The Path of Love I

All We Need Is Love
Lisa Campion 

I love writing about love, it’s one of my favorite topics ever and I want to thank the Harmonic Concordance Blog for the opportunity to write about it on a regular basis.

And it’s a huge topic!  It really covers the waterfront, especially if we consider love as a Spiritual practice.  It is here that we have the core belief that LOVE is the warp and weft of the fabric of reality itself.

But Love is mysterious.  It drives us from deep inside; it is a primal need and a soul longing.   We yearn for it; desire it more greatly then anything, and yet so often we either don’t recognize it when we have it, or when we catch a glimpse of it, we run screaming from it as fast as we can.  And sometimes it just kicks my booty and confuses the heck out of me.

However, we are dealing with far more than just romantic love (although that one is the real head scratcher, isn’t it)?  We also have familial love and unconditional love for the rest of humanity, known as “agape” by the Ancient Greeks.   Hopefully we love ourselves too as self-love is most important in Spiritual practice.  And we have love for our beautiful blue planet and all its creatures.  That will inevitably lead us to divine/cosmic/universal love and all its many possibilities.

So yeah.  BIG topic.  And all I can really do is share my own odd, funky and admittedly limited experiences with those high-falutin’ themes.

What the heck is love?

“The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and
feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the
world is transformed.” – Krishnamurti

I see love as a state of being.  It’s not something you do to another person, it’s something you are.  Love emerges from inside of us and flows out into the world in whatever glorious and chaotic ways that it does as an expression of our soul’s desire to live.

In his fabulous book “The Mastery of Love,” Don Migel Ruiz says love is life itself, and when we love, we feel life flowing through us.   Love is the language of our soul and when we love, we are actually feeling our own soul pop through the mask of our personality to feed us life force energy.

We have a river of love flowing through us all the time.  It really has nothing to do with anyone else.  It’s our natural state of being.   It fills us, connects us to ourselves and to everything else too, especially Creator.   It’s that state of being embodied so easily by very young children, who delight in everything and everyone, especially themselves.

When our hearts are really open that is how love feels.  There is no need.  No attachment, dependency or jealousy.  It’s just a pure stream of love upwelling and pouring out of us.  It doesn’t even matter if there is anyone else there to feel, see or receive it.

This is that spinning, flowing sensation, a feeling of surrender that we often call “falling in love.”  When we fall in love, we relinquish control.   We let go and fall backwards into love, surrendering into it, and if we are wise, we let love have its way with us.

We could feel that way all the time, if we really opened our hearts.   The problem comes that, when we do fall in love, we often become convinced that someone else MADE us feel that way.  We attach it to a particular person and then get hooked and dependent on that person to provide us with that feeling again.   However, no one can make you feel that way because what you are feeling is actually YOU, the Love Energy of your own soul.

And then we suffer greatly when that person is not available to give us our hit of love.  That suffering is part of the illusion we buy into that our feeling of love has anything to do with another person.   Someone else could be a trigger to help us open our hearts, but what we feel is ultimately Us, loving.  Our body, our heart, our own soul.  That person may help us to tap into our own river of love and, but if you take their face off it, you can actually access that love anytime you want.

I don’t know about you, but I find that tremendously liberating and comforting.   Hallelujah!

 “Love is life.  And if you miss love, you miss life”.- Leo Buscaglia

Love as a Spiritual Practice

Because I believe that love is the highest expression of our own souls, I think love is also the greatest Spiritual practice.  If you look through the history of religion, theology and philosophy, you will see this as a common theme.

We know in our hearts, our roots and our guts, that love brings us closer to God, to our own Souls and to our highest potential.  This is the greatest and best aspiration of Spiritual practice.   It’s hard to live there every day but even in the most fleeting moments of living and breathing pure love has the power to change us at the most core places. 

If we are lucky, we stumble into our love epiphanies.  Somehow the stars align just right and we have an experience of pure love.  One can’t order these off a menu; they just happen spontaneously and they have the potential to heal any physical or emotional pain that you may be carrying. 

As a healer with many, many years experience of working with people, I have seen this happen again and again.  Cancer remissions, old, broken relationships restored and ancient traumas released – in a split second.  Our spontaneous Heart openings account for the miracles that we experience in our lives.  It’s so simple!  And yet, so elusive.

“Hail to thee, O Love, sweet madness!  Thou who heal all our infirmities.” –Rumi

The real miracle is this.  Our everyday lives with each small, ordinary moment offer us the ability to choose love in each moment.  Can I choose love right now, in this situation?  And again now?

And that is how I see love as a spiritual practice that humbles me every day.  Each moment, I can choose love.  Or not.  The choice to shut down and turn away from love hurts me more than anything, but still sometimes I do that.  It’s not easy to determine what is the most loving thing I can do in each moment, for me, for the Other and for the world.  It’s tricky, and I can only feel my way through it in the moment, making a lot of mistakes along the way.

 Good thing it’s all research!  But the trying, the fumbling and the intention are what it’s all about.

 All you need is love. – -John Lennon 

So here’s to LOVE!