B005HP3PVY EBOK

by John Welwood

  Through making peace with the wound my partner triggers in me, as well as with her wound, which I trigger in turn, I become much more accepting of myself and her. This is why consciously working with the wound of the heart is not a narcissistic self-indulgence. Coming to terms with our woundedness helps us navigate the complex emotional dynamics of human relationship and gradually bring a more all-embracing love into this world.

  With this kind of perspective we can begin to see and appreciate the hidden perfection or sacred meaning contained within all the imperfection and turmoil of human relationship. Learning to ride the turbulent ups and downs of relative love makes us more tolerant, more understanding, more humble, more wise. Thus all the storms and trials of relationship serve a useful function, bending and shaping us so that we become a clearer, more open channel through which unconditional love can flow.

  Authentic loving presence—the meeting of I and Thou—requires me to be able to honor all of my own experience and all of yours at the same time: not denying any of my experience or yours, not denying the differences between the two, and respecting these differences while feeling the rawness of never being able to fully overcome my aloneness and share my world with you. Yet still letting the longing for human contact forever arise anew, again and again, and ripple through me—the longing to reach out, to let in, to touch, and to taste the joy of letting myself feel drawn toward you, the sacred other, the luminous unknown.

  THE PLAY OF RELATIONSHIP

  Wonderful as it is to receive love directly from the absolute source, this in no way diminishes the special delight and significance of sharing its human expression as it sparkles through a smile, a look, or the energetic contact of hearts, minds, and hands. Indeed, intimate, personal love is not just a pale reflection of absolute love, but a further expression of it. After all, the absolute source does not have expressive eyes we can gaze into, filling us with warmth and tenderness. And only two human bodies can share all the nuances of naked touch and feel. Only in sexual play do the two poles of existence—spirit and body, masculine and feminine, heaven and earth, beauty and beast—join in full-bodied union. Only two persons can speak the sacred words “I see your beauty” or “I love you for who you are.” Soulful, personal love—the capacity to cherish and respond to the unique beauty of another, who in turn responds to our unique beauty—is a joy few worldly pleasures can match.

  Many spiritual teachers, such as Krishnamurti, are willing to give the name love only to pure, selfless love, as though relative love, with all its fluctuating passions, were unworthy of the name. Selfless, unconditional openness is certainly love’s essence and highest possibility. As the most refined, subtle frequency of love, the pure expression of spirit, it is like the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum—pure white light.

  Yet love is also a wide-spectrum light with many shades and hues, ranging from ultraviolet—the openness of pure spirit—to infrared—the warmth of bodily and emotional contact. Since human beings are not pure spirit alone, the infrared heat of personal and sexual intimacy can help tune and enliven body and soul as instruments of deeper resonance. Through embodied human love the divine takes up residence on this earth.

  Caring for Others

  Having explored intimate relationship as a transformative journey in my books Journey of the Heart and Love and Awakening, I wanted in this book to focus instead on our inmost connection to love itself and the disconnection from it that has left our world so broken and torn apart. This focus has led me to emphasize the central importance of being able to receive love in healing the wound of the heart.

  Yet in truth, receiving and giving are both equally essential, for they are the inhalation and exhalation of the breath of love. Knowing that we are loved, as we have seen, can help us discover that we are love. And this sets us free—to love, to care for others as they are, apart from our designs on them. The more we “become the beloved”—through letting the sun of absolute love shine upon us—the more this ripens our capacity to embody unconditional love in the world around us.

  This whole cycle—accessing pure, absolute love and giving forth human caring and kindness—corresponds to two great commandments upon which Christ said “the whole Law and the Prophets depend.” The first is to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. As a child, I had a hard time understanding what this meant when I first heard about it in Sunday school. How was I—this small, impoverished creature who barely recognized the presence of love within me—supposed to send love to God, the almighty Father, who didn’t even need my love anyway because He already is and has everything? Although I was told that I should do this, I had no idea what it meant or how to go about it. Certainly no one at Sunday school ever suggested that you might have a hard time with the first commandment if you did not know that you were truly loved yourself.

  Through the practice of opening to absolute love, I came to understand Christ’s first commandment in a more concrete, immediate way. If the presence of absolute love is “nondirectional,” as one of my students described it, this means it is not something that a self over here gives to God over there, or that God out there gives to a self over here. To love God with all one’s heart must mean immersing oneself in the all-pervasive stream of absolute love that is God. When immersed in this stream of blessing, I can see that love is not something I give or am given. It is the essential substance of what I am, my whole heart, mind, and strength. Loving God with all my heart and mind must mean loving my very nature as love itself, opening into pure openness, like water poured into water.

  Christ’s further commandment, to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” arises directly out of discovering this love that lives within you. When you know yourself as openness and warmth, this sensitizes you to the pain of others who feel shut down and cut off from these qualities. You can see, behind their fear and defenses, that they too are desperate to know and connect with something beautiful and real within themselves. And then loving your neighbor—through sharing the wealth, this gift of warmth and openness—becomes more possible.

