LOVE IS ......
(Read to students and have them write a list of words that describe “love”)
We are in love when we are most in touch with our souls and the deepest aspect of ourselves and each other. There is new consciousness of the preciousness of life, living, and loving.
Falling in love is an effort to retrieve paradise, that dimension of bliss where no one is blamed for anything, and anyone is fully appreciated for who they are. We briefly drop our tendency to judge and wholeheartedly believe in the other human being. This initial purity of love gives expression to our own soul.
It is through trials and difficulties in a relationship that we test and temper our love and potentially our souls can slowly unfold, growing, evolving toward what might be termed “perfected love” a permanent state of suspended judgment, at the summit of which we cherish our partner, who truly has become our beloved.
In loving another at a soul level gives the other the message that, “I love you because you are, simply because you exist.”
Ann Landers says, “Love is a friendship that has caught fire”. It is a quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good times and bad. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.
Love is content with the present; it hopes for the future and it doesn’t brood over the past. It’s the day-in-and-out chronicles of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories and common goals.
Love, which emanates from the soul level, is a love that germinates from working together, laughing together, growing together. It is profound respect for each other and those people the other cares about. It is proclaiming from the rooftops the victories, little and big, of one another. It is wiping away the tears when failure comes. It is protective and works out its problems in private. It is not only accepting the other for what he or she is; it is wanting that person to be what she or he is.
Such love, involves liking the feel of the other and the touch the other gives. It is the wonder of being alone together. It is looking across the room and thinking, of the person who is loved, “I’m glad I have you”. It is experiencing reverence for the gift of the relationship. It is returning to the “awake ness” of the spirit that existed in the relationship’s beginning.
And in a moment of discovery, when you experience or re-experience coming from your inner core a purity of love, the essence of which might be called spiritual of soul-love – a love that can only be found and explored in an awakened state – and, in such a moment of discovery, when you feel the depth, the delight, and ecstasy of that love, both you and your world will be transformed.
By JoAnn Larsen, D.S.W.