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Committing to Love

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COMMITTING TO LOVE 

Not as easy peasy

People who see themselves as being on a spiritual path, often have as one of their top values, to come from love in all things.  The desire to feel blissful, juicy, aliveness in every single moment, as the baseline for existing.  We strive to be connected, in flow, with our hearts open and unshakably rested as a presence of loving goodness.  Even though most of us feel a strong desire for this, and to share this love with the world, many of us are not really committed to it.  It sounds good in theory.  We might even start imagining the creation of our next program or offering to help the world somehow be more loving.  We get excited about the possibilities of how beautiful and peaceful life would be if everyone came from love.  If the whole wide world was one big heart centered yum fest where everyone was supporting, looking out and caring about everyone else.  Like a magical island where ecstatic rapture and divine bliss are the norm.  Oh yes we all want to live there, or I should say we all want to live there in theory.

The reality is that most of us don’t really want it.  Why do I say that you ask?  I say it because we are not choosing it.  For 99% of the people on this planet this is not a lived reality.  It’s just a concept.  A fantastical idea that feels good to think about.  Perhaps we choose that all embracing, allowing and present love for moments, like when we are at a retreat, program, festival or on some exotic vacation.  But when we come back to “reality” or whatever we mean by our more ordinary lives, we find ourselves stuck inside of our typical triggered responses to the movements of life.  Something upsets us and we get pissed.  Things don’t turn out how we had hoped and we see failure and doom.  Everything feels like hard work or an uphill battle.  We judge ourselves and others when things don’t live up to our expectations. We can’t stop thinking about stuff, tense up, plot for retaliation or desperately try to find way out of it all.  

I am not suggesting that it’s easy peasy to choose love.  The truth is, when life is not feeling like we are merrily floating down the stream of it, it is hard to choose love.  Love seems like the furthest option from our reach.  We are hooked into our story about what life is supposed to be rather than choosing to love it for what it is.  When things feel unjust, unfair, not right or unwelcome, or when we feel unappreciated, not seen or undervalued, choosing love is hard.  In choosing love our egos take a hit.  It seems we have to swallow something that tastes really, really bad.  How do we let go of that thing we keep saying we want to let go of, but which we keep holding onto for dear life?  We let go by letting go.  We feel the little micro ego death that comes with it.  The death of not getting what we want or what we feel like we deserve.  Then we experience the openness that remains when we relinquish.  That openness, which is the fertile field of bliss and rapture.   

NORMALIZING RAPTURE 

The doorway in

If more people were choosing love, then more of us would be experiencing ecstatic rapture as the norm rather than an unpleasant, drab, harsh world.  Magical rapture would be our ordinary reality.  It is however quite remarkable how much we don’t allow ourselves to feel good.  It’s like we all have this internal goodness meter, and we can only let it go so high before we start to find ways to make ourselves feel not quite as good.  A little bit of joy and happiness is acceptable throughout our day, but not too much.  A tad of pleasure and ecstasy is ok from time to time, but not too often and as long as no one else sees you experiencing it.  This is the inner reality most of us live.  Can you even remember when the last time was that you allowed yourself to feel uncontrollably ecstatic in front of others, outside of an alcohol or drug induced state?  Before you started to be self-conscious and began to value fitting in and caring about what others think of you.

What if we didn’t need to find ways to feel less good?  What if we didn’t get hooked anymore into our stories about what is or isn’t, in order to bring our state of being down?  What if we were more committed to being love than to receiving what we want or getting justice?  When we commit to love we bring ourselves into the reality of rapture, of direct commune with the divine, not as a concept or idea, but as our very being.  There is nothing outside of us required for this to become our experience.  It is an inner commitment, an inner choice, by you and for which only you can make.  Containers can be set to deepen the inner permission, but you are the permission giver.  

The permission to feel good, while simultaneously letting things go that we don’t really want to hang onto anyways, is the doorway to rapture.  Rapture simply because you want to choose it rather than what your mind tells you that you should choose.  Some people might think that this naive or stupid, and your mind will likely fight you some on this, insisting that you are letting things go that you shouldn’t.  Your habituated thoughts will attempt to find ways to get you to hold on, to fight, to seek righteousness, because your thoughts think they know how to get you what you want, but they always come up short.  What you want lies beyond them, in the world of the heart.  

While committing to love and living from the heart may feel like defeat to the mind, the result is that you get to experience that state of rapturous delight the moment you choose love.  You don’t have to wait until your thoughts agree, or until your physical reality says so.  You get to experience it the moment you decide to let go of your current commitment to discontent, frustration and misery.   While those states are familiar and addicting because we have normalized them as our reality, we can begin to normalize rapture now.  Rapture is our nature.  It’s what we are made of. Unification with our essence is rapturous union with the divine.  Committing to love in face of everything is the doorway in.

