Let’s talk about the universal language — love.
Play with me for a second. Take a minute to find the emotion of love. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and feel what love feels like.
For me, it’s warmth that starts in my heart and spreads throughout my whole body. The feeling materializes as soft vibrations, a steadying of the heart rate, and happy tears.
Eyes open? You found that emotion all on your own.
In the absence of thought there’s calm. A peaceful, neutral place, void of mental chatter and drama. What I’ve realized from practicing being in the present moment is that when there’s space in the mind, it’s filled with a powerful energy; love. Love fills the empty space.
In the beautiful balance of a relative world – where happy exists because there is sad – neutral is love. Our natural, stable state. All other emotions are variations of this energy, filtered through our thoughts and belief systems.
If you want to find love, just close your eyes and quiet your mind. I claim this not on scientific grounds, but from personal experience. Let’s check out some of the science.
Science’s Love Story
What’s science’s take on love?
Love pops up across every culture in every corner of the world. This isn’t surprising, considering we’re hardwired to love. It’s in our DNA.
Rick Hanson talks about this in his book Buddha’s Brain. Mammals have much larger brains than other animals, due to their need to manage their offspring and social relationships.
Human brains have developed neural networks dedicated to expressing feelings of love. We have neurochemistry that facilitates bonding. Ever heard of the hormone oxytocin (not to be confused with oxycontin!)? That’s one of them. It’s also called the “love drug” or “cuddle hormone.”
Love serves lots of practical roles in our lives – like building trust in communities, finding a partner for reproduction, and caring for our offspring. It makes sense that the brain has evolved to promote relationships. Relationships are critical for our survival, as individuals and as a species.
But is love really just a bunch of hormones produced in our brains? I’m not convinced. I think it’s a lot more than that.
My claim is that hormones are the body’s interpretation of love, or the way our body interacts with it, not the source.
Love is the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe and transcends all boundaries.
Deepak Chopra
Culture’s Love Story
The holidays are right around the corner. This can be a really tough time of year to be single. Trust me, I know.
With the focus on love and family, the holidays tend to bring up all our ugly thoughts and beliefs about love – I wish I had someone, I’m not worthy of being loved, I’ll never find “the one.” A lot of nonsense that we’ve adopted from the incessant barrage of songs and movies telling us we need someone else to make us feel a certain way.
Can we talk about the fairy tales? I love them, but they’re seriously the worst. Two of my favorites growing up were The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Always a story following a young girl who finds love and happiness in the end with her Prince Charming. An underlying message of, “Find the man, find love, find happiness!”
I have my wonderful father and stubborn personality to thank for not being completely corrupted by this silliness. But the mental game is real. Studies show that we develop subconscious biases towards cultural preferences. We internalize and believe what we see and hear, even if we don’t want to consciously.
Culture offers all sorts of ideas about love. But we don’t have to buy into any of them if we don’t want to. It took me a while to fully appreciate this.
My Loveless Story
I may have a stable love life now, but this was not always the case. I spent over a decade of my adult life figuring it out by trial and error. I was a hot mess. It’s where the majority of my suffering and growth came from during that time. It was extremely rewarding, but it was exhausting.
During my decade of lovelessness, I had a special knack for breaking up or being broken up with on or right before a “love holiday” – like Valentine’s Day or Christmas. It was a special skill of mine. I’m sure part of it was my subconscious rebellion against a mandated love fest (I’m not a big fan of being told what to do).
Nevertheless, there I would find myself, “alone” with my family for the holidays.
It was easy of course to blame everyone but myself. It was his fault, he couldn’t keep up with me, I was too good for him anyway, I just haven’t met the right one yet. Lots of excuses that temporarily made me feel better.
But at some point, the blame game has to stop. We get to own our feelings. We get to own our life. We get to take back our power.
In unraveling my thoughts and beliefs around love, I realized that I rebelled against cultural ideas about love that I disagreed with by seeking independence as a way to prove my worth to myself. My incomplete logic went something like, “If I’m alone and totally happy, this is my proof that I don’t need a man to find love and happiness.”
