Feeling Love

 

I had been doing a course on self-love with Eva Beronius. I’d love to summarise it for you but it’s already a couple of months ago and since then I’ve been through another rollercoaster of learning and experience, and it would be hard to pinpoint what I learned when, as it all merges and emerges in a huge dynamic cycle of suffering, detachment and realisation. What I did learn, which I think triggered this latest cycle, is all about the feeling of emotion. Law of Attraction teaches us it’s all about FEELING. If you can feel it before you have it, you’ll get it. You have to believe it to see it, and so on. And you can read about visualisation techniques and meditations but for most of us it’s hard to conjure up, never mind sustain, a physical sensation at will.

I don’t recall the context, but the lesson was life changing. Eva asked us to pinpoint the feeling of loving. This was new. I’ve often been asked or prompted to “feel love” but Eva distinguishes between the different sensations of sending and receiving of love. My curiosity pricked, I conjure up my go-to images of love. Usually it’s Twiggy, my first cat as an adult, the instigator of my spiritual path. Twiggy, tiny but ferocious little hunting cat, a cat with more character than you could pack into a TARDIS, sleeping in her little round hammock. Though it was shallow as a teaspoon, Twiggy would still disappear into the hammock with nothing but an ear poking out. I would bury my face into the middle of her soft, warm body and breathe in her smell of grass and dirt. My heart would constrict. “Is this what people feel for their children?” I would wonder, knowing I would rip limb from limb anyone who harmed my precious Twiggy. I have come to realise though, that this feeling of love is somewhat, humanly, tainted, twinged with a sense of impending loss. That’s not the unconditional love: I want the warmth of that feeling without the fear. So I conjure up the living objects of love. I see Gary sitting in the grass outside, with Sally the cat cuddled in his lap. I see our three little hens. Niala is pecking at him gently with that glaikit* look on her face, and Ella and Pink, grotesquely sprawled out, sunbathing beside him. Sunbathing chickens can be alarming if you haven’t seen them before, they stretch out like roadkill, limbs all strange and awkward angles as they lever every joint they have to get maximum solar exposure! This little tableau of the things I love generates a warm sensation in my solar plexus, radiating to my heart, and I lean into this feeling, trying not to veer into the heart constriction which indicates I’m tiptoeing into the fear element of human love, the fear that you can lose the physical presence of those you love. Trying to feel only that outgoing feeling of warmth. This feeling comes easily to me, but to sustain it and focus on it takes discipline, we don’t tend to indulge these feelings unless we’re in sorrow (or in love, ironically!) So it takes practise and persistence to try to hold that feeling. I encourage you to try it, with practise it suddenly made me realise that I CAN feel that, and although I need to keep at it, it imbued me with a knowing that this is the key to my self-love, practising this physical sensation of “to love” and “to be loved” until I can conjure it up at will.

Next comes the receiving of love. This is what most of us struggle with the most. I have been trained to give my entire life and it’s taken years of self-awareness and practises to recognise what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Giving has never been a problem. Receiving on the other hand… like “boundaries” the words don’t really mean much to me, I stare blindly at the words that describe accepting, receiving, enjoying love, with no visceral understanding of that it all means. What?

Before I finally imploded at my corporate job I would wistfully explore other career options, desperate to find something that floated my boat, but that used my current skill set. As a manager I longed to be technical again, to be free of the politics and finances. I love problem solving and software engineering was a brilliant obedient puzzle, and I loved coding. I loved all of it. Or I thought I did. I had managed to wangle a side hustle of creating a user interface and I thought I’d be in my element. After all it was user interfaces I had done at university and the opportunity with advances in technology were mind bending. But it just didn’t excite me in the way I thought it would. Neither did web-pages – though the feedback was instant and gratifying and I’m really good at all the design elements, but nothing really did it for me at all. The malaise was still there. On top of that I was massively stressed with managing the people and budgets, but getting zero pleasure out of anything I did. Even the spreadsheets lost their shine – I’m kidding! –  that would never happen – but you can love a spreadsheet and still rather do something else. Then I read an article about “white hackers” and I thought that’s it! That’s the thing! That’s technical, but fascinating. I mentioned it to one of my colleagues. He was doing an MSc in digital forensics. The next day he arrived at my desk with an armful of information. He had burned CDs with all his lecture notes and assignments. He had books and a vast array of things he had collated for me that must’ve taken him hours. I was mortified! I felt awful. Unworthy. Ungrateful. Awkward. It’s only now that I can see that it was no more that I would do, did do, frequently, unasked, for other people my whole life, but that he had done it for me, wasn’t even humbling, it was crippling. I simply didn’t know how to accept gracefully this unbidden gift of someone else’s time and energy.

