The *feeling* of love

[spinderella]

I was doing one of Leo's older meditations on self-love, and he asks us to bring to mind a memory of the feeling of love.  During the meditation we go more deeply into the actual experience of the feeling of love. 

For some reason, I seem to have a very difficult time actually feeling love.  I focus on the heart, I try to allow myself to feel, but I just feel...bored.  Flat.  Not exactly "numb", but I don't feel anything in particular.  This isn't a new experience, and I'm also not new to meditating.  I didn't have a particularly traumatic childhood or anything, but I can't seem to muster up the actual vibrational feeling of love.  It's almost as if I am blocked in some way.  

In general, I think I feel quite blocked emotionally.  I've used psychedelics and actually have a very hard time, I feel like I have a lot of resistance that I can't let go of, and I think it's blocking my experiences both with psychedelics and in real life.  I don't seem to know how to let this resistance go, and flow with an experience. 

Any advice?

[peanutspathtotruth]

It was the same for me despite a lot of consciousness work and breakthroughs. I think it's not that unusual. At some point it just happened, as if an energetic blockage just burst through. It was more than clear what happened on a feeling level. Trust the process and keep going. As a practical advice, this is one of the best sessions for nourishing that connection to the heart and to feel it fill with love. Give it a try if you feel like it  

 

[Leo Gura]

@spinderella What is it you love?

[WelcometoReality]

37 minutes ago, spinderella said:

I feel like I have a lot of resistance that I can't let go of, and I think it's blocking my experiences both with psychedelics and in real life.  I don't seem to know how to let this resistance go, and flow with an experience. 

Any advice?

What is in the resistance? What feelings come up?

[Nahm]

@spinderella

What is focused upon, unconditional love be’s. 

Focused upon: “Boredom”.

Unconditonal love: No problem, you got it. Love ya unconditionally. 

[Matt23]

• Maybe try the Brahma Viharas; similar to metta meditation.  

Basically:

• Pick one of the 4 brahma viharas to focus on (it's recommended to do them in the order provided).
  1. Loving-Friendliness
  2. Compassion
  3. Joyous appreciation
  4. Equanimity
• Then contemplate the dangers of it's opposite
  1. Loving-friendliness = hate
  2. Compassion = cruelty
  3. Joyous appreciation = jealousy and envy
  4. equanimity = grasping, greed, not letting go, and hate
• Then recite each phrase in order to try to create the related feeling.  Start with directing it towards yourself first (except equanimity; start with a close loved one for this one), then once you've mastered yourself, move to a close loved one, then a neutral person, then to an enemy, then to everyone in existence, etc.. 
  1. Loving-friendliness 
     • "May ___ be happy.  May ___ be peaceful.  May __ be safe.  May __ live with ease."
  2. Compassion
     • May ___ be free of suffering.  May their suffering finally cease
  3. Joyous appreciation.
     • "May the happiness and good fortune of ___ always increase.
  4. Equanimity
     • "___ is/are the true heirs of their karma.  ___'s happiness depends upon their actions and not upon my wishes for them."
• Once you feel something, stop repeating the phrase and, instead, focus on the feeling and try to cultivate it, enlarge it, and spread it through your body.  

I got these instructions from Daniel Ingram's free online book here: https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-vi-my-spiritual-quest/68-magick-and-the-brahma-viharas/the-brahma-viharas/.  He goes into more depth about them and certain trap as well in relation to them.  

 

Maybe also thinking of times when you've felt love and trying to reconnect with that memory and feeling.  Then just focusing on that feeling and trying to strengthen or enlarge it.

[kinesin]

@spinderella  It may be the case that you just don't know what you're supposed to be looking for.  For me, the physical feeling of love is not too different from the sensation of being about to cry.  There's a welling, opening sensation in my upper chest/lower throat and a sense of some kind of energy being transmitted.

[mandyjw]

If you're sort of thinking of love as this particular sorta thing, like love for or from a person, think more broadly. Like pumpkin spice coffee in September, sunsets, and the way puppy feet smell. Just notice when those sort of things come up in life, (whatever they are for you) and notice when you effortlessly feel love without trying. 

Edited July 5, 2021 by mandyjw

[spinderella]

@Leo Gura I wish I knew.  I intellectually feel like I have love for my parents and my cat and my friends, but, I don't have a feeling of secure love in my heart when I think about those things.  I feel more of a sense of sorrow - which I know sounds kind of sad, but it feels as if I don't trust the feeling of love.  It's as if I don't want to get to close to it, because I don't trust that it will stay.  But at the same time, I know intellectually that nothing is permanent. 

From another perspective, I can see that all of this is just thoughts and beliefs that my mind has made up.  I can choose to continue believing that story, or to believe whatever other story I want to believe. 