  The Buddha understood the relation between absolute love and human kindness in a similar way. The Buddhist term for perfect love is awake heart—the natural open presence of our true nature (absolute bodhichitta in Sanskrit). Residing in this open presence corresponds to loving God with all one’s heart and mind in the Christian tradition. This connection with absolute love can have a “vertical” feeling to it, in that it almost seems to pour down from above as a stream of blessings—from God or the wisdom guru or the vast openness above the crown of the head. This inflow enters and energizes the heart center, which can then radiate “horizontally” as kindness and caring toward all sentient beings. This infrared radiation is relative awake heart (relative bodhichitta).

  This vertical connection to skylike openness above straightens us up, metaphorically speaking, allowing for an upright, balanced posture in relating to others. As one of my students spoke of his realization after the absolute-love practice: “I felt myself straighten up. And I saw that trying to get love is like leaning over at an angle. When leaning like that, I lose the vertical connection to my own ground, and I become even more desperate to win love from out there.” Straightening up like this allows us to practice genuine kindness, free of any ruse to make other people like us.

  The Buddha knew that loving one’s neighbor is often not so easy, even after opening to absolute love, for the habits of fear and grievance have etched well-worn grooves in our psyche that will continue to draw us into them unless we consciously practice relating to others in new ways. Thus the Buddhist tradition contains many practical methods for generating loving-kindness and compassion toward others.

  One simple way to activate caring for others is to remember your own wish to know yourself as beautiful and lovable, and then to recognize that everyone without exception has this same wish, whether they know it or not. If you look deeply at your worst enemies and the desperadoes of the world like St
alin, Hitler, or bin Laden, you can recognize that behind their aggressive facades, they too have this wish—which they dare not reveal to anyone, least of all themselves. They judge themselves as weak for having this need and feel ashamed of it, hiding it behind a mask of pseudostrength. And so they come to deny and forget the deeper longing hidden beneath their drive for success, power, expertise, wealth, celebrity, or revenge.

  When you see how ashamed your fellow humans are of their desire for love, regarding it as a weakness, something to hate themselves for, how does this affect you? How much we all hide the tenderness of our heart, so that no one can see it! As you contemplate this, a glimmer of compassion may arise for yourself and all beings who want to know happiness but continually keep it at bay.

  Christ’s two commandments are connected in another way as well: Boundless love cannot flow into us unless it also has an outlet that allows it to keep circulating. If opening to absolute love unclogs the in-channel, expressing tenderness and kindness unclogs the out-channel, clearing away old traces of grievance still blocking it. Even if we just start practicing kindness in little ways, such as letting someone go ahead of us in traffic or saying hello to strangers in a friendly voice, this exercises our heart, nourishing us in the process as well. For as the Indian teacher Sri Poonja points out,32 “When you love, you are loving your own heart.”

  Living for the Love of It

  Knowing we are held in great love frees us from the status of beggars anxiously awaiting our next handout. This allows us to act more creatively and effectively in the world. When we no longer secretly try to win love through our work, we become much better artists, businesspeople, politicians, parents, students, or teachers. We are freed to do what we do as a form of creative play rather than as a form of self-validation.

  The same principle holds true in every sphere, from political leadership to spiritual practice. Given the great challenges facing our planet, there is a tremendous need for wise leaders who can, out of their love for humanity, put the long-term benefit of the planet above the short-term interest of their approval ratings.

  In religious communities, one of the biggest obstacles to spiritual development is the secret agenda to win love through being a good parishioner, a serious meditator, or a hardworking disciple. Zealously trying to be nice, to meditate correctly, to pray sincerely, to devote themselves to their teacher or to service, people hope to win the recognition from God, the guru, or the community that they never received as a child. Yet all of this effort only leaves them with long, dour faces. Trying to win approval or acceptance is always a joyless task.

  For many years I engaged in spiritual practice in the impoverished way I have just described. And for many of us it may be unavoidable to start that way. Although I found great benefit in meditation—greater awareness, greater understanding, greater compassion—it troubled me that I did not feel much delight in it. Though my life was good in most respects, I still lacked a deep sense of joy in my heart.

  This lack of joy became my koan—a Zen-like riddle requiring an answer that could not come from my mind. For years I tried to find out what was missing, and I discovered many things about what was blocking my joy, important things I needed to look at. Yet none of this lifted the cloud from my heart.

  It was not until I began to discover direct access to perfect love within myself that the sun finally began to come out from behind the clouds in a more consistent way. Joy arose from knowing that I was one with the presence of love and that I didn’t have to prove or achieve anything to deserve that benevolence, because it was already built into the fabric of who I was.

