The Yoga of Love
Falling in love or experiencing limerence while you’re on yoga is a bizarre experience.
I use the turn of phrase “on yoga” because when one has a compulsory daily practice of yoga and meditation, something happens to one’s brain and a person’s ability to witness the things one’s brain is doing.
I’ve become accustomed to my mind witnessing itself doing the things I always do. So, immediately behind most thoughts and emotions are these thoughts:
“Hey look what you did there! Look what’s happening! Huh! Interesting! Watch how that thought or emotion thing tries to turn to pattern! Watch how that internal thing dances a weird dance with all the other internal things! Oh, now it’s all stirred up and angsty! Weird.”
This doesn’t happen every time. I’m not enlightened. But it happens a lot, thank goodness. There’s an infinitesimal moment between my experiencing an emotional stimulus and my internal reaction to it. And I can witness it happening.
When human beings “fall in love”, we experience a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that initiate the bonding process. Entire libraries and college degrees have been devoted to the study of love, so I’ll just say if you want to read more in this vein, check out A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis.
The logical aspects of my mind really enjoy understanding the quantifiable, scientific aspects of love, because the mysterious and mystical aspects of love are unsettling, uncontrollable, and frankly have been the continued catalyst for my own spiritual work.
Here’s what happened when I flipped the script on what I normally do when (romantic) love comes to visit me. In the past, I’ve responded like one normally does: with abandon, flying toward it madly with little care for circumstances or really anything else OR running far, far, away screaming into the night, or some tug-of-war combination of the two that eventually culminates in relationship.
Recently, I’ve devoted (and continue to devote) the energy of those effusive, obsessive, wild emotional sensations to digging more deeply into my own personal practice. I turned (and continue to turn) the emotional experience of limerence into a practice of yoga.
And I recently received a profound gift from investing in that practice, which I’ll share with you here:
When we talk about the practice of yoga or any meditative practice, we often talk about the experience of Oneness, or the realization that you as a singular entity do not actually exist, as such.
What you call you is really only a collection of illusions that you hold with your ego. I am this, I am that.
When I’m speaking from my ego, I use all my designators and labels: I’m a yoga therapist, a mindfulness coach, a writer, a transmasculine person, a non-binary person, I’m in my thirties, I’m Texan, et. al.
But at the core of me, I’m not actually any of those things. I’m just a human being. And even deeper and more simplistic than that, I’m just a spark of life in a meat suit. And this spark of life is like a cell, one cell that makes up the whole tissue of this species, and the whole organ of this world, and the whole animal of this universe.
So then when we as little cells experience the thing we call “love”, it’s really just recognition. I love this idea, because we can equate the emotional experience of love as looking in the mirror, because that really is what it is. We are seeing another person through the eyes of intelligent design, or the divine.
When we connect with someone else in a profound way and we feel that affinity, that attraction, and eventually that attachment, we are recognizing our own innate beauty in the intelligent design of someone else.
Here’s where it gets interesting: when we feel love, we start to dress it up in all kinds of filters and lenses. We dress it up in the past, trying to contextualize this new relationship with the old ones (what’s the story, how have I evolved in my desires, how is this person different from all my exes, who do they remind me of?).
And we filter it into the future (what will happen, are they my future life partner, what role will they play, what adventures will we share together, what will we fight about?).
But both of those practices are somewhat irrelevant, because you’ve never been with this person before, so there actually is no story there, unless you create one.
And the possibilities for the future are endless and unquantifiable, unless you limit them with your hopes, fears, judgments about the other person, and eventually the choices you make.
That leaves us standing right here, in the present. And when we stand in the present with the person we love, we’re opening ourselves up to continually unfold into a deeper truth: the person you love is only a messenger.
We aren’t meant to, but we often confuse the beautiful messenger with the message itself: that you (we) are inherently lovable and worthy of acceptance, attention, appreciation, affection, and allowing.
Always. Always.
For every breath you take, from the moment that you are born, until the moment you die, and beyond.
It’s what you deserve, and it’s what you have always deserved.
We confuse the two (messenger and message) all the time, seeking ways to be loved that we do not give ourselves.
And maybe there is a gray area.
Maybe by loving us in in our less endearing moments, our messiness, our ugliness, our raw humanness, our beloved lights the pathway for us to love ourselves even more fully.
They can illuminate the shadows we’ve so long shuffled into a corner of our psyches, gathering cobwebs, but still quietly taking up space.
Sometimes the illumination of being seen as our human, fallible selves burns. It can be shocking. It can push us and piss us off. It’s humbling, especially if we ever had delusions about “arriving” somewhere in our personal growth.
Sometimes the discoveries which can only be made in the friction of two can invite you to laugh at yourself, your grand delusions, and your ego.
Sometimes that laughter can echo and crack the very foundations of your sense of self and reveal a rich, pliable earth underneath, rife with tree roots and earthworms and seeds beginning to sprout and the soft decay of leaves and grass and dead bugs.
And from that aching split into the fallible and fecund truth of being alive and human, we learn to love ourselves and grow and evolve like never before.
So, moving forward, I write this as a reminder to myself as much as to you all: stay present. That’s where the love always is.
