A Day in the Life of Love - Pt 1
By: Stephen Levine
Posted: July 26, 2010
What might it be like to wake up into a day in a life of love when being loving is even more important than being loved?
But of course love is contagious and the more loving we are the more loved we become.
What would your first thought be? How open the mind and body? How soft the belly?
How considerable the day. How graceful the possibilities.
A day of forgiveness and compassion. A day of grounded kindness.
What might it be like to experience a loving that does not depend on getting what we want but on offering what the world so cries out for?
A day that cultivates a concern for the well being of all we meet. An aspiring to live comfortably within even a sometimes seemingly ill-fitting world. A sense that no matter what comes next compassion is our option. To gradually open the heart until no one is excluded.
Some days in a life of love are gratefully dedicated to learning to keep our heart open even to our heart being closed. I know some remarkable people, even some who are considered Great Human Beings, but I have never known anyone whose heart is open all the time. Even the Dalai Lama speaks of anger arising and of saying things which much to his chagrin can never be taken back. Forgiveness of oneself and others is a means of staying present rather than lost in remorse over past unskillful moments. Forgiveness works miracles. It takes courage to trust the process of surrendering our dissatisfactions into the possibilities of the heart, to be loving.
And just to add to the hundred ironies of being loving the more open the heart has become the more closed it can feel. Because the more it has opened the further it has to go to close. The most open-hearted at times complain that they have never felt so closed in their lives.
Just as all wish only to be happy so our deepest drive, our greatest satisfaction seems to be in the experience of this unobstructed openness. “Opening the heart” speaks of the prevalence of states of mind sometimes referred to as the “loving mind”, the “compassionate mind”, the “forgiving mind”. Just as terms which express the distractions of afflictive states or emotions, are referred to as the “judging mind” or the “fearing mind” or the “doubting mind”. Each describe the mind when a particular state, loving or unloving, predominates. Although in defining “opening the heart” as a state of mind it also can refer to breathing into energy center over the physical/spiritual heart. When congested with unattended sorrow there is an ache there. The breathing into the heart point can open into a peace and heavens beyond description.
Though the cultivation of love may begin with a state of mind in the course of time it becomes a state of being. When its hindrances have fallen away beneath all our holding to our discomforts and petty annoyances is the clarity of Being. Love is an aspect of clarity. Some may imagine that clarity means “a cloudless sky” but clarity is also the quality of clearly noticing the shapes of clouds, their ripples and ever –varying densities, their precise outlines even when passing before the sun, and remembering the light that illuminates them from behind. At night without the moon of consciousness reflecting the sun of awareness the clouds continue unobserved. Clarity is mindfulness (knowing what is happening while it’s happening, not living our life as an afterthought but in the living present) plus love. If one does not sustain the other there is a lack of the continuity we call clarity.
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We have so long mistaken ourselves for our fear. We may even feel that without our fear we would not know who we were. But love can give a meaning to our life that the state of meaninglessness can not imagine. Indeed we may find when we begin to live a life of love that we have not been living our own life but rather in the image and likeness of someone else’s, a parent, an admired hero, an unreachable religious figure. The image of someone we wished we were. And come to notice why “ wearing the clothes of another” our life fit so poorly.
We discover our true life a day at a time. The unfolding of our authentic life may take us through unexplored territory. What we settled for previously may be seen as always somewhat dissatisfactory as the satisfaction of we become increasingly loving toward ourselves and others. Not allowing the judging mind to rush into the wake of our progress and follow us like a lost dog. But noticing those tendencies too to be unloving toward ourselves. Sometimes the barking gets so loud we can hardly hear our selves think anything else. But instead of running fearfully away we mindfully turn toward these fears and speak softly to the dog, we make it feel safe not knowing quite what lays ahead but daily learning from an increasing warmth to trust the process. Its not, as the judging mind might growl, that we were somehow living a lie before but that now day by day options previously little considered are presenting themselves. In a sense we are always living something of a lie until there is nothing separating us from the clarity that is indistinguishable from love.
No one can dream our dreams or pray our prayers. But grace is our true nature. The experience of our true grace awaits our willingness to go deeper. And when we meet beneath who we think we are who we really are it thrills us. It liberates unimagined options.
As Rene Dumal pointed out in Mount Analogue those who stay in the base camp may believe they are safer at times but those who climb gain a perspective that stays with them for a lifetime. In fact once we have been able to see above the lowlands we are never quite lost again and our view of life is forever offered a more spacious option.
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What might it be like to inhabit a life of clarity and love?
To explore the terrain of love just below the stormy atmosphere that sometimes hides our true nature from view? To traverse a universe within greater, more spacious, than that in which the stars seem to float. To wander the pastures of compassion, to dive to the bottom of the bottomless sea of Being and the heart not skip a beat, and the breath breathe itself in absolute peace.
A woman who had been depressed for some time spoke of waking up one morning into “a very new day”. She said she awoke somehow knowing that “when the heart has broken it heals back bigger than before because it has to incorporate so much pain”. The subtle nausea that often precedes a breaking through arose as her attention dropped into the ache growing at the center of her chest. The pain was so great she could hardly breathe. It felt like her breath, maybe even her heart, might stop. It seemed a very long time between breaths. Gasping for air like someone just short of drowning she said, it felt like first her belly, and then her chest burst open as she took a breath directly into her heart. She felt a kind of mercy and willingness to live fill her heart. Her body heaved with a great sigh as she let that releasing breath go.From something deeper than knowing she remembered how breathing directly could revive the heart.
And she began to breathe in and out of the ache in the center of her chest sensing it was a vent directly into her heart. Breathing in love and breathing out all the unattended sorrow. Opening into a day in what became a remarkable life of love.