{"id":473,"date":"2012-03-21T07:20:47","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T15:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/?p=473"},"modified":"2012-03-21T07:20:47","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T15:20:47","slug":"what-is-love-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/what-is-love-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Love?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside.” – Margaret Walker<\/em><\/p>\n

My take on love comes from watching what is actually happening inside the body when we are experiencing the sensation known as love.\u00a0 This is something that anyone can observe or directly experience if they just take the time to watch.\u00a0 I come at this topic first from a detached, precise perspective, and second from an attached perspective as a human who wants to expand love.\u00a0 To embrace the whole reality of love one embraces both the detached and attached perspective, giving both their due.<\/p>\n

Love is a feeling\u00a0we have inside of our body and is a reaction to thoughts.<\/p>\n

Generally, we learn how to love from our parents or whoever nurtures or takes care of us when we are infants.\u00a0 As this person comforts us, say by feeding us relieving our discomfort of hunger, we learn to associate the image or thought of this person with that comforting, and we develop a habit of relaxing around the thoughts of this person.\u00a0 Relaxing is not just a physical thing, or just something we do with the muscles of the body, it is also something that we do with the nerves.<\/p>\n

Therefore, love is a two-part process; the first is the thoughts and the second is the reaction of relaxing the nerves and the muscles around that thought.<\/p>\n

In the beginning, our thoughts are associated with some material things like the person who nurtures or takes care of us, as we mature, our thoughts can be associated with anything, even a concept. As children our experience of love comes from thoughts of people or things that produce the good feelings<\/p>\n

This practice or habit of relaxing is healthy in that it removes the \u2018dis-ease\u2019 we may be experiencing when we hold onto some thought or habitual tension in our body.\u00a0 This is why spiritual teachings encourage us to love this or that so that we can develop a habit or skill of relaxing around our thoughts of various things that traditionally would have produces tension or \u2018dis-ease\u2019 within us.<\/p>\n

We call these traditions \u2018spiritual\u2019 because they address what we are inspired or motivated to do; the word \u2018spirit\u2019 has the same root as the word \u2018inspire\u2019.\u00a0 We are naturally motivated to seek the release of tension the same way that water is naturally motivated to flow downhill.<\/p>\n

Therefore, when any tradition encourages us to practice love or any positive emotion, they are encouraging us to practice relaxing around our thoughts.<\/p>\n

Some thoughts we have we have developed a habit of contracting around, and we call this fear.\u00a0 A spiritual tradition might say that \u201clove drives out fear,\u201d for if we practice love (relaxing\/expanding) around a fear producing thought we will eventually re-train ourselves to react by relaxing to that thought and thus relieve the tension, dis-ease or negativity we had experienced.<\/p>\n

Learning to love is like learning to control our bowels and bladder; it takes practice at first but later becomes natural.<\/p>\n

As I said above, the first part of learning to love is the thought, which is why there is no much emphasis on thinking about this process.\u00a0 This can come in the form of a spiritual or religious tradition, which tries to get us to think in ways that allow us to relax around thoughts that traditionally produce contraction or fear.\u00a0 Such a way of thinking might be to \u201clove your enemies\u201d since the idea of an enemy is of one who seeks to do us harm, we would naturally develop a habit of contraction or fear associated with \u2018enemy.\u2019\u00a0 Since mostly the reality is we are just thinking<\/em> about our enemies and not actually being injured by them, then we are being taught to love the thought<\/em> of our enemies or to relax around the thought of those who have or might hurt us.<\/p>\n

Once we get that love is healthy and what we want to experience it more, then we recognize that ANY thought we have we want to develop a habit of relaxing around.\u00a0 We then will no longer need to discern between this or that type of thought, we just relax around all thoughts.\u00a0 Hence, we will no longer need the philosophies or theologies and we can go back to being innocent \u201clike the children to enter the kingdom of heaven.\u201d\u00a0 This enables what we call \u201cunconditional love\u201d, for we choose to love without conditions or criteria since we recognize that love is what we want to experience.<\/p>\n

This is the objected behind the teachings to \u201clove God,\u201d where God is a concept that implies the creator of all that is.\u00a0 We are practicing to love ALL that is, since it was created by this creator. \u00a0At an even higher level, we are encouraged to love the process<\/em> of love, where \u201cGod is love\u201d and we are taught to love God\/love.\u00a0 This moves us away from any mental activity that may be a limitation to our practice of relaxing and we practice loving the process itself.<\/p>\n

Much of the \u2018how to love\u2019 teachings are about the science AND art of love.\u00a0 The science deals with the understanding of how the human instrument works; how to relax both the nerves and muscles of the body.\u00a0 The art deals with developing the sensitivity and the skill or habit of actually operating the human instrument.<\/p>\n

I am currently writing a book that will detail my observation on both the science and the art of loving, particularly loving ourselves. \u00a0To keep informed on this book please subscribe to this blog.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside.” – Margaret Walker My take on love comes from watching what is actually happening inside the body when we are experiencing the sensation known as love.\u00a0 This is something that anyone can observe or directly experience if they just take the time to watch.\u00a0 I come […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,45],"tags":[97],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-healthemotional","category-lovefear","tag-love-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":477,"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions\/477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jimfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}