It took a great deal of courage to admit that part of me believed the fairy tales. I was afraid that if a man “took” my independence, it would prove that the fairy tales were true. That I needed a man to find love and happiness.
I had not yet made peace with the idea that I can have a man and be loved completely and not need him for any of it.
It was my own story that was causing me the pain, not Walt Disney’s.
Once I put down the morning star flail (my weapon of choice; it sits next to the bulldozer), the healing began. Instead of looking out to find the source of my pain and do battle with it, I turned inward to heal it.
I faced and dealt with my scary beliefs, one by one. And in the process, I found that thing I so desperately craved from someone else, inside myself. You got it, I found love.
Two Versions of the Story
Extremes help paint the full spectrum of characters for us. Let’s talk extremes.
The first character extreme looks to someone else to fill a void. We call them needy. The most severe cases are the stage five clingers. We all know one.
The second character extreme blocks or repels love. The effort, of course, is a silent betrayal because it suggests a desire for the very thing in resistance (love) but an inability to make peace with it. (This was me.)
Both are based on fear. The first, a fear of what being alone might mean. The second, a fear of what being together might mean.
Sitting peacefully between these two extremes is neutral. Ground truth. This is where unconditional love lives. In the space between thought, worry, and resistance. This is where your truest desires thrive and grow.
I spent a while coming up with this next paragraph. Let me know if it makes sense.
If not in the ease of the space between thought – if supported by a belief structure we haven’t sorted through yet – we effort to either push people away or pull people in because of what we make it mean to be close to them.
It all comes back to our thoughts; our stories, and what we make our stories mean. Isn’t that powerful.
What’s Your Story?
Do you see yourself in any of these scenarios?
Take a minute to reflect on your relationship patterns.
Have you tended towards needy? Have you tended towards independence? Do you push (or scare) people away? Why? What story have you been telling yourself? What do you make your story mean?
Is it serving you?
The Space of Unconditional Love
In my hot mess of a journey through the troubled waters of love, I learned a lot.
I learned how to pick my broken heart up off the floor. I learned my own strength. I learned compassion and empathy. I learned pain and suffering.
Out of that suffering came the thing I least expected. On one of my darkest nights – in the crumpled heap on my hotel room floor following a breakup two weeks before the Christmas we were planning to spend together with my family – something incredible happened.
In the surrender that followed the storm of tears and wails (it wasn’t pretty) at three in the morning, there was silence. I was too physically and mentally drained to even think. In that silence – in the space between my thoughts and an openness to believe something different – came a flood of unconditional love.
I knew in that moment what it meant to be loved.
That space between thoughts is filled with love. That space is always accessible. To everyone.
It’s where all the real stuff is. The unconditional love – the kind you can feel, not just intellectually conjure in your mind. All the hopes and dreams and desires you’ve been storing up. All the guidance and messages from the bigger energy ball we’re all connected to. It’s all there. Always. Just waiting for us to tap into it.
And if that isn’t good enough, there’s a bonus.
When you align with love, your desires have an easy time finding you. Because you’re home – with yourself.
Think of it this way. If you’re aligning with the same energy that your dreams are made of, you’re a match. You’re now in the energetic and physical space of your dreams. This goes for all your desires, not just relationships.
Find that place for yourself. Feel out what’s there. Then act from that place of strength and peace and power and love.
There’s no right or wrong way to do love.
Every culture and every religion in every expanse of the world has an idea about it. You get to decide what’s right for you right now.
Maybe that means you stay single for a while. Maybe that means you get married and have a family. Or maybe you just sit all by yourself on a mountaintop. It’s all good! You’re loved just the same. That place of unconditional love comes from you; it’s accessible regardless of your decisions or where you go.
Just whatever you do, do it for you. Not for science or your family; not for your culture; not for your story. Do it for you. Because when you make decisions from that place of unconditional love, they always serve everyone else.
It’s your life. Live it the way you want to live. Do it your way.