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by John Welwood

  3. FEEL THE ENERGY OF YOUR LONGING.

  Once you sense your separation from love, an impulse to do something to fix it may arise. After all, we have all developed strategies for winning love, admiration, or approval to ease this feeling of separation. We may try to prove ourselves, or to please, charm, or impress others. We might complain, demand, or even sulk, hoping that others will come after us. If any of these impulses arises right now, just notice it and come back to simply feeling the separation from love, without trying to do anything about it.

  While paying attention to the sense of separation, see if you can notice any longing to feel more connected with love. Let yourself acknowledge how much you want to experience pure love, how much you want to be seen, understood, appreciated, and accepted—in short, to be held in love, to be loved as you are.

  Now let yourself open to the pure energy of this wish or longing, without focusing on trying to get anything from anybody in particular. Feel the energy contained in the longing, and let your attention rest in this bodily feeling. Sense the natural desire of the heart to abide in great love. This longing is sacred because it is an entry into truth, the truth of your heart as an open channel through which love naturally wants to flow.

  4. OPEN THE HEART AND CROWN CENTERS.

  See if you can feel the longing in your heart center, in the middle of your chest. Let that whole area be filled with the energy of your longing. Let yourself enter deeper and deeper into that feeling. As the energy of the longing stirs, notice any way your heart seems to open or come alive. Also let your crown center, at the top and back of your head, become soft and receptive. Feel this receptive openness in both the heart and the crown centers.

  (If you have trouble feeling your heart center, breathe gently into it. As you breathe or tune in to the heart, you may begin to sense it as an open, energized space. If you need further help feeling your heart center, you can put your hands over the center of your chest while thinking of something or someone you deeply appreciate. If you have trouble feeling the crown center, sense the space directly above it and the connection between that space and the top of the head.)

  5. LET YOURSELF RECEIVE.

  Notice how there is, contained in your longing, a desire to receive love. Feel and acknowledge that yes to receiving. What that yes is essentially saying is, “I want to let you enter me.”

  As you experience that openness to receiving, then look and see: Is there any presence of love at hand right now? Don’t think about it or look too hard. Rather, sense this very softly, very subtly: Is the presence of love available right now, is it anywhere at hand? Don’t imagine or fabricate anything with your mind. Don’t make it up. Simply experience what’s there.

  If there is some sense of warmth or love at hand, let it enter you. Don’t try to make anything happen. Let your body be totally receptive; let your pores drink in the warmth that’s there. Feel the cells of your body bathing in the presence of love.

  Notice how the presence of love is not something located in only one spot. It is more like a gentle breeze softly holding, surrounding, or permeating you. Let yourself be held in the space of great love and see what that feels like. To whatever extent any sense of openness, warmth, or tenderness is there, see how it feels to let it move through or fill your body.

  (If you don’t feel any presence of love, then most likely you didn’t feel your separation from it or your longing for it strongly enough. In that case, you could try saying one or more phrases gently to yourself while experiencing how they’re true for you, such as: “I want to feel loved,” “I want to feel held in love,” “I want to know that I am loved,” or “I want to let love in.” Don’t say these words as a form of autosuggestion or affirmation, but as a way to make your deep wish and prayer more consciously felt. See how it affects you to state your wish in words while feeling its truth.)

  Give yourself plenty of time to be with whatever you’re experiencing. The presence of absolute love can be very subtle; it usually doesn’t announce itself in dramatic ways. It might feel like being infused with warmth, or surrounded by a soft plasma, or held in a gentle embrace. It might feel like floating in a pool of warm water or simply like total relaxation and stillness.

  You may find that your mind resists, or you become distracted by thoughts, or you may not trust what is happening. You may think that you are making the whole thing up. Just notice these mental games without struggling with them. Remember that the ego has made a habit of resisting love because it is afraid of melting. It doesn’t trust that if it lets down its defenses, love could just be there in a reliable way. So if you encounter any resistance in this process, hold it in a kind and gentle way.

  6. LET YOURSELF MELT AND LET LOVE HOLD YOU.

  Feeling the presence of love, let yourself relax and melt into it. Instead of having to hold yourself up, let yourself be held by love instead. Soften the boundaries of the body, and feel what it is like to melt into this warmth. Notice the effect this has on your body, and stay present with that subtle feeling.

  Can you feel love as a gentle presence that holds and enfolds you, allowing you to relax and let go? You don’t have to hold yourself up. Let love be your ground.

  I would suggest trying this practice regularly at first, perhaps while lying in bed first thing in the morning or last thing at night. After you have found your way with it, then you can also do the practice very briefly, in a minute or two, and find nourishment and renewal in that.