  From there I started to recognize the radiant energy of aliveness at the core of my being as intrinsically blissful or, in the words of the poet Blake, as “eternal delight.” When love or passion flows unobstructedly, it is experienced as bliss. And when we awaken to the bliss in our veins, its natural outflow is radiant love.

  Of course, in our creaturely vulnerability, there is no way to avoid loss and separation from what we love. We cannot avoid coming back again and again to the experience of being alone. No one can finally get inside our skin and share our experience—the nuances that we alone feel, the changes that we alone are going through, the death that we alone must die. Nonetheless, loss, separation, and this fundamental aloneness are important teachers, for they force us to take up residence in the only real home we have—the naked presence of the heart, which no external loss can destroy.

  Standing in this, our own true ground, is the ultimate healing balm for the ache of separation and the wound of love. “You must fall in love with the one inside your heart,”33 says the teacher Poonja. “Then you will see that it has always been there, but that you have wanted something else. To taste bliss, forget all other tastes and taste the wine served within.” The warmth and openness at our core is the most intimate beloved who is always present, and into whose arms we can let go at last.

  Epilogue

  Who’s Holding You?

  SARAH WAS a highly intelligent and attractive woman I had worked with in therapy for several years. Having been through three marriages and many affairs, she desperately wanted to find a relationship she could finally settle into. Yet she had never been able to create one that worked for her.

  Sarah’s father had left the family when she was an infant, and her mother had married another man. Her mother never told her the truth, leading Sarah to believe that her mother’s new husband was Sarah’s real father. Throughout her childhood Sarah knew in her body that something was missing, but did not know what. In addition, her mother was not capable of taking care of Sarah’s emotional needs, so Sarah wound up taking care of her mother instead. As a result, she came to believe that love was in short supply and that she had to earn every scrap that came her way.

  Sarah continually enacted this belief in her relationships with men. She married men who were emotionally unavailable and had passionate affairs with men who had other commitments. Her tendency was to focus on what the man wanted while putting herself aside. As a result, though she was a beautiful soul, she had never found a man who saw or valued her enough to give her his all.

  After much work on these issues, Sarah finally met someone who was crazy about her, and she about him. The only catch: Eric was still involved with another woman, whom he saw part-time and whose children he had helped raise. Although he deeply loved and wanted Sarah, his fear of the consequences of leaving the other woman prevented him from being able to commit to her 100 percent.

  Sarah waited for Eric for several months, feeling excruciating torment whenever he was with the other woman. Finally she could not stand it any longer. She realized that she would have to stop seeing him if he could not break off with the other woman. While this was hard for her, she had gained enough self-respect through our work to know she had to do it. Yet no longer seeing Eric also brought up powerful waves of emotion, which allowed her to explore her core wounding more deeply than ever before.

  Since this relationship was the closest Sarah had come to what she wanted with a man, Eric’s inability to commit was totally devastating. She had tremendous anger about that, and I encouraged her to feel it fully. After working through the anger, she went into grief about having become involved, once again, in a relationship with someone who was not fully there for her.

  As she opened to her grief, I asked her what was most painful for her, and she said, “Feeling so alone, and never being able to get my needs met.” Then we explored what she was most needing, and she said, “I’m tired of trying so hard to get someone to love me. I want to know that someone can just be there for me, that I can relax and feel held for a change.”

  We were at a critical juncture. Sarah had never developed a nourishing relationship because she had never owned or fully allowed herself to feel her desire to be loved, with the vulnerability and endangerment that implied. It had always been much safer to focus on taking care of the man’s needs instead, hoping he’d throw a few crumbs
her way. This time was different. Sarah was finally acknowledging the depth of her longing to be held in love.

  I encouraged Sarah to repeat the words “I want to feel held,” and see how that affected her. As she did this, a warmth and softness began spreading throughout her body. The focus was no longer on Eric or her grief. Directly experiencing her deep longing to feel held allowed something in her to relax. And in relaxing she discovered a presence that actually seemed to be holding and supporting her. This had a profound effect on her. Her whole face softened into a smile and she was totally at peace.

  After a while, I encouraged her to alter the words slightly—to see what it would be like to say, “I want to let myself feel held.” While this phrasing was only slightly different, it put more emphasis on her willingness to open herself to that holding.

  At first this was a bit too threatening for her. The change of phrase let her see how hard it was to let herself be held. Not trusting that anyone would reliably be there for her, she had based her life on being independent, as a way of compensating for the lack of holding in her childhood. So to shift gears and let herself feel held was scary. It threatened her stance as a self-made woman and made her feel acutely vulnerable. As the session ended I encouraged her to keep exploring her wish to feel held in the week between sessions.

  Before the next session, Sarah had a minor car accident and wound up calling Eric for support and help. He was delighted to take care of her for the weekend, and this felt comforting to her. Yet though she felt comforted in Eric’s arms, she also realized that this wasn’t nearly as powerful as the presence of holding she had felt in my office the previous week.