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor & Spiritual Guide, Boulder, Colorado

Learning to Love Life

Dr. Amanda Love 1 Comment

LEARNING TO LOVE LIFE 

Logic is not the answer

This life is not always a walk in the park.  In fact much of the time there is challenge, hard work and lots of arduous learning to be had.  Sure there are rhythms when things flow smoothly and all goes according to our desired plan, yet there are many rhythms when things don’t.  Rhythms where we feel lost, confused, bored, restless, stressed, and where we are ready to be off planet in some peaceful paradise where things work easily and we feel good all of the time.  Yet the fact remains that we are here on this planet, with this physical human body and there are things to be learned, shared and created right here where we are.  How do we make peace with being where we are even when we don’t like it?  How do we live in acceptance rather than resistance to our experience of challenge, work and learning?

When things are difficult many of us are good at logically rationalizing the situation.  For example say you are experiencing a tough rhythm.  Something you really want isn’t working out.  You feel confused and lost as to what is going on in your life.  You keep trying to think and find a logistical way out of the situation or something that will make it work out, but you are just spinning.  You can’t seem to find your way through.  You feel stuck, and little hopeless.  This is an incredibly common scenario.  You might logically know that somehow everything is going to be just fine, and while you logically know this you can’t quite seem to get yourself to really believe it because you are still spinning inside of it all.  Utilizing logic is not the solution at this stage of the game.

While logic is not the solution, this doesn’t stop us from trying to use it in order to get out of whatever it is we don’t want to experience in this life.  The reason why logic is not the answer is because from our mind’s perspective it is illogical to accept what we don’t like or understand, and ultimately acceptance is the solution to learning to love life as it is.  Your logic will likely not get you into acceptance of whatever is, but rather will keep you continuing to strategize how to not accept whatever is showing up in your life that you don’t want or understand.  Accepting what is also means that we have to feel what is.  This is again why we default to logic.  Most people prefer being tortured inside of the tornado of their thoughts rather than feel their emotions about what is.   

LOVING WHERE YOU ARE 

Accepting what is

Feeling our emotion about what is, bridges the gap between what we are logically trying to get ourselves to figure out and accepting what is.  When we feel emotion it clears out our resistances.  We stop trying to fight an uphill battle and therefore we can take a breath.  We may still not like, prefer or want what is, but we are no longer trying to deny, escape or get out of its existence.  We are rather just with what is, no longer fleeing from the dangers of feeling our emotions about it.  We’ve felt the thing, or more accurately we’ve felt our emotions about the thing.  We now experience some space, some ease and some peace.  We may not have clarity or know what we need to do, because perhaps there is nothing to do, or maybe there is, but either way we are more embracing of being in this moment rather than trying to get out of it and into the next one where we perceive we will feel more peace, joy or excitement.  

How does all of this lead to loving where you are?  When you are more accepting you are naturally more loving of everything.  You can still not like certain things, but your liking or not of what is, doesn’t touch you loving it.  Yes that’s right you can love what is, and simultaneously not like it.  You can respond with authenticity and grace, receiving what you don’t like and loving it exactly as it is.  But as long as you are in resistance to what is and not feeling your emotions about it, your mind can’t grok how this would be even possible.  Acceptance of what is opens the doorway in your mind so that you can comprehend this.  

Until we reach acceptance of what is no real change can occur in us or in how we perceive or feel about the situations of our life.  Instead we will just keep trying to fight or flee from it.  We won’t find love where we are if we are resisting what’s here.  You can’t escape your resistances.  You will take them with you into your next situation, and your next one, and the one after that, and on and on for eternity.  They don’t just go away because you insulate yourself from them through carefully crafting or controlling your environments.  Rather you only keep them at bay while they lurk in the depths waiting for their next opportunity to present themselves so that you can heal, resolve, and integrate them rather than move away from them.  

To not love where you are in this moment is to reject life and be in a state of unappreciation, and there is nothing more painful than that.  If your circumstances or situations change to your liking and then you decide to love life, your love is conditional.  The condition of your love being that your preferences are met.  This is not the stable, unshakeable, unconditional, divine love that we all seek to know.  To know this love is to become it.  How bold is to love life even when it’s not up to your liking?  How brave do you need to be in order to feel, accept and love life as it is and know that it will work out perfectly for you even if you don’t like it? This is what takes in order to learn to love life and to love where you are in this moment.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor, Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado