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by John Welwood

  Great Love

  It’s true, we are entitled to perfect love. It’s our birthright. But the problem is that we are looking for it in the wrong places—outside ourselves, in our imperfect relationships with imperfect people who are wounded like we are. This inevitably leaves us frustrated and disappointed. Even though perfect love can shine through relationships in moments, we cannot count on other people as a consistent source of it.

  Yet even though human love usually manifests imperfectly, there is another dimension of love that is perfect, unbroken, and always available. It flows directly into the heart from the ultimate source of all—whether we call that God, Tao, or Buddha-nature. This is great love, absolute love—pure, unconditional openness and warmth—which actually abides at the very core of our nature.

  If great love is like the sun, our woundedness is like a cloud cover temporarily blocking its rays. Fortunately, just as the sun cannot be damaged by clouds, so our native capacity for warmth and openness cannot be destroyed. Thus healing the wound of the heart does not require fixing something that is broken. Having a wounded heart is more like being lost—lost in the clouds that temporarily block access to the sun that is always shining. Though we can spend a whole lifetime lost in these clouds, this doesn’t mean that the sun itself is lost or damaged. Healing the love-wound, then, involves making ourselves available to the sun, that it may do what it naturally wants to do: shine upon us.

  Letting Love In

  Most religions try to remedy the problem of human lovelessness by admonishing us to love more generously. The way to be loved, they say, is first to love. “To him who hath shall be given.” “’Tis better to give than to receive.”

  This core principle of spiritual life certainly contains profound truth. Yet there is another truth that stands alongside it: We cannot give what we cannot receive. Just as the earth is abundant because of its ability to receive and absorb (light from the sun and rain from the sky), so we can only give forth love abundantly if we are able to receive it, soak it up, and be nourished by it. If we don’t feel loved within ourselves, then how can we ever truly love? If our wounding prevents us from letting love in, then how much do we have to give?

  “To love is to cast light,”8 Rilke writes, while “to be loved means to be ablaze.” Who is to say that being ablaze is any less holy than casting light? And how can we cast pure light if we are not ablaze?

  Thus the key to loving is to become more permeable to love, to let it all the way into us, so that it can live and breathe from inside out. Even if we believe that God is love or that we have a moral duty to love our neighbor, such beliefs will have little effect as long as our “in-channel” is shut down or constricted, preventing great love from flowing freely into and through us.

  Countless books have been written about how to do a better job of loving. This book is different because it will help you focus instead on your capacity to receive love and how you can go about opening up that capacity.

  There is a secret about human love that is commonly overlooked: Receiving it is much more scary and threatening than giving it. How many times in your life have you been unable to let in someone’s love or even pushed it away? Much as we proclaim the wish to be truly loved, we are often afraid of that, and so find it difficult to open to love or let it all the way in.

  One way that couples often deal with their fear of receiving love is to split into two poles—one partner becoming the pursuer and the other the distancer. Although it looks as though the distancer is the one who is afraid of letting love in, in fact both sides are choosing control over receptivity. Pursuers remain in control by demanding, seducing, or chasing after—all of which keep them from having to melt and open. They are often frightened of having to receive and respond—which is why they would rather do the chasing. Distancers remain in control by withholding. While each side complains about the other, they are in fact doing the same thing: engaging in a strategy that avoids the risk of opening fully to love.

  A Psychospiritual Approach

  In my work as a psychotherapist, I have discovered the power of bringing together both psychological and spiritual principles in the process of healing and growth. Psychological work focuses more on what has gone wrong: how we have been wounded in our relations with others and how to go about addressing that. Spiritual work focuses more on what is intrinsically right: how we have infinite resources at the core of our nature that we can cultivate in order to live more expansively. If psychological work thins the clouds, spiritual work invokes the sun. This book brings these two approaches together, presenting a psychospiritual approach to transforming the wound of the heart.

  On the psychological level, this book offers a distinctive set of understandings and concrete methods for addressing your personal wounding around love and releasing your old grievances so that you can let love flow more freely in and through you. On the spiritual level, it will help you develop your capacity to open, to hold your most difficult experiences in a space of love, and beyond that, to tap into the great force of absolute love that is your very essence, so that it may infuse and illumine your life from within.

  Working on both these levels—addressing your psychological wounding and learning to access great love—will help you relate to yourself, others, and all of life with a more generous, open heart. You will discover that your wounding is not a fault or defect but rather a guiding compass that can lead to greater connectedness. And this will allow you to live more creatively with the tension between love’s inherent perfection and relationship’s inevitable imperfection.