So now we turn our attention to receiving, and again, Eva Beronious has found the magic words that got through to me. Abraham Hicks says that if humans had found a way to monetise the sun, we would have done that. That if we humans can embody our deserving of money in the way we take for granted our supply of sunshine, we would have limitless supplies of money. I appreciate it’s an odd concept for someone in Scotland, but I can still get it, just. Or maybe I should think of the rain. Every single day the sun rises. I never question it. Maybe the days I can actually feel it on my skin I am more aware of it, but generally I never question my deserving of sunshine, air, rain, grass. And these things are in abundance around me all the time. If I can coax my brain to accept money into that category, I’ve arrived in monetary abundance.

Where I am is exactly where I should be and right now I can feel my receiving when I close my eyes and think of lying on the deck of a water villa in the Indian Ocean. I can hear the lap, lap, lap of the water against the steps down into the turquoise water. I know there’s a batfish that hangs around the steps, with his enormous billowing yellow and brown fins, his curious, glassy but penetrating look. Previous guests must’ve fed him because he’s very brave. I idly wonder what you feed a fish but pull my marshmallow brain back to the sensations. Sunshine is great for melting your brain. I can feel my skin against the warm wooden boards, radiating warmth under my body. I can feel the trickles of water dripping from my swimsuit as they pool and run off my skin. I can feel the soft warm breeze tickling my arms. I can almost sense the steam rising off my body as the water evaporates. I can hear the crabby bats squabbling in the palm tree on the island. I can hear the whoop, whoop, whoop of the Asian Koel bird that spirals off into a crescendo of warbling, far, far, far away. AND as I lie on the deck and can FEEL, yes I can FEEL my receiving of this warmth. This, my friends, is love. I can imagine the sun on my skin and my body opening to receive this warmth. This light. This life giving force. Receiving. It doesn’t matter that it’s light, or warmth or love, it’s that I’m open to receive. I can expand the image to the receiving of love, gently radiating from Niala, from Ella, from Pink and from Sally. From the sheep in the fields. The robin in the hedge. The magpie, hopping across the lawn. Harder to imagine from humans but I know that all my animals are beaming unconditional love to me all the time. I don’t want to risk resistance by imagining humans in the mix. If my brain wakes up this party is over, and my brain wants to define love, poke at it, test it.  My ego has accepted the love from my animals is unconditional, but my ego has a whole pile of observations and opinions around human love and what that should look like. So for now, we stay with the animals.

It’s early days for me. Maybe one day I will. Maybe one day I will effortlessly receive love from humans. I am still only taking baby steps. If anyone offered me the love I used to think I wanted, I think I would hate it, feel suffocated by it, shun it, despise it. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. But I also know that I am only just learning about what love actually is, and it’s not what I thought it was. It’s not what most humans think it is. It’s not about laying down your life for someone. It’s not about waiting hand and foot on someone. It’s not about providing for or taking care of someone. It’s not about doing what they want. It’s not even about supporting them emotionally. It’s about being present with them. It’s about observing them exactly as they are without needing them to change. And maybe from there you can only respect and cherish them. Until I learn to love myself unreservedly I can’t attract it from others. Until I can love myself without needing me to change, I’m still learning.

But it’s a start. I can feel it. I can feel the abundance of love in the world. I can feel that this is the love I want, not all the things I thought love was. If I can accept everyone just as they are, without needing them to change, that’s happiness right there.

 

*glai·kit [ˈɡleɪkɪt]

ADJECTIVE SCOTTISH, NORTHERN ENGLISH

• stupid, foolish, or thoughtless.