. There is no way around it. To sit with that emotion willing you to act out of Love, without acting it out, can be the most difficult thing to do. It feels good to just act. It is rather a heroic task to take oneself within focus and begin to do the inner work to realize, accept, and integrate those passions that arise disguised in the feeling of Love. In addition, we must begin to open our hearts to see what it has to say. In this, not only do you begin to feel what Love has to offer, you also unlock Love’s brother. That is foresight, or intuition.
Making Love Work For YOU
Control
Controlling emotions are not the ability to decide what emotions you want to feel. Rather, letting them run their course as you detach and evaluate them. Love is a powerful emotion. In this, it is one of the most felt emotions. Why? Emotions arise out of our unconscious. Most unconscious thoughts and emotions have much less energy than our consciousness. It isn’t until one has enough energy to pop into awareness until it is noticed. Through this awareness, you can begin to stop, instead of willing, an emotion. If it is caught, evaluated, accepted, and integrated, it may not have the same emotional signature the next time it is triggered. This is true self-work, out of Love (this is the process described in the previous section). Self-Love at its finest.
Intelligence
Intelligence and Love go hand and hand. Love tells Truth. That is part of its unconditional nature. To Love is to Truth. Love just is. In this beauty, one has the ability to become Self-aware by setting this sights within and without to see where love arises and projects. If an inner thought or emotion arise that make you act, you must try to find what that action is trying to provide you. Instead of taking it from an outer person, place, or thing, provide it back to your Self. If an outer person, place, thing, or idea triggers love, catch what value it has stimulated. What does this mean to you? How can you provide this to yourself, and begin to install habits and disciplines to claim this value? Love is free, it is not conditioned on anything or anyone but Self. Find Love through Self, and through this you may begin to love, rather than desire, the world.
Redefining Love
Love is an internal signal of something you value. It is unconditional. It is based in truth, freedom, and connection. Love can be blind; in its evil sister desire. If you can internally burn through desires, you can begin to connect with the true sense of Love. A part of the heart, the seat of intelligence. As Love cultivates, life blooms. Love doesn’t fade. It is a de-stressor and of the highest state of energy.
Truly think about it. If you don’t know love, you haven’t understood the wisdom within your heart, how can you love another? In addition, did you ever think that maybe you are projecting Love on to another since you haven’t been able to love yourself? Imagine if you truly knew what Love was, and were able to now attract it into your life. Not only will you find your dream partner, house, job, etc. but you will find you Self.
Do the divine work and unlock your Love within.
Next, Emotion 3 - ANGER