  All the ideas and methods in this book have grown out of my own personal experience and research, as well as my work as a psychotherapist. In sharing this material with people in my classes and workshops, I have seen it have a powerful effect on their relations with themselves and others. In a teaching context, experiential exercises provide a way to apply this material to their lives in a concrete, personal way and make it their own. Yet since including exercises in the body of a book can interfere with the flow of the prose, I have chosen to gather some of these exercises, with a few important exceptions, in a separate section at the back of the book, organized by chapter. If you are so inclined, you can turn to this section and work with the exercises after reading each chapter. This will aid you in integrating and incorporating the understandings that you gain along the way.

  May all beings be happy and at their ease. Through knowing we are held in love, may we find the boundless source of joy within ourselves and share this with the world around us. May we realize our true nature as blissful, radiant love.

  Prologue

  To Feel Held in Love

  DAVID WAS AN INTERESTING MIX: He was an engaging male in his forties who had deep feeling for women, for sex, and for honest, direct contact. Yet he also lived under the shadow of his wound, and his life was marked by a series of love affairs that had never gone very far. While he had no trouble finding attractive female partners, the story was always the same: He would wind up either judging them and pushing them away or holding back until they finally left. He desperately wanted love in his life, and as he looked back on all the women he had split up with, he admitted that several of them could have made good mates. Yet at the time, he had always found something to justify his dissatisfaction and subsequent exit. He had entered therapy because he wanted to find out what was wrong with his love life.

  Six months earlier he had embarked on a new relationship with a woman whom he loved more wildly and intensely than anyone before. They shared a strong emotional bond, great talks, and terrific sex. But at a certain point, he pulled back and cut off the relationship with Lynn because he couldn’t trust her and feared how much she could hurt him.

  In our first few sessions, David remained focused on Lynn and her untrustworthiness, but I eventually steered the focus back to what was going on within him. He had grown up with a mother who was erratic, depressed, and largely unavailable for long periods of time, and wh
en she was there, she had little to give emotionally. Nothing David did—from getting angry to withdrawing—brought him the attention and love he needed. As a result, he simply didn’t trust that love could really be there for him or that he could be loved for who he was. He would wind up trying to prove his worth by impressing women, all the while resenting them for having to do this.

  Underneath David’s engaging exterior was a seething resentment he could barely recognize, much less express, because in his family anger had been the ultimate sin that warranted rejection. So one way he expressed his anger was to push away anyone who tried to get close. He was essentially saying to all the women who wanted him, “Get lost, I don’t trust your interest and attraction because you could never really love me.” The distrust he felt toward Lynn reverberated down the corridors of his whole past, a whole lifetime of never feeling fully loved or embraced.

  After a number of weeks of working with and understanding his wounding, David’s interest in Lynn started to revive and he wanted to see her again, even though it felt dangerous. As he considered this, there was a wonderful moment when he looked up, as if gazing to heaven, and asked, almost rhetorically, “So is that it? You love someone and open yourself and feel vulnerable, you let them in and they become really important to you, and then they can just do anything they want—walk away, hurt you, lie to you—and there’s nothing you can do about it? Is that what love’s about?”

  The rawness of David’s words touched a chord that resonated in me, putting me in touch with my own experience of what he was speaking about, and I smiled in recognition. I reflected on how when you really want deep connection with someone, when that passion wells up from deep within, it’s like a wave you can’t control. It simply busts you open. Not only can’t you control the wave of feeling, you also can’t control how the other person will respond to you. I thought of times I’d felt raw like that, and the fear and instinct to protect myself that came along with it.

  “When I feel this open to someone, I can really feel the depth and power of it,” David went on to say. “I know this is what I really want with someone, and that’s where the real juice lies.” He was speaking of that sweet edge of surrender where the force of love carries us along, making us want to keep opening without putting on the brakes. “But it feels so dangerous, like I could get killed.”

  David was standing on a razor’s edge, uncertain whether to give in to the pull of his attraction to Lynn—which felt terribly risky—or stand back and play it safe. I asked him, “If you could have whatever you want in this relationship, what would that be?” The first words out of his mouth were a plaintive, “I don’t know.” I encouraged him to sit longer with the question, look inside, and allow an answer to arise from deeper within. After a pause, he said, “I’d like to be able to trust her and know that I was really loved.” Hardly had these words left his mouth than he qualified them: “But maybe that’s too much to ask for.” I asked, “What would it be like to feel loved like that? What would that give you?” A longer pause now, and then: “A sense of acceptance, of being valued for who I am.”

  My next question was: “And what would that give you—if you felt really accepted and valued?” An even longer pause this time, after which he said softly, “I’m so tired of being separate and alone. I really want to feel connected. . . .” David had often talked about a recurring sense of isolation that left him feeling as though he were lost in this world and didn’t belong anywhere. This was the first time he had directly acknowledged his longing to feel connected.

  Yet I could sense that something more was stirring in him. I invited him to continue this inquiry, asking him what that sense of connection would give him. This time the answer came quickly, before he could think about it: “A feeling of belonging, like I was cherished just for who I was—though I’m not sure what that would be like, because, you know, I’ve never experienced that.”

