Invest… and/or expand
“When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called "cathexis". I his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us "confuse cathecting with loving." We all know how often individuals of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting of neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.”
Bell Hooks
So, what is love anyway? We may use the word gregariously, but do we really know what we mean by it?
In my own context and process, I have been challenged often and recently also to understand this more deeply.
In the past, what I called love included a diversity of emotional experiences ranging from a disorienting loss of self (oftentimes with the lack of an existential expansion) or an adoration for the color ochre, the joyful hobby of dancing for hours on end, and the sound of the human voice sharing intimate experiences.
Clearly, I can get deeply emotionally invested in something or someone, but is that the same thing as loving?
It has been quite a path.
“Oh my, a dream has turned into a nightmare!” I yelled thirteen years ago in response to my father’s care when, after a very intense period of fusion, my partner and I went through our first cycle of disintegration. My own words echoed in the chambers of my compartmentalized mind, and I immediately reflected that I was clearly investing my projections in my partner – an awareness that did not immediately translated into the ability to transcend this all too human tendency in connection with my partner.
On a similar note, I had a tough time understanding how my partner could not be as enthusiastic and passionate about the things that I ‘loved’ such as personal development, a fascination for offbeat personalities or expressive soul singers. I also felt confused, sometimes irritated, and angry, when his way of working through conflicts was so very different from mine, or when he did not want to take on all the unsolicited advice and help I gave him .
Of course, relationships are creatively messy and my partner and I both experienced increasing moments and processes of expanding love and recurring moments of confronting, contracting projections.
What characterizes these processes of love, of loving?
What I have learned along the way, is that love in its different manifestations has a lot to do with acceptance. Deep acceptance of ‘what is,’ of who and ‘how’ the other is. This is an active acceptance, it sounds easier than (I find) it is in practice, because it ‘demands’ we work through whatever comes up for us emotionally and don’t project that upon our significant others. Hello top level deconditioning!
As I fall into love, I try to 'rise through the process' and to see the workings of emotional investment play out in my mind and body. I contemplate the potential expansion that love can be, that I can embody. I contemplate it through breathing, analyzing my thought and dream processes, embodying the intensity through dance, singing and writing, and by slowing down.
Slowing down is not easy when the body is charged. Slowing down is not easy for a mind that can run fast. Slowing down is challenging for a little girl trying to survive the emotional consequences of a lack of expanding love. But slowing down is the best recipe for a human being experimenting with love. At least, so it appears to be for me, and for the fluid entity called a relationship growing out of the reciprocal process of nurturing the spiritual growth of all involved. This way, the relationship also becomes an intense meditation on love and our growing awareness turns into the arena in which we contemplate the intense waves stirred up in the all-encompassing ocean of love we share beyond the borders of one particular relationship.