Connecting with Love

by Michael Sky

Why must we have a passion for reality? Why must we love and desire and be filled with metaphysical ardor? Because these passions set up in us the momentum for bringing new forms into being.

-- JEAN HOUSTON, THE POSSIBLE HUMAN

We live in the age of connection. Through the wizardry of personal computers and the Internet we can come into instant, even intimate contact with others throughout the world, as well as with a huge and growing body of information. Satellites send pictures of distant planets back to Earth through light years of empty space, while cellular communication devices now allow us to link up at all times, in most places. From an early age we take for granted the invisible connections used by such wireless gadgets as portable radios, telephones, and remote controls.

This technology-based experience of connectedness finds confirmation in many of the life sciences. Holistic medicine asserts that all parts of the body interconnect and function as a single system; a change in any one part affects all other parts. Quantum physicists have demonstrated that invisible links exist between any two particles of matter, however great their seeming separation. Similar insights echo in the disciplines of environmental science, systems theory, computer programming, and global economics.

Yet when it comes to a typical relationship between two or more people, or two or more groups of people, disconnection seems the prevailing truth. We live as if the body forms an impermeable boundary, dividing each of us from the rest of the world. We experience the self as inside the body and everything and everybody else as outside. At times, we open up and reach through the body-boundary to genuinely connect with some other. Mostly we remain separate and apart from others and, through various forms of intolerant thought, we justify, enforce, and even celebrate our disconnection.

Part of the problem stems from an inability to explain or even imagine a medium of connection between people. Our technological connectors all depend on one form or another of energy. Pull the plug, take out the battery, sever the wiring, or shut down the power plant and our computers, phones, satellites, televisions, radios, and remote control devices immediately stop working, their connections broken. Energy functions as the one essential force of technological connection.

Any such medium of connection between people, however, has proven difficult to scientifically verify. For many the very notion of invisible forces constitutes an insurmountable problem. Despite the model that our technologies provide -- vast quantities of data flashing instantly and invisibly around the globe -- the suggestion that similar connections exist between humans -- enabling similar transfers of information -- smacks of quackery and long-discredited vitalism.

For others, God presents just such an invisible, omniscient, and omnipresent (if ultimately unfathomable and scientifically unverifiable) force that connects all people. Yet God obviously means different things to different people and, for too many, God remains abstract, distant and apart from humanity. Defined and experienced as such, God not only fails to serve as a medium of connection, He, She, or It actually becomes a justification for decidedly disconnected behavior, as our long history of religion-based wars and intolerance demonstrates.

Still, many cultures have long had experience with an invisible force that connects humans. They have given it many names -- including num, chi, prana, mana, animal magnetism, life-energy, and the soul's substance -- and they all describe a similar vibratory force that moves through the body in regular currents and emanates beyond the body in radiant fields. Allowing this energy to flow more freely through the body brings great benefits to our physical health and general wellbeing.

Just as energy moves within us as the motive force and raw material for effective response to life's constant changing, so energy extends beyond the body in radiant fields (called auras) that connect us to the world, or to specific others, and that vary in size, intensity, and feeling according to our ever-changing perceptions and intentions. For a strong and healthy individual and for most babies, the energy fields extend vigorously from the body, filling entire rooms and beyond, while providing vital links to the living world. The energy "boils over" and flows out into meaningful connection with our world. The larger and more vital our energy fields, the more energy-connected we feel, and the more empowered we become to meet life's challenges.

These fields all grow out of and expand from in-flowing energy-in-motion. Thus, the more vigorously we flow within, the larger and more vital our radiant fields. Yet while we may experience our internal energy-in-motion as positive one moment and negative the next, we mostly feel our out flowing energy as a positive (though not always easy) force. As a rule, the expansion of our vital energy occurs as a positive, life-affirming, and uplifting event.

Exceptions to this rule do exist. Powerful and out of control desires, such as lust and greed, will send waves of clutching energy toward the object of desire. Extreme hatred and anger can explode outward in malevolent waves. Disciplined practitioners of the "black arts" can learn to extend their energy fields with purely evil intent. Certain political and religious leaders, such as Adolf Hitler or Jim Jones, have used their charisma -- their "personal magnetism" -- to manipulate large numbers of followers with energy-based mass influence.

Yet such negative expansions of life force tend toward self-depletion and self-destruction. Like plants growing from poisoned soil, vital energy radiating from a toxic, chronically suppressed being will poison all that it touches, beginning with the mind and body of the offending individual. Clearly, such people can inflict great suffering in the world with their psychoenergetic powers. But they practice a form of self-immolation as they must ever dwell within and eventually choke on their own toxic radiation.

While any negative expansions of vital energy invariably bring us to self-deplete and self-destruct, positive expansions of energy bring the very opposite results: they make us stronger, healthier, more energized and alive. Curiosity, for instance, sends energy tendrils out to ask and inquire of things, to touch and taste the world; the more curious we feel, the more we learn, and the greater our curiosity becomes. The protective concern that parents feel for their children extends like strong energy arms that -- despite the countless worries children inspire -- never grow tired of reaching to surround and protect. Deeply heartfelt dreams start waves of energy pulsing through manifest reality; the more committed our dream, the more our dream-energy expands, and the more likely our chances of successful creation.

Any positive expansion of vital energy has the potential to sustain itself indefinitely, while sustaining the self at the most basic levels. When we expand our energy with positive intent we step into an infinite river of living spirit. The more we give outward, the more energy arises within and the more empowered we become to go on giving. No experience demonstrates this better than love.