  The color rose in David’s face after these words, and I recognized the leap they represented for him. We talked about this for a while, acknowledging how hard it is for men to recognize their desire to belong and feel cherished, and how it is even rarer and more vulnerable to admit this to another man. David searched my face for signs of judgment, so I let him know I was right there with him, appreciating his willingness to share this with me. We sat for a while in silence, both sensing what it was like for him to acknowledge his longing to be loved like this.

  Part of me wanted to stop there and leave well enough alone. Yet having come this far, I sensed that there was something more to explore here. After making sure he was still okay, I said, “Imagine being cherished, and see what that gives you on the inside, what it allows you to experience inside yourself.” He closed his eyes for a while, then said, “It feels like being held, held in someone’s loving arms. . . . I can actually feel that a little bit right now.”

  David and I were both noticeably softening here, together. The warmth, clarity, and groundedness that David was experiencing were filling the room.

  Having felt so disconnected from his family as a child, David’s willingness to acknowledge his need to belong, to feel cherished, and to be held in love represented important steps toward healing his alienation. In directly acknowledging these deep needs and allowing them to be there, David was holding his own experience in warmth and openness. And this gave him a taste of what it was like to feel held in love and acceptance—which was what he was looking for.

  We had come a long way, and again I was tempted to leave it at that. Yet before I knew it, the next question sprang to my lips: “What’s that like for you—to feel held like that? How does that affect you in your body?” The answer this time was right at hand because David was already there: “It feels like I’ve landed on the ground, which is holding me up. There’s a warmth in my chest and a fullness in my belly.”

  “What happens when you stay present with the feelings in your belly and chest?”

  “It’s relaxing. Something in me lets down.”

  I encouraged him to let himself relax into this. Since this was a new and powerful experience for him, it was important to let his body get to know it more fully. After a while, he said, “There’s a blissful sense of warmth spreading through my body, as if it’s permeating all my cells.” David was experiencing what it was like to let love move freely through him, and I encouraged him to keep letting himself have this full-body blissful experience. And then a final question: “What’s that like—to let love move through you?”

  “It’s like coming in for a landing, and settling in. . . . It’s like deep rest. . . . It feels like all of me is here.”

  “There’s no need to prove yourself right now.”

  “No, nothing to prove. I can just be.”

  We had reached the bottom of the inquiry. He had landed in the only place there is to land—in his own nature, that presence of openness and warmth that we call love, goodness, or beauty. And he felt this in his body as a fullness in the belly and an openness in the heart. This was, at bottom, David’s deepest wish: to go beyond having to prove himself in order to win love, to relax and settle into being himself, to reconnect with his vitality center and his heart. Recognizing this, he felt a deep sense of peace washing over him as he let himself rest there—present in himself, to himself, with himself.

  This proved to be a major turning point in our work together. David had uncovered a clear, flowing spring in the middle of the desert of alienation where he had wandered all his life. And this allowed him to approach his relationship with Lynn in a new way, from a stronger place, more rooted in himself.

  Love as a Holding Environment

  The key moments in this session were David’s recognition of his deep need to feel held in love and his discovery of what that holding felt like, which allowed him to relax, let down, and settle into himself. David’s distrust of his mother had led him to fear and resent women all of his life. But at an even deeper level, his wound showed up as a distrust of life, a difficu
lty recognizing that his whole existence was held by something larger that he could trust.

  What exactly is the nature of this holding that we need?

  Consider for a moment how all things in this universe are held by something larger. The earth is held in space, which is the all-encompassing environment that allows it to move and turn freely. DNA is held within cells, and cells are held within the larger tissues and organs of the body. Leaves are held by a tree, trees are held by the earth. And growing children are held within a family environment.9

  The British child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott defined the family as a “holding environment” that allows and supports the healthy growth of the child. Beyond the physical holding that is essential for children, Winnicott’s notion refers to a benevolent emotional environment that a family can provide.

  What type of holding is most essential for human development? Imagine picking up a baby bird that has fallen from its nest. If you hold it too tightly, you crush it. If you hold it too loosely, it falls to the ground. So you want to cradle it in your hands, but you also don’t want to press too hard against it.

  These, then, are the two essential aspects of holding: contact and space. Contact involves meeting, seeing, touching, attunement, connection, and care. When children experience good contact, they are more likely to develop confidence, inner support, and self-acceptance. But good contact by itself is not enough. Children also need to be given space—room to be, to be themselves. Contact without space can become intrusive, claustrophobic, smothering.

  Winnicott stressed the importance of allowing infants to rest in their own “unstructured being,” without constant intrusion. When parents fail to provide this spaciousness, children feel smothered or controlled. Then they become overly oriented toward pleasing the parents and fitting into the parents’ designs, thus losing touch with their own sense of being.