  When I first discovered this practice, through my own personal need for it, I was surprised by how concretely I could feel the presence of love entering and infusing my body. This experience was fairly subtle, rather than anything dramatic. Above all, it required an ability to open and let in the nourishment that is right here in this very moment. This nourishing presence was not something I could hold on to; I could only stay open and let it enter me.

  As I continued working with this practice, I felt profound changes happening. I experienced a new kind of trust and relaxation in knowing that I could have my own direct access to perfect love whenever I needed it. My investment in grievance diminished, along with tendencies to expect others to provide ideal love.

  Yet though at first it seemed I would never go back to needing love from people in the same way again, I did eventually find myself slipping back into old relational expectations. Nonetheless, the absolute-love practice left me with a new, concrete knowledge that something else was possible, and this served as a polestar in guiding me toward seeing what I still needed to work on to free myself further.

  I say this so that you will not become discouraged if you find yourself slipping back after having some new realizations with this practice. Since most growth happens in the form of “two steps forward, one step back,” slipping back doesn’t mean your experience of absolute love was just an illusion.

  Living in Love

  Through opening to absolute love in this way, many people in my workshops have also discovered that the love they most long for is directly available. As a man in one of my groups described this, “I am amazed to discover that if I feel my longing for love deeply enough, that is the same as feeling the love itself. As soon as I feel the longing, the love is right there at the same time. I feel a sense of warmth and flow, filling up and over-flowing.” His finding accords with the words from the Bible: “Ask and it shall be given, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.” Asking in this case means consciously experiencing the heart’s true longing, which opens up a clear channel that invites absolute love to enter.

  People experience the presence of absolute love in different ways. One woman felt it as “a spaciousness, not necessarily warm, just spacious.” She is feeling the open dimension of absolute love, which doesn’t necessarily have the warm and fuzzy quality of human contact. Another woman experienced it as “a beautiful sweetness drizzling down on me.” Another woman felt “a lot of intense light and warmth and bliss.” Another spoke of looking at
first for some kind of ecstasy, but finding instead that love’s presence was “very simple. There wasn’t a lot of emotion; it was more clear and neutral. And there was a sense of equilibrium, like being held up by water.”

  One man said: “The love that is there when I open in this way is not coming from somewhere or going somewhere. It’s nondirectional—just a simple, open presence.” Another man spoke of “a fullness that made me feel more alive.” Another described it as “a powerful experience of being known, which feels like the resolution of my grievance about not feeling seen.” Here are other words that people have used to portray the influx of love: “soft,” “still,” “radiating,” “inclusive,” “energizing,” “animating,” “grounding,” “restful.”

  One woman spoke of the humor in her discovery: “What a joke: the love I’ve been hungering for was right here all the time. I can’t believe how much pain I have put myself through imagining that love is missing and that I have to extract it from someone! But now I see that all I have to do is to tune my receiver and there it is. It seems as though love is always ready to respond: ‘I have only been waiting all this time for you to turn your face toward me and let me hear your call.’”

  Just as fish do not see the water around them, so we mostly fail to recognize the ocean of love that surrounds and holds us up. Though love is inside and all around, it is so fine and transparent that, like water, it often seems invisible. So all our lives we have been trying to win love, not realizing that great love is right here, freely available. We have been trying to hold ourselves up, not realizing that love is the ever-present ground supporting our whole existence. We have been trying to prove we are worthy of love, while failing to realize that our very nature is already lovely and lovable.

  As long as you still hold onto the childhood fixation on not being loved, then no matter how much others love you, it will never be enough. The wound will operate like a hole in you: No matter how much love someone pours in, it will always leak out the bottom. And you will continue focusing on the love that’s not there rather than the love that is. That is why the practice of tuning in to absolute love is so important. It is a way out of the endless, fruitless attempt to plug the hole of love from outside.

  As soon as you fully acknowledge your thirst, the waters of love find an opening and start flowing toward you. At first it seems as though love is coming to you from somewhere outside. But as you let love’s subtle presence enter you, you can no longer say that I am here and love is there, two separate things. There is no separation.

  To know that you are loved, then, is to know that you are love. When you let down your defenses and allow love to pour into you, you become one with love, like a sheet of ice melting into the river from which it came. Just as the ice was never separate from the river, so the freezing of the heart has only created a temporary separation from your nature as love.

  Melting into love is what the soul has always wanted. The relief it brings goes much deeper than just outgrowing childhood pain. It heals the universal spiritual wound of separation from love.

  This is what we usually seek, whether we know it or not, in our fantasy of the perfect partner—someone in whose arms we could completely let go and relax. What is orgasm, after all, but this? We simply cannot help seeking perfect love, for it is what will help us melt into the warm expanse of openness that is our very nature. “To find the beloved, you must become the beloved” means becoming one with the love that is always loving us.

  The theistic traditions describe this as becoming “the beloved of God” or “a child of God.” In the words of an English hymn:

  Come down, O love divine,

  Seek thou this soul of mine.

