On the nature of loving
‘I’ve heard the word love many times before in my life, during this weekend I have experienced it.’
Isn't this the best review of a training on existential development ?
These were the words I used to close off one of the four weekends that are part of a training facilitated by @L'avant-garde / Stijn Smeets.
I have seldom experienced a setting and set in which participants (including our guide) were so authentically doing their introspective research and so open towards the vulnerabilities inevitably part of that process. And yet, I am sure, there is so much more to come, to be with.
What can happen when we allow each other and ourselves to let down our guards? So often in life, we find ourselves responding to this question with anxiety, withdrawal, unbelief.
I have been in that space of anxiety frequently and I am currently breaking down walls too, with the tender yet profound impact of awareness. Shared awareness, honesty.
I guess my last words during the first part of the training were no coincidence. Many people have told me that I am a very loving person. Perhaps I should say, a very giving person. As a child, I felt a deep kind of love that transcends boundaries and binds us loosely in this ongoing, autonomous exploration of differences that make up the ungraspable whole. While I have experienced this love as a generous and natural source of affection, for a long time, the potential stream of openness towards authenticity that love includes hardly flowed towards the relationship with myself. I have internalized passive aggression, internalized oppression, and of course that also tweaked my openness towards other hearts.
It turns out that I have not been able to see my own halo as I was too focused on shining ever brighter, at times blinding the person in front of me.
Now, I am learning that there is a difference between being emotionally invested in someone or something and love, loving as a deeply existential act, a way of being in this world, in this body, as an intimate connection. Lovingness rather than attachment. I already knew this, it remained at the core, it remained my core, literally and figuratively. Nonetheless, I did not learn how to communicate my inner truth in a direct and honest manner in those contexts that are also most near and dear to me.
“What cannot be communicated to the mother cannot be communicated to the self.”
John Bowlby
Love thrives in freedom. You breathe in and you breathe out, as Thich Nhat Hanh would emphasize. Love is a way of being that always includes becoming, it's streaming rather than characterized by one specific relational pattern. Love is an ongoing, regenerative meditation on what it means to be alive. Love teaches me, through very particular moments, that the meaning of life can be
experienced in the creation of love. Quirky laughter is the creation of love.
This period, I am learning to sit with vulnerability and let its vitality teach me the art of interliving.
Inner work within a firm social body, how grateful I am for the opportunity to get to know myself as a continuous stream of intensities and in that instance, to be able to truly be there for another, different person. To also be there for how my love will extend itself, to be present with those yet unknowable shapes and spaces, to reconnect with and finetune the art of giving. To learn how to give what I have, love, also to those not (yet) near to me.
As I am writing this, Max Richter’s Sunlight accompanies the contemplation. Tender musical strokes for my frightened heart, a smothering core slowly taken over by the silence in between the accords.
Love, it’s hitting me ‘like a ray of sun, burnin’ through my darkest night.’
[improvising with a joyous, playful smile…] …‘Remembering who I am, integratin’ the shadows… rendered visible by gifted light.’
Or, in other words, ‘What you seek, is seeking you’.