Expanding intensity, love lessons
“What you call the external world, is as much you as your own body.”
Alan Watts
How can intensity of experience truly expand us?
As I walk around in the emotional landscape of my social life, I get the impression there is quite some deeply repressed love. I am getting more aware about this, or I am framing it in ‘love terms,’ because I am going through a personal revelation of nearby – and, in its expansion, transpersonal - love and this process is making me more attuned to how encompassing, enlivening and threatening love can feel at the same time. This whole process also makes me more aware of who I am, who I am becoming. It is as if the dominance of safety needs over my perception slowly dims and growth needs are fulfilled self-evidently, creating moment to moment transcendent experiences sometimes accompanied by shortlived peaks of doubt and disorientation.
In relating, I have the tendency to see the others potential. I see, imagine, and sense what one can become – and at the same time already is. I imagine a developmental potential, sense what one can become if all conditions were optimal, ‘more’ optimal. One could also call this seeing the other through the lens of loving kindness, although I am inclined to address a critical voice here. Seeing this potential can also come along with a demand for change which ironically can create the impression that there is something wrong with the other in the here and now. Learning how to sit and flow with the intensity of seeing this potential is a life’s practice. In a way, ‘loving kindness’ is the potential of my way of looking at, even embodying, another person. In a certain sense, just this way of being with another person may expand their sense of self. That is the power of love, I guess.
Deeply repressed love can awaken through the enlivening force of shared and lived through sadness. It can awaken through the enduring encounter with caretaking others. It can ripen through the subtle yet far-reaching touch of a life’s friend or the exuberant, expressive energy of spontaneous play. It can sometimes awaken forcefully through an enlightening emotional meeting, shaking the foundations of the so-called self, giving back full power to what we call intuition.
I find myself wondering how to formulate the process of positive disintegration in terms of this potential love-boosted expansion. How can one fully live, embody, the creative force of life, including the conscious recognition of what it is potentially destructive within this power? How can one live love in a way that invites both the self and the other to express their own way of being human, as Scott Peck might have said.
This understanding of love is deeply connected to understanding our experience and expression of our intensities and complexities. Fully abiding in the intensity of one’s own experience and psychological make up has the potential to mirror your connection with everything else (inside and outside of yourself), even when it’s embodied by one particular ‘Other’. You may be even more intense than you have imagined once you dare to let go of the conviction that this intensity is all about you. The giftedness is in the exchange.
I am very fond of hands. Not only their aesthetic beauty captures my love, they also represent a bundle of very sensitive nerves and are one of our bodies finest visual and motoric gateways to being different together. I even dare to say, and like to remember, I fell inlove with my life partners hands ! Its in the meeting of the hands that my intensity is unmistakenbly a shared, electrified experience. A transindividual body emerges out of an emotional depth I only, but strongly, intuited was there.