A few little thoughts on Love…
Is it possible to love without attachment?
I thought that by entering a monastery, I’d be protected and safe from the pulls and sways of the heart, all the challenges, deep vulnerabilities, and intense emotions that often come along with loving relationships. It was one, if not the reason for coming here. I was noticing how deeply pulled I was trying to care for the needs of others, feeling lost or conflicted in my own needs. How my judgements and fears would project themselves, or how deep connections - which felt cosmic - would consume my whole being.
Yet as tenderness took hold inside and around me, what I found was even more to fall in love with—human beings, living beings, memories. Sometimes, all I can see is love, everywhere. Have you watched the way a bee caresses the inside of a poppy? Or how the ripples of a river gently kiss the shoreline? Creation is so deeply in love with itself and so delightfully unbashful in its expression of admiration. Relationships are not something we create from non-existence but rather something we delicately foster, as we’re in relation to everything all the time, even if it may appear otherwise.
As I write this, I’m sitting on the shore of a pond, listening to birds sing, sensing the breeze gently brush my arms—there is such tenderness. The quality of each relationship is so keenly determined by the quality of presence I am offering. Might I sense not just with my eyes and ears, but my whole being. Not just what is happening around me, but within, as we are but thin, porous entities—in reality, there is no ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ ourselves.
This is all to say that love is an art, an action. Love is what we are. How to love is the deep inquiry. How do we embody a love that feels freeing, spacious, nourishing? How do we enter a relationship from a place of equanimity? Can we allow beautiful things to come and go? What does it entail to be deeply intimate with life? Where does the deepest form of intimacy lie? These questions are ongoing investigations, ever-present in my mind as I notice my heart softening and expanding.
At the moment, I’m experiencing so much attraction it is sometimes overwhelming. Yet I relish in its aliveness - and when attraction or desire arise, I gently tend to these beautifully powerful feelings by asking myself—
What is it in their ‘being’ that I find incredibly beautiful?
Perhaps it’s the way they offer themselves space for silence or their free-spirited curiosity for life. Perhaps it’s their gentleness, artistic talents, openness. If I can play and piece them apart into essences of ‘being,’ I’ve found I can not only invite myself to cultivate that quality in my own ‘being’ but expand my love to those essences existing in this very moment in other forms—humans and beyond. This leads to such a deepening of love and catapults me into a space of curiosity and abundance. Attachment fades as I experience the felt sensation of not needing a particular someone or something to feel the love or peace I notice present around them. It’s always there.
The other key I’ve been investigating is if I am loving from a truly authentic space—my deepest aspiration is to support the growth and solidity of whatever I am loving, whether it’s my grandfather, a flower, or a friend. I wish nothing more than for them to freely explore their self-potential and all the gifts within them. So now, I’m practicing that with everything I meet, I ask myself—
How can I support their solidity and wellbeing in a way that feels nourishing for us both?
And then there are the fears that often jaunt alongside the beauty of loving—fear of being deeply vulnerable, perhaps abandoned. Yet if I enter from a space of deep love and trust for myself and the other, do I still fear vulnerability, or welcome it with the utmost pleasure? Is vulnerability not just a form of deep intimacy with life? And isn’t that aliveness? Heartache—not a sensation to run away from, but to collect as moments I’ve fully lived.
When my grandfather passed away, my fear of death dissipated quite immediately. Yet in its place arose the deepest fear I still hold: not living this life in a way that I feel ‘fully alive.’ And perhaps, to embody and live in non-fear, is one of the deepest offerings of love there is.
Can we live in spacious, boundless love? Support one another in our aliveness? Perhaps that is freedom for us all.
Here is a little poem I scribbled after mediating on love on evening:
