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.
Everything connects. We live in a worldwide web, truly, as every living
thing connects to every living thing.
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
Info/Order this book
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.
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