Meditation Makes Love
Really, really meditation makes love. We all want to know how to make love better and it’s true, if you learn to love yourself the rest will fall into place. But that’s easy to write about and hard to live.
What is your definition of love?
I see love as the energy that heals. It’s what connects in a moment to let life force flow. The Beatles got it right when they sang...all you need is love, love, love is all you need. But the challenge is living it...making space for it, recognizing it, discovering opportunities for it, allowing it. The big, big, biggest challenge is choosing love in the face of pain.
We are hardwired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. So it’s natural to want to avoid anything we don’t like or that reminds us of pain. But pleasure and love are not synonymous and if we exclusively seek pleasure to avoid pain, problems arise. From my experience love is your greatest transformational power. Pain is like the muck surrounding the proverbial lotus. Like thick rich dark soil pain helps us grow. Like sunlight and rain love helps us bloom. The challenge is to relate deeply to the muck while not getting stuck in it.
From a neuro-biological perspective it is near impossible to choose love over pain. Not bragging here, but one thing I know well is pain and it’s closest relative suffering (but those are other blogs). Pain patterns are deeply etched neuro-biological grooves formed into default habits and reactions. Every time a pain pattern repeats, microscopic grooves become deeper and more automatic. Since mind-body-soul are all interconnected - grooves on one level relate to grooves on all levels. The deeper the grooves (or the more familiar the pattern), the harder it is to change. Pain exists to protect and preserve. Pain patterns, like all stories, run on neurological efficiency. Like a super highway.
Meditation takes you off the superhighway and opens up a vast field of new possibilities. It does this through neuro-plasticity. It does it every time you meditate and it adds up over time.
If you didn’t have to travel one way down a superhighway where would you go?
Meditation is a great way to get off the superhighway. Just getting off the highway is a small act of self love, but if you can get off the superhighway and be in a beautiful field of wildflowers, you will surround yourself in love.
No hippie hoopla here. Love arrives when there is a moment of presence (layers here too) and meditation creates lots of moments of presence. The deepest presence is a stillness beneath the mind’s ceaseless chatter. In that serene space there is a new opening … an opportunity to simply be (and to know that is enough) or to choose new directions.
Maybe more than anything the presence of meditation, like making love, feels great! Since we are hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain, maybe consider making a little self love in your life with meditation. You will thank yourself and the world will thank you too.