Love emanates from within as moving and outward expanding energy. When we love any other -- person, animal, plant, place, or thing -- we extend our self, as fields of living energy, to touch, to envelop, to enter into, to couple with the other. We feel the outward-connecting movement of our energy as love.

Love enhances flow, so when we love we reap precious blessings for ourselves. Our bodies function better on all levels. Our natural healing processes can accelerate, causing the spontaneous remission of the most difficult of diseases. Love-inspired minds become clearer, lighter, and positively directed. Because love enhances flow, when we love all of our emotions come easier and we use our energy-in-motion well.

Love begins in the center of the chest -- the psycho-emotional "heart" -- and radiates outward, sending beams of love-energy in all directions, as from an inner star. When we love we glow with a sparkling light, sometimes visible to others, and we move and act within this halo or aura of love-energy. For this reason we can accurately speak of being in love. Love permeates and surrounds us like a luminous womb or cocoon, protecting and nurturing and encouraging life.

For all of its benefits to the lover, love always seeks a beloved. Love must extend outward into meaningful connection with others, must reach to bring others "in love." Love must touch, must caress, must feed and nurture, must uplift and inspire. True love flows without discrimination or conditions. Love-energy radiates through all of the self-made boundaries -- the body's armor, the mind's prejudices -- and causes, however temporarily, the blessed experience of true oneness. For those who sustain such love the boundaries forever dissolve, allowing the continuing experience of love to grow ever stronger, to spread to others, to become the common currency of all relationships.

Love makes things whole. Love flows as masculine energy: extending vigorously, entering into others, filling and inspiring. Love flows as feminine energy: reaching to caress, surrounding and enfolding others, protecting and nurturing. Love takes our divided and disparate selves, victims of incessant human conflict, and makes us whole people, wholly alive.

Two or more people flowing in love experience the very best aspects of being human. Connected via love-energy they may move as one, may breathe as one, may dream and create as one. When lovers touch, their hands and fingers fill with the most healing energy in the universe. Lovers' thoughts and feelings flow easily from one to the other through love-energy threads, enabling compassion, empathy, and telepathy. And when true lovers make love, their union evokes the most exquisite of pleasures, effects the most profound of healings, and may even create a brand-new, love-inspired human being.

Love ever subsists as the primary matrix out of which all living relationship happens. Any relationship succeeds or fails to the degree that love flows or fails to flow. Without love energy -- extending and connecting -- we live as solitary individuals, profoundly alone in the universe and essentially unrelated to all people, including family and friends.

Yet such lack of love describes the daily lives of most men and women. "Why?" we must ask. Why fail to love when its absence hurts so much? Why not love when loving gives so much? How do we take something so fundamental to human existence and make it so difficult, so scary, so utterly impossible? Love is the most sublime of human experiences: think of young lovers dancing on air; think of any parent gazing upon a sleeping child; think of one's feelings upon the death of an old family pet. How does something so great get twisted into the all-too-common feelings of betrayal, intolerance, avoidance, hatred, and fear?

For all its power, love cannot flow through an individual riddled with and crippled by chronic suppression. Every act of emotional suppression contracts our inflowing emotional energy and thus diminishes our experience of energy-expanding love. The more we condition our children to emotional suppression, the less love-able they become. The more we, as adults, sustain our personal patterns of suppression, the less we can feel love, the less we can teach love to our children, and the less likely they will be to teach love to their children. And so it happens that most people come to experience love as rare and difficult, rather than omnipresent and easy.

It helps to think of your emotional energy as a flowing river, circulating through all parts of your body and then gushing out beyond the body -- as love -- and drenching others. Your whole emotional experience arises from the one flowing river of energy. Suppress any part of the river and all of your emotions -- inward flowing and outward expanding -- must suffer. Suppress any feelings of sadness and your capacity for love diminishes. Suppress any feelings of anger and your capacity for love diminishes. Suppress any emotion -- positive or negative, easy or difficult -- and your whole emotional experience, including and especially your capacity for love, diminishes.

Yet while damming up any part of your emotional river has a suppressing effect on the whole river, freeing up any part of the river has the opposite effect. Any time you move from suppression to flow it increases the circulation of emotional energy throughout all parts of yourself. Moreover, as philosophers and poets have been telling us for ages, outward expansion of your emotional energy -- as through the feelings of compassion, empathy, curiosity, and love -- causes the most direct and efficacious movement to system wide emotional flow.

Further good news: We can learn to purposefully and intentionally practice love. Love must become more than something that just happens to us, if we get lucky, or that we fall into and out of according to some unfathomable whimsy. We can and must learn to actively make love: to cause love-energy to stir and swell and flow out into meaningful connection with others; to gratefully open to and receive love whenever it comes our way; and to create with others a world in which such conscious loving is the sole abiding reality.

This article was excerpted from:

The Power of Emotion
by Michael Sky.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bear & Co. (Inner Tradiotions).http://www.innertraditions.com

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About the Author

MICHAEL SKY, breath work teacher, certified polarity therapist, and fire walking instructor, is also the author of Dancing with Fire, Sexual Peace, and Breathing: Expanding Your Power and Energy. Michael has been leading human potential seminars for twenty-five years, including more than 200 fire walks. He lives in the Pacific Northwest. Visit his website at http://www.thinkingpeace.com.