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by John Welwood

  When parents are nonintrusive, when they recognize and honor their child’s individual rhythms and needs, when they respect the child’s space instead of continually interrupting the child’s “going-on-being” (as Winnicott calls it), this helps the child rest at ease in himself or herself. Of course, if this spaciousness is not balanced by good contact, that too becomes problematic, for then the child feels abandoned.

  Thus there are two general types of wounding around love that lead to fear of intimacy. When parents act intrusively and do not provide enough space, then children grow up fearing that close contact with others threatens them with engulfment, control, manipulation, or violation. And when parents do not provide warm emotional contact, then children grow up fearing that relationships will lead to abandonment, loss, or deprivation. Engulfment fears generally lead to withdrawal in relationships, while abandonment fears lead to clinging, though these two types of wounding can also show up in a variety of other symptoms. Many people suffer from some of each, resulting in “push-pull” relationships where one partner pursues when the other is pulling away, but then retreats when the other comes forward.

  When parents do provide enough of both contact and space,10 this creates a holding environment that nurtures healthy development and healthy relationship. In this kind of friendly environment, children can feel safe to relax, let go, and trust. And this helps them to keep the heart channel open and to experience its delicate sensitivity, which the Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa called “the soft spot.”

  The two aspects of holding—contact and space, attunement and letting be—correspond to the two core qualities of love, warmth and openness, that are native to our being. Warmth is our natural impulse to reach outside ourselves, touch, and make contact, to welcome, embrace, and take delight in. Openness is our capacity to let be, to allow, to let in and receive others as they are, in a gentle, spacious way, without having to dominate them or bend them to our will. This kind of letting be is the greatest kindness we can offer those we love. Taken together, openness and warmth allow us to recognize and appreciate the natural beauty at the core of everything and everyone—in short, to love.

  Even though these two qualities are part of our native birthright, they need an initial spark to ignite them. For children, that spark is knowing that they are loved. And children know they are loved when they feel genuinely held, that is, when their parents provide both warm contact and gentle space that lets them be.

  To feel held in love, then, is the key, as it was for David, to letting down our guard, so that we can learn to relax, let love flow through us, and reside in the essential openness of our own heart.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

  Again and again it defeats me—

  This reliance on others for bliss.

  —FROM A POEM BY THE AUTHOR

  IF THE PURE ESSENCE OF LOVE is like the sun in a cloudless sky, this clear and luminous light shines through relationships most brightly in beginnings and endings. When your baby is first born, you feel so graced by the arrival of such an adorable being that you respond to it totally, without reserve, demand, or judgment. Or when you first fall in love, you are so surprised and delighted by the sheer beauty of this person’s presence that it blows your heart wide open. For a while the bright sunlight of all-embracing love pours through full strength, and you may melt into bliss. Similarly, when a friend or loved one is dying, all your quibbles with that person fall away. You simply appreciate the other just for who he or she is, just for having been here with you in this world for a little while. Pure, unconditional love shines through when people put themselves—their own demands and agendas—aside and completely open to one another.

  Absolute love is not something that we have to—or that we even can—concoct or fabricate. It is what comes through us naturally when we fully open up—to another person, to ourselves, or to life. In relation to another, it manifests as selfless caring. In relation to ourselves, it shows up as inner confidence and self-acceptance that warms us from within. And in relation to life, it manifests as a sense of well-being, appreciation, and joie de vivre.

  Absolute Love

  When we experience this kind of openness and warmth coming from another, it provides essential nourishment: It helps us experience our own warmth and openness, allowing us to recognize the beauty and goodness at the core of our nature. The light of unconditional love awakens the dormant seed potentials of the soul, helping them ripen, blossom, and bear fruit, allowing us to bring forth the unique gifts that are ours to offer in this life. Receiving pure love, caring, and recognition from another confers a great blessing: It affirms us in being who we are, allowing us to say yes to ourselves.

  When two people see and appreciate each other as they are, they share a moment of I-Thou recognition, as Martin Buber would call it. Buber sees this as providing a certain kind of essential confirmation: It helps us know and feel that we are.

  What feels most affirming is not just to feel loved but to feel loved as we are. As we are means in our very being. Absolute love is the love of being.

  Deeper than all our personality traits, pain, or confusion, our being is the dynamic open presence that we essentially are. It is what we experience when we feel settled, grounded, and connected with ourselves. When rooted in this basic ground of presence, love flows freely through us, and we can more readily open up to others. When two people meet in this quality of open presence, they share a perfect moment of absolute love.

  However—and this is an essential point—the human personality is not the source of absolute love. Rather, its light shines through us, from what lies altogether beyond us, the ultimate source of all. We are the channels through which this radiance flows. Yet in flowing through us, it also finds a home within us, taking up residence as our heart-essence.

