Love

Love

What is Love?

“Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread” may be the appropriate adage to my opening of this series – talking about Love, a keystone of the whole spiritual skill set.

Love is defined as a deep and emotional feeling of affection and attachment for a person. There are different types of love: self-love, familial love, platonic (non-sexual) love, romantic (including sexual) love, and agape. Volumes have been written defining and explaining each kind of Love, and my purpose here is not to duplicate those fine works; rather, I want to focus on Love as a spiritual skill.

Why is Love a spiritual skill?

Using the words ‘spirit’ and ‘love’ in the same sentence, might lead you think only of unconditional love or agape – love for mankind (rooted in fundamental Christianity). I prefer a broader definition of spiritual love that includes all of the types of love in our skill set. For me love as a spiritual skill is the unbreakable combination of spirit, heart and mind, producing unselfish thoughts and acts on the behalf of another – romantic or otherwise.

Love involves feeling – being touched or touching someone else, in the spiritual sense and often an immaterial way that produces happiness, joy, and pleasure for your love object. It creates a ‘one-ness’ with another person – and within yourself – so you don’t feel divided or separated from your unity of mind, body, and spirit or your unity with the universe. Moreover, you allow this special energy to permeate your daily life.

When we have ‘ego-less’ feelings for another person, when you hold no expectations for the other, when you feel your deepest human soul is committed to the joy of all, when you accept and give your love without conditions, you are a master of love.

There are no rules for loving except those we make for ourselves or adopt from others. Love deals with the best of the immaterial, it amplifies the human soul, and for some is our ultimate destiny – to love in a way that lasts beyond our physical existence. Love teaches us to enjoy the emotions that come with it. Love requires daily attention without the assurance of achievement, and perhaps more than any other spiritual skill, it deals with deeply held emotions.

When we form love relationships with a spiritual perspective, we end with a union of two individuals that mutually benefit from their spiritual growth – the most important reason you chose this existence. All else that follows in such a relationship will be full of beauty and wonder.

How to Develop Love As a Spiritual Skill

1. Make a commitment to love. Each morning, resolve that you will be a loving person that day. Assume the attributes and traits such a person would exude. Adopt love as the way you’ll interact with the people you come in contact with. Choose at least one person each day to love – someone you didn’t love the day before. Expand your circle of loved ones.

2. Allow yourself to be physically close to other people. The gift of touch communicates love: so touch, hold hands, hug, kiss, and all those other things that signal ‘love’ in some way. Closeness also involves ‘being in touch’ – communicating with each other. You may need to be the one to make the effort.

3. Develop a curiosity about others – get deep ‘into’ them. Love is about discovering what makes people tick. Practice on everyone. Your interest in them is an expression of love. Could you describe someone you’ve met and loved today to someone else? What do you know about them? What do you wish you knew? Take time to find out. Care.

4. Practice ‘active’ and ‘empathic’ listening. How often do we hear ‘all’ of a message a friend or loved one sends our way? Often we multi-task, failing to take in the complete message and its nuances. To love, we need to practice receiving the entire message, thus we must not only listen and look, but also sense and sympathize. No other element of lasting love is as important as communication, and within communication no other skill is as important as empathic listening.

5. Suspend judgment. When we bring our pasts into the arena where we want to love, we use our previous experience as a basis to evaluate the present. Unfortunately, we can use these judgments to be dismissive and critical of the present: in other words, we can rationalize not loving someone and not allowing ourselves to be loved. Don’t let your past decide your future.

6. Be there in the ‘bad’ times. While friends might sympathize with you in the bad times, they often aren’t there physically or emotionally for you. People that love are there in every way possible for someone going though a ‘bad’ time. Be a surprise to someone that needs a friend in a bad time: acquaintances are there in the good times; love is there always.

7. Shape your expectations in a spiritual landscape. Love is an emotive word, and thus by engaging in the love of someone or allowing yourself to be loved, you have expectations about how you’ll feel, how they’ll feel, what you’ll do, what your thoughts will be, … Eliminate your ego-driven expectations. Bring love to a spiritual landscape. Open your mind to love without expectations.

Do you think Love is a spiritual skill? What would you do to develop that skill? How will you know you’re succeeding?

Namasté, I love you all

This website is to stimulate your spiritual thinking in the hope that it will contribute to your spiritual growth. The author invites your comments and critiques by reply e-mail to bob@futuremoons.com.