When we fall in love, our heart becomes full of feel-good qualities that infuse our life with joy and excitement. Everything feels light, fresh and more vibrant. We wake up to a brighter day, the air is warmer, the sun is brighter, everything is right with the world.
Living life through the interactive and colorful kaleidoscope of love is one of the highest human experiences. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to capture this experience and transform it into a permanent state of being? In my next few articles, we will formulate our unique blueprint to reconnect to our love source and transition from experiences of love which come and go to living love at its fullest moment to moment.
Love & Emotions
Understanding the difference between love and the many feelings inspired by love is essential in realizing that love is the baseline from which everything else emerges.
As human beings, we experience many emotional states under love’s vast umbrella, yet each one of them fails to convey the totality of what love is. Love is not equal to the sum of its parts. It is far more powerful than transient emotions. It is an integral state of being waiting to be rediscovered.
Each deeply nourishing emotion ushered by love stands on its own merits and offers its own specific gifts. These emotions assist us in reaching our full potential as human being by deepening our interior faculties and also by giving us the human qualities that propel us into action to help others in need and to make our world a better world.
Love’s Ambassadors
Love’s ambassadors enrich our life experience and increase our range of perception. Love’s ambassadors are: compassion, joy, kindness, wisdom, peace, gratitude, equanimity, appreciation, pleasure, acceptance, intimacy, benevolence, grace, generosity, respect, sympathy, among others.
All these supreme heart qualities advocate on behalf of love and fall under its vast umbrella, but none of them define what love is. They suggest what love might feel like, they point in the direction of love, but they individually and collectively do not come close to the full spectrum of love’s power. Each heart quality is unique and offers special gifts. For example, appreciation may feel like love but actually represents a recognition of a certain quality. It has a finite characteristic. So does gratitude which has many uplifting vibrations and is essentially the crystal clear awareness and heartfelt acknowledge-ment of life’s gifts.
Compassion, Love’s Favorite Wingman
Many of these qualities are considered to be divine in nature because they embody the highest human values. Wisdom traditions foster these qualities of the heart while making the distinction between love and its ambassadors, most notably between love and compassion. The tender feeling evoked by compassion is considered to be a universal virtue, one we extend towards ourselves but more frequently towards other people’s suffering. Compassion has a global history with various ways of expression, depending on cultural differences, yet it has held throughout times its distinct benevolent meaning and its position as love’s favorite wingman.
One of the Buddhist interpretation of compassion is the desire to relieve sentient beings of suffering, while love is the desire to bring happiness to sentient beings.
The Christian tradition holds universal love to be the principal message of Jesus (the Gospels), with many direct references of love in the Bible, and compassion is viewed as the method for enacting this love as part of our responsibility to alleviate human suffering in the world.
In Hinduism, all love for others is considered self love as brahma (universal soul) manifested in the individual (atman) while seva (selfless service) is a central theme of life, practical compassion in action and our duty to humanity.
Love Is A State Of Being
“I’m not interested in being a “lover.” I’m interested in only being love.” — Ram Dass
Love evokes the largest colony of feelings known to man. Nothing else comes close. It commands basic emotions, activates a host of feel good feelings and also has the unique capacity to deactivate negative feelings on contact.
The power of love to dissolve negativity cannot be underestimated. This power becomes our closest ally in removing the emotional blocks that keep us isolated from our love source.
Love is not an emotion. Happiness, in contrast, is an emotion, and as with any other emotion, it comes and goes depending on the circumstances triggering it.
We often make the mistake of reducing love to the level of emotion, thereby diluting its power and settling for small love experiences that indeed come and go. If we become aware of this type of love, its qualities, where it comes from, why it comes up in our lives, we notice that generally the emotion we call love is but a shadow of the deeper state of love which is our essence.
Love is not sentimentality or even romanticism. Those are what we do with love to express its many delicious ways and plays.
When love is a state of being, we can actually experience unhappiness and still be rooted in love. We can feel love amidst other emotions. Love is the background on which all other emotional scenery go by.
These distinctions are sometimes faint, delicate, because they are translated according to the depth of our perception. Psychological well-being does not indicate the presence of love, but rather the absence of turmoil, and remains very dependent on the pendulum of life forever swinging from one side to the other, from pleasure to pain. Love as a state of being is independent of outside circumstances.
So far, we have been used to the smallest indication of what love really is. We have limited love to an intellectual idea or a set of well delineated beliefs. That is hardly satisfying to the soul, isn’t it? It does not come close to the actual experience of living in a state of love.
The absolute difference is to be felt, not just understood.
Searching for the state of being called love leads us to the ultimate discovery of who we really are and what our purpose is. Please join me on this adventure, and In the next articles let’s recognize together love in a new light and realize that it has been inside of us all along.
Love is just waiting to be discovered, again.
by Toni Emerson
Toni Emerson is a writer, speaker and is currently working on her book, “The Love Dialogues”. Visit her on her website, www.TheLoveDialogues.com. For free love quotes delivered daily to your inbox or to your loved one’s inbox, visit www.LoveQuoteOfTheDay.com.
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