  We have a natural affinity for this perfect food that is also our deepest essence, our life’s blood. That is why every baby instinctively reaches out for it from the moment of birth. We cannot help wanting our own nature.

  When the value and beauty of our existence is recognized, this allows us to relax, let down, and settle into ourselves. In relaxing, we open. And this opening makes us transparent to the life flowing through us, like a fresh breeze that enters a room as soon as the windows are raised. This brings a sense of well-being, as well as genuine power, which D. H. Lawrence defines as “life rushing into us.”

  Martin Buber sees the moment of I-Thou connection as the shedding of an old, protective sheath, like a butterfly’s emergence from its chrysalis. In tasting pure, unconditional love, we experience that it’s good to be ourselves, good to be alive, and this makes us want to spread our wings and soar. This influx of aliveness coursing through us feels blissful.

  In this way, experiencing unconditional love allows us to rest in ourselves and the blissful flow of our aliveness. As Brother David Steindl-Rast describes this11 deep connectedness: “We simply know for a moment that all belongs to us because we belong to all.”

  This is one of the great gifts of human love, this entry it provides into something even greater than human relatedness. In helping us connect with the radiant aliveness within us, it reveals our essential beauty and power, where we are one with life itself because we are fully transparent to life. When life belongs to you and you belong to life, this sets you free from hunger and fear. You experience the essential dignity and nobility of your existence, which does not depend on anyone else’s approval or validation. In this deep sense of union with life, you realize you are not wounded, have never been wounded, and cannot be wounded.

  This is the bottom line of human existence: Absolute love helps us connect with who we really are. That is why it is indispensable.

  Relative Love

  Yet even though the human heart is a channel through which great love streams into this world, this heart channel is usually clogged with debris—fearful, defensive patterns that have developed out
of not knowing we are truly loved. As a result, love’s natural openness, which we can taste in brief, blissful moments of pure connection with another person, rarely permeates our relationships completely. Indeed, the more two people open to each other, the more this wide-openness also brings to the surface all the obstacles to it: their deepest, darkest wounds, their desperation and mistrust, and their rawest emotional trigger-points. Just as the sun’s warmth causes clouds to arise by prompting the earth to release its moisture, so love’s pure openness activates the thick clouds of our emotional wounding, the tight places where we are shut down, where we live in fear and resist love.

  There is good reason why this happens: Before we can become a clear channel through which love can freely flow, the ways we are wounded must come to the surface and be exposed. Love as a healing power can operate only on what presents itself to be healed. As long as our wounding remains hidden, it can only fester.

  This, then, is relative love: the sunlight of absolute love as it becomes filtered through the clouds of our conditioned personality and its defensive patterns—fearfulness, distrust, reactivity, dishonesty, aggression, and distorted perception. Like a partly cloudy sky, relative love is incomplete, inconstant, and imperfect. It is a continual play of light and shadow. The full radiance of absolute love can only sparkle through in fleeting moments.

  If you observe yourself closely in relationships, you will see that you continually move back and forth between being open and closed, clear skies and dark clouds. When another person is responsive, listens well, or says something pleasing, something in you naturally starts to open. But when the other is not responsive, can’t hear you, or says something threatening, you may quickly tense up and start to contract.

  Our ability to feel a wholehearted yes toward another person fluctuates with the changing circumstances of each moment. It depends on how much each of us is capable of giving and receiving, the chemistry between us, our limitations and conditioned patterns, how far along we are in our personal development, how much awareness and flexibility we each have, how well we communicate, the situation we find ourselves in, and even how well we have each slept the night before. Relative means dependent on time and circumstance.

  Ordinary human love is always relative, never consistently absolute. Like the weather, relative love is in continual dynamic flux. It is forever rising and subsiding, waxing and waning, changing shape and intensity.

  So far all of this may seem totally obvious. Yet here’s the rub: We imagine that others—surely someone out there!—should be a source of perfect love by consistently loving us in just the right way. Since our first experiences of love usually happen in relation to other people, we naturally come to regard relationship as its main source. Then when relationships fail to deliver the ideal love we dream of, we imagine something has gone seriously wrong. And this disappointed hope keeps reactivating the wound of the heart and generating grievance against others. This is why the first step in healing the wound and freeing ourselves from grievance is to appreciate the important difference between absolute and relative love.

  At the deepest level of our being—the divinity within that we share with all beings—there is no separation between me and you. At any moment it is possible to experience the warmth and openness of a heart connection with any living creature: a lover, a child, a friend, a stranger passing on the street, or even a dog. When we appreciate the beauty of another’s being, the heart channel opens and a spark of absolute love passes through us. In this moment of connection we no longer feel so separate or isolated. We delight in sharing the one lovely, tender presence that dwells in the heart of all.

  Yet at the same time, on the relative plane, we always remain separate and different. We inhabit separate bodies, with different histories, backgrounds, families, character traits, values, preferences, perspectives, and, in the end, different destinies. We each see and respond to things differently, and approach life in our own unique way.

  Yes, we can experience moments of being at one with another. But this can happen only when we connect being-to-being, because at the level of pure being and pure openness, we are one. My openness is not different from your openness, because openness has no solid form and therefore no boundary that separates us, one from the other. Therefore, when we meet in a moment of absolute love, being-to-being, it is like water poured into water.

  Relative love, by contrast, is an exchange that occurs on the level of form, person-to-person. Every person, just like every snowflake, every tree, every place, every circumstance in this world, is completely distinct. Each of us has our own unique character and way of unfolding, different from all others. While two persons can know themselves as one in the realm of pure openness, they remain irrevocably two in the realm of form.

  One night you connect deeply with another, which leaves you feeling wide open to this person, totally amorous and enamored. But then the next morning, though you may still feel loving, that wide-openness may become clouded by considerations that start to arise: Is it safe to open yourself to this person? Can you accept the ways this person is totally different from you? How deeply is he or she able to understand you? Are you a good match?

  Melting into oneness provides moments of blissful union in absolute love. And this is what the great mythic romances thrive on, this pure discovery and meeting that often happens outside ordinary time and space. But the challenges of relative love bring couples back to earth, forcing them to continually face and work with their twoness. This is not a bad thing, however. For without honoring the ways in which they are distinctly different, and exploring how to keep finding each other across these differences, a couple’s connection will lose passion and vibrancy, and run the risk of unhealthy emotional fusion or codependency.

  Thus relationships continually oscillate between two people finding common ground and then having that ground slip out from under them as their differences pull them in different directions. While trying to meet in the present moment, they become tossed around by shifting tides of memories, expectations, and wounds from the past. This ongoing tension between oneness and twoness, togetherness and separateness, fresh moments of discovery and old associations, inevitably renders relative love unsteady and unstable.

  This is a problem only when we expect it to be otherwise, when we imagine that love should manifest as a steady state. That kind of expectation prevents us from appreciating the special gift that relative love does have to offer: personal intimacy. Intimacy—the sharing of who we are in our distinctness—can happen only when my partner and I meet as two, when I appreciate the ways she is wholly other, and yet not entirely other at the same time.

  While the play of twoness and oneness generates sparks of curiosity and passion, it also ensures that intimacy can be only intermittent at best. Intimate moments, in which we make contact across the great divide of our differences, are just that—moments—rather than a constant, steady flow. At its best, relative love has a great beauty all its own, which sparkles through when two people can appreciate and enjoy each other in the midst of their differences and the changes they are going through. At its worst, however, it becomes the stuff of soap opera and tragedy.

  So if you are counting on a steady state of attunement with another person, you are setting yourself up for frustration, disappointment, and anguish, because this is impossible. Each person can only follow his or her own internal laws. Since everyone has his or her own rhythm and sensibility, you can never count on others to be consistently attuned to you. It’s inevitable to fall out of synch with your beloved, since you both invariably want different things—from each other and from life—at different times. As a result, harmony inevitably turns into dissonance, and understanding into misunderstanding, creating hurt and separation. Thus even the closest of marriage partners wind up at times feeling misunderstood, disconnected, or utterly alone.

  Even someone who wanted to be perfectly attuned to us would be unable to, for he or she could never divine exact
ly what we want at each moment. Maybe we want closeness right now, so our lover snuggles up to us, but then a few moments later, we want some space. It is hard enough for us to know what we want and what’s going on inside from moment to moment, and besides, it’s always changing. If that is so, how can we expect anyone else to be consistently attuned to us, especially when others can only operate according to their own very different perceptions, rhythms, and needs?

  Not only do we each have different needs and perspectives, we often want to be loved in a very particular way—one that would soothe our emotional wounding from the past. But that is a tall order, for it assumes that others should consistently tailor their style of loving to match our style. If you have abandonment fears, for example, you might press your partner for more verbal engagement than he or she is comfortable with. That kind of engagement might be soothing for you; it lets you know the other is there for you. Unfortunately, these expectations may trigger your partner’s engulfment fears, for he or she may feel controlled when pressed for engagement on your timetable. Unlike you, your partner may feel most loved when given space to be himself or herself. So if you expect your partner to love you in just the right way, this may make him or her want to withdraw, which in turn will activate your abandonment fears. Despite their best efforts, two partners often cannot help triggering each other’s wounds in this way.

  Even though no one can provide consistent attunement, we may go on expecting it nonetheless, while blaming others for its absence: “You did not give me my due.” As one Indian teacher, Swami Prajnanpad,12 describes this: “Everyone is passing through this deep mental agony. Why? Because he wants to have, but does not get. He believes that he ought to get and that it can be gotten. And yet he didn’t get. This is what is causing such pangs of agony.”