  Nontheistic traditions like Buddhism state it differently: “Your mind is one with the compassion and wisdom of all the buddhas.” Yet whatever the language or belief, the great saints and sages of all times always exude great love and compassion, for their heart is one with the absolute love in which they swim. In becoming the beloved, who they are is no longer separate from love.

  The defensive ego is like floorboards we put under our feet to hold us up when we do not trust that love is holding us. Yet though this self-constructed flooring can provide a sense of security, it also separates us from the larger open ground of our being. To let love in, we need to start opening up spaces between the floorboards so that love’s warmth can rise up and envelop us.

  The Work and Play of Relationship

  If you received a phone call telling you that you’d just won a million dollars in a lottery, and then you walked outside and discovered that someone had just stolen your car, it probably wouldn’t bother you too much. Similarly, discovering that you have direct access to great love starts to put the frustrations and disappointments of human love into perspective. You become less dependent on family, friends, or lovers for approval, which is, after all, but a poor substitute for the real thing. Then you can begin to stand on your own and dare to be yourself in a relationship. And since you are less tempted to sell yourself out to win love, there is less resentment.

  After discovering their own access to the source of love, participants in my groups sometimes ask: “If you can open to absolute love directly, it seems like you wouldn’t need people as much anymore. Couldn’t this lead to devaluing or turning away from intimate relationship altogether?” This is not an idle question, as many people today have made the choice as they grow older to live alone. And others have decided that relationships and their difficulties are a distraction from the spiritual path or an impediment to their spiritual well-being.

  This whole question of needing other people is a confusing and tricky one.30 Although having access to the source of love can reduce emotional neediness, it is not exactly a substitute for human warmth and connectedness. While this book has focused on how to heal ourselves—by bringing ourselves back to life in the places we’re wounded and shut down—healthy relationships can also play an important part in this healing. A helping relationship like psychotherapy, a devotional bond with a spiritual master, or a deep soul connection with a friend or lover can provide an important corrective experience that opens our capacity to let love move through us.

  Yet even when a relationship functions in this positive way, it’s important to remember that true nourishment, growth, and expansion come about only through what happens within us, in how we learn to soften and open our guarded heart. Looking to someone else to fill our holes or always satisfy our passion only cuts us off from the wellspring of beauty and power within.

  The point of accessing absolute love directly is not to disengage from relationships. Instead, it allows us to inhabit them more fully, with greater presence and potency. The less I depend on the one I love to fill my holes, the more freely I can see her as she is, show myself as I am, and brave the risks of real intimacy. When my partner and I lay down the frustrating burden of trying to extract perfect love and acceptance from each other, we can see our relationship in a new light: as a field of work and play that provides an opportunity to grow and transform through each other’s influence.

  THE WORK OF RELATIONSHIP

  As we have seen throughout this book, just because we are fashioned out of absolute love, this does not mean that we can embody it31 very fully in our relationships. Nothing stretches our capacity to embody great love like learning to accept others in all of their differences and limitations, especially when these trigger our emotional hot spots. There is nothing like a relationship to show us where we are frozen and shut down, where we have trouble making contact, where we are most afraid, and where we refuse to accept what is. Nothing else so quickly brings our core wound to the surface, exposing all the ways we still feel unloved or unlovable. Human relationships provide the ultimate litmus test of how healed, or whole, or spiritually mature we really are.

  Usually when we shut down in relationships, it is because the other person’s emotional wounds have activated wounds of our own that we cannot tolerate. M
y partner’s anger, for instance, may trigger my deep fear of rejection. If I can’t handle that fear, then I close down when she is angry. So to stay open and present with the one I love in difficult moments, I must be able to hold my own emotional trigger-points in awareness and kind understanding. If I can handle my fear, then I can handle her anger.

  Healing the love-wound doesn’t mean it has been banished forever; instead, it means gaining some freedom from its influence over us. We develop this freedom through a process of understanding and unfolding like the one described in this book—which allows us to pause and consider what is happening when our wound is triggered, instead of just discharging some automatic emotional reaction. Every time I shut down to someone, this is an opportunity to face my woundedness and see where I am shut down in myself as well. This willingness to face my own shutdown is the key that allows me to stay open, both to myself and to the one who is triggering my pain. Through learning to accept what is hardest to accept in myself, I gain the fortitude to face what seems most impossible in my partner and to offer her genuine kindness and caring when she most needs it.

  If my partner and I can learn to speak together about the wounded places that give rise to our emotional reactions, this will also help us remain more awake when the wounds are triggered. Until recently, couples never had access to language or psychological understandings that would allow them to talk about the complex feelings they stirred in each other. And this limited how much they could share of themselves, one with the other. Awareness of each other’s woundedness around loving and being loved helps a relationship deepen and become more resilient and intimate.