But still, I just feel flat.  

Sometimes I think I love the feeling of freedom, but I also think that feels more like hope than actual love.  

But like when you say to bring to mind something that you love and to feel that feeling in my heart....I feel nothing.  I like lots of things, like nature and butterflies and birds and rainfall and lakes.  But do I love them?  No.  I feel more sorrow than love.  

[spinderella]

@Matt23 Thank you, I do like these meditations.  I have found that "praying" or meditating on someone elses wellbeing to be therapeutic, and I can try that.  

[RickyFitts]

On 7/5/2021 at 10:02 PM, spinderella said:

In general, I think I feel quite blocked emotionally.  I've used psychedelics and actually have a very hard time, I feel like I have a lot of resistance that I can't let go of, and I think it's blocking my experiences both with psychedelics and in real life.  I don't seem to know how to let this resistance go, and flow with an experience. 

Any advice?

I can relate to this a lot, emotional upheaval in my personal life a few years back really helped me to see to what extent I was in resistance, and coming to terms with it wasn't easy.

The thing that really helped me was just body-awareness and breathing mindfully, becoming very intimate with my visceral, felt experience. The first thing I'd notice, more often than not, was a physical holding, like I was unconsciously trying to keep some feeling at bay, and I'd have to allow that contraction to fall away. We humans are often so conditioned to repress certain emotions that we end up doing it unconsciously, and so the first step to releasing those repressed emotions is to become aware of the inner resistance we've built up against them - and it seems you are aware of it (you seem very self-aware in general), which is good. I think as much as anything you just need a willingness to sit with yourself and to allow the arising of emotions that can feel uncomfortable or painful, keep breathing through those emotions - scream if you need to, or have a good cry if that's what comes up.

As a very wise person once said to me, 'The only way out is through'.

[RendHeaven]

2 hours ago, spinderella said:

I wish I knew.  I intellectually feel like I have love for my parents and my cat and my friends, but, I don't have a feeling of secure love in my heart when I think about those things.  I feel more of a sense of sorrow - which I know sounds kind of sad, but it feels as if I don't trust the feeling of love.

I love that.

2 hours ago, spinderella said:

It's as if I don't want to get to close to it, because I don't trust that it will stay.  But at the same time, I know intellectually that nothing is permanent.

Ground your trust in impermanence. Then it becomes easy to love.

 

[Leo Gura]

7 hours ago, spinderella said:

@Leo Gura I wish I knew.  I intellectually feel like I have love for my parents and my cat and my friends, but, I don't have a feeling of secure love in my heart when I think about those things.  I feel more of a sense of sorrow - which I know sounds kind of sad, but it feels as if I don't trust the feeling of love.  It's as if I don't want to get to close to it, because I don't trust that it will stay.  But at the same time, I know intellectually that nothing is permanent. 

From another perspective, I can see that all of this is just thoughts and beliefs that my mind has made up.  I can choose to continue believing that story, or to believe whatever other story I want to believe. 

But still, I just feel flat.  

Sometimes I think I love the feeling of freedom, but I also think that feels more like hope than actual love.  

But like when you say to bring to mind something that you love and to feel that feeling in my heart....I feel nothing.  I like lots of things, like nature and butterflies and birds and rainfall and lakes.  But do I love them?  No.  I feel more sorrow than love.  

Yeah, well... sounds like you're very disconnected from Love.

I suggest you start to correct this by first realizing your love for reality itself. And then expand from there.

If you can't find love for reality itself, you're sorta fucked. You are missing something fundamental: which is a consciousness of existence itself.

[mandyjw]

What's wrong with sorrow and flatness? There's plenty of sorrow and flatness is the best most transcendent, inspirational novels ever written. From Moby Dick to Harry Potter. You aren't a character in this story, you're the author. Nothing more flat than that. No greater love than that. 

[molosku]

49 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Yeah, well... sounds like you're very disconnected from Love.

I suggest you start to correct this by first realizing your love for reality itself. And then expand from there.

If you can't find love for reality itself, you're sorta fucked. You are missing something fundamental: which is a consciousness of existence itself.

lol NO! She is not "sorta fucked", just cornered in by seemingly having not too many avenues for progress with the problem. There is so much stuff that is more powerful than trying to "just realize" love is there.

How about some basic (psycho)theraphy? Very obvious thing to try, in combination with various forms of healig work one can google. Then expand from THERE.

 

She almost answered her own question: the emotional, meaning non-existential, level of love is blocked, so it calls for de-blocking. How that will play out should be tailored to the needs of the person who is blocked.

This does not mean that spiritual practice should be put on hold, rather reinforce it with personal, emotional work.

