Having an injury recently meant spending less time moving and more time meditating and reading, and re-visiting some old favourite reads. Sharon Salzberg’s ‘Real Love: The art of mindful connection’ sometimes gets filed away as a book about relationships, but it’s not a relationship book — as in, sorting out romantic relationships, it’s about how to love, whether it’s loving ourselves, loving a friend, loving a partner, loving a child, loving life itself. Learning to love life is something that, for obvious reasons, is something of a struggle for many of us right now, let’s be honest.
And there’s also a lot of fear around at the moment as well, and as Salzberg writes that Love is the energetic opposite of fear. The book is 3 years old, but this is a sentiment that suits us well for these times – as she writes in the book – ‘we need to make peace with fear’. She goes on;
“When we pay attention to sensations in our body, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear. Love seems to open and expand us right down to the cellular level, while fear causes us contract and withdraw into ourselves. Yet, so often fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.
Close relationships ask us to open our hearts and expose our innermost thoughts and feelings. Yet if you felt unseen or unappreciated in childhood, the risk of self-disclosure can seem almost life-threatening. Or if you were valued only as a “good kid,” and not encouraged to express your individuality, intimacy may feel suffocating. How we felt in relation to our caregivers in childhood is the (often unconscious) prototype for our connections later in life. Becoming more conscious of those early feelings can make us less fearful of dropping our protective masks.
This fear of loss is natural, especially if you’ve had a big loss early in life. But it also can keep you from savoring the love that’s available to you right now.
As we explore new ways of loving and being loved by others, we need to equip ourselves with open, pliant minds; we need to be willing to investigate, experiment and evaluate as we approach a topic we thought we knew so much about.
In the practice of mindfulness we attend to the present moment. We gather in our attention, again and again, and open to whatever comes, humbly accepting it. In doing so, we begin to peel back the layers of conditioning and unconscious expectations. We can’t judge whether they’re realistic or not until we know we have them. We start to discern what, in actuality, is available to us, both in terms of what we can give and what we can receive. And at a deeper level, we realize that love simply, perpetually exists, and that it’s a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it”
As psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm said: “Love is not a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole…”
