Falling In Love

 

 

Falling in love with someone who falls in love back brings us into a feeling of deep belonging.  From this belovedness, we can find a well-spring into creativity, expansion, and courage to do things we did not think we were capable. Because of its power, this kind of love can be transformative in unexpected and unanticipated ways.  In this kind of love, I have found the courage to move across the country, begin a new and unexpected course of study, run a marathon, have a child.   This kind of love is a potent medicine for making change and taking risk and as John O’Donahue has written it dissolves all of our awkwardness.  It is an experience of homecoming where the parts of ourselves we have rejected find a loving home with the love from the other. 

 

But this kind of love does not last.  While a kind of love can remain, the in-loveness fire inevitably fades as we become real people to our lovers and they to us not the projections which set the fire going in the first place.  We come down from the heavens, the rhapsody changing into a mellower tune, our God or Goddess turned human again. Our awkwardness and shame returns along with a loss of belonging and courage. 

 

Still, the experience of falling in love can leave a trace of what is possible, a life with less shame and awkwardness, more courage and creativity.  Because at its root, the feeling of falling in love comes from within us. It may seem as if the other bestows this upon us.  We feel beautiful in their presence because they see our beauty.  But, our beauty does not fade when we are no longer in the relationship.  The feeling of beauty, knowing our belovedness, is our birthright. We can cultivate and nourish this belovedness through spiritual practice, the intimate and tender relationship with our innermost self. 

 

Amazingly, this inner sourced belovedness (locally sourced!) has the same potency as falling in love with another.  When we nourish an openness and compassion with our innerself, we are gifted with same possibility of belonging, freedom, and courage.  And this is the love that makes other loving possible.  Because we are fed from an inner well-spring, we can be in relationship with others with less grasping and projecting and more giving and receiving.