This community is sometimes overly biased on solving everything with non-duality

Edited July 7, 2021 by molosku

[Leo Gura]

Sit in silence and look at reality until you realize that you love it.

[vladorion]

On 7/6/2021 at 0:02 AM, spinderella said:

I was doing one of Leo's older meditations on self-love, and he asks us to bring to mind a memory of the feeling of love.  During the meditation we go more deeply into the actual experience of the feeling of love. 

For some reason, I seem to have a very difficult time actually feeling love.  I focus on the heart, I try to allow myself to feel, but I just feel...bored.  Flat.  Not exactly "numb", but I don't feel anything in particular.  This isn't a new experience, and I'm also not new to meditating.  I didn't have a particularly traumatic childhood or anything, but I can't seem to muster up the actual vibrational feeling of love.  It's almost as if I am blocked in some way.  

In general, I think I feel quite blocked emotionally.  I've used psychedelics and actually have a very hard time, I feel like I have a lot of resistance that I can't let go of, and I think it's blocking my experiences both with psychedelics and in real life.  I don't seem to know how to let this resistance go, and flow with an experience. 

Any advice?

You can investigate, what it is that you love in your mind that your attention is always going there, no matter how hard you might try to keep it somewhere else.

There is something there that you love very much, you just need to become aware of what it is and that will make your love conscious.

Edited July 7, 2021 by vladorion

[Nahm]

9 hours ago, spinderella said:

I intellectually feel

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi

The ‘barrier’ there is the common egoic materialist paradigm. Bamboozlement via mugglry. The belief there is a you which “wakes up in the morning” in a “physical reality” & therefore could or might one day “awaken”. 

Intellect is an appearance, just like waking up in the morning is an appearance. Intellect hijacks feeling by claiming it as a possession… “I….feel”. The intellect can not ‘find’ reality while reality is appearing as “an intellect”, which does not belong to reality or to anyone or anything, because ‘it’ is already an appearance of reality. Reality can never be what reality is thought to be, because reality is that which is appearing as “the thoughts”. (Subject object thoughts) 

When you love your parents, your cat, your friends, security, nature, butterflies, birds, rainfall and lakes… notice… experience is changing… but is there parent-love, cat-love, friends-love, security-love, nature-love, butterfly-love, bird-love, rainfall-love, lake-love? That’s hilarious. Are you coming & going? Or is the the thought, “I” coming & going, appearing & disappearing? How can ‘an intellect’ ever find the reality it is already made of?

The I which loves freedom (“freedom-love”) is the seeming bondage of freedom. Reality is, as it appears. Already free. The appearance is the very evidence of the freedom of reality. Pure potentiality, pure spontaneity. What else could? The “I”, the “intellect”, is a reoccurring thought, (one thought) and not a thing in time (“time” is a thought). Hope for freedom is the veil of freedom. (self referential thoughts). 

 

[molosku]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Sit in silence and look at reality until you realize that you love it.

and if that does not work? yeah

[Cepzeu]

Love is seeing a child give another crying child a hug

Love is seeing your sister become a mother

Love is seeing your parents decline cognitively over the years

Love is holding your girlfriend as she experiences a panic attack, feeling her lose herself as she trembles in your arms

Love is seeing your mother cry when she stands at the grave of her father, who she didn't get to say goodbye to

Love is looking into your father's eyes and seeing his realisation that he wasn't there in your time of need

Love is not being able to get out of bed because you're lost and don't know your purpose in life

Love is seeing a resident at a retirement home, surrounded by family, and then seeing another, all by themselves in the next room, knowing that no one visits them.

Love is seeing your grandma forget who you are because of dementia

Love is being lost by yourself

Love is seeing your friend, a once-active young man, now wheelchair bound cradling a beer in his hand, watching his friends play the sport he loved so much.

Love is when you tell your girlfriend you want to break up, even though you know it will crush her

Love is hearing a mother recount the day she held her baby for the first time and saw it smile

Love is hearing a mother recount holding her stillborn baby and caress her, as though sheltering her from the world.

 

Love is waking up in the morning and hearing the birds chirp

Love is feeling the first sip of coffee in the morning

Love is waking up before your partner, and giving them a kiss as they sleep

Love is listening to someone who is venting, and not offering advice back

Love is the regret you feel after fighting with a loved one

Love is when your crush doesn't know you exist

Love is when you tell your parents how you truly feel

Love is when your dog rushes to the door as you enter, eager to see you

Love is when you see yourself in others

Love is when you know what it's like to be in another's shoes

Love is when you realise you are God

Love is when you realise why everything is so - because LOVE

LOVE IS

LOVE IS ALL OF IT

Love is...