I have traveled extensively since our last talk and gathered many moments of insight into the “mechanisms” (not sure how to define what I see here), which underlie our most intimate relationships and our unfolding experiences with others.
I have pondered this aspect of human interaction for a very long time, as I was privy very early on to division and secrets and the annihilation of my family from the storybook picture of love, harmony and trust.
I had to learn to trust in a different way than my mother, my parents, my family, and my society back in the days of my childhood.
I did my best to repattern my life and bring a “new” and real and deep love to the family that I created, but it did not work, did not meet my heart’s yearning for the peace that is possible when there is thorough and lasting trust and a knowing that there is no ripple of distrust.
I have been asking the question from my roving and traversing of how we can change the underlying and shifting sands that feel so insecure and unable to hold us in the Truth of Love itself. Why can’t we seem to sure up the members of our families so that there is an invincible and steady thread that keeps us woven?
John Henry has answers to this and refers continually to the heart as the generator of TRUE love, without thought, ideas or an agenda about how that happens or where that takes us—planned, orchestrated and defined LOVE, rather that the depth of the heart’s constancy continuing without stopping (which is of course the true way this works.)
So I ask and I travel and I search and I watch. I request assistance to unravel this tangled web, because I observe everyone I love having some amount of distance from parents, siblings, children, loved ones and each other. One of the major themes of my life was to show love, to be able to love myself, and to develop a LOVE MUSCLE.
The LOVE MUSCLE was a way I started thinking of life during the last years of my life. I realized that LOVE, the capitalized version that doesn’t have an end or a beginning, is what we need, what all life needs, no matter where we are, to step into and live fully and develop as a way of being. Like John Henry says, it isn’t about thinking about what love is and trying to find a way to ‘be’ or ‘do’ that. Love is something that you can’t plan and try harder to do. Love isn’t a doing.
So the muscle idea came to me and I practiced it. I figured that if I could love all the time, like breathing, with no condition for it other than being alive, that I could “finally” find peace within myself and then I could spread that peace around so that others could begin to understand the LOVE MUSCLE.
I tried so hard to have others love me, not as an egoic thing, but to block out the past. To start again. To make a place for everyone in my life with no exceptions so that all and everyone would feel that from me AND FOR EACH OTHER! Children, siblings, husband, family LOVING EACH OTHER. Isn’t that the way it is supposed to be???
There was so much disappointment and rejection and judgement, that sometimes it felt like there wasn’t enough love even in the ocean to fill the voids that we all felt…even with the Guys talking with me, great friendships and true community, there was a place that didn’t feel “right.” Inside it felt like there wasn’t enough love somehow. The disharmony ate away at whatever I could create in the outer world and felt like a failure of the principles I was being taught to affect the reality I was experiencing.
So developing the LOVE MUSCLE became the way that I dealt with the pain and distance from those I loved so deeply. I brought the love to the surface of my heart like it had been a submersible balloon and now had enough air to lift out of my chest.
I made my way out of the darkness and began to rebuild the structure of my heart from
the inside out. I kept moving the love that was there, the yearning for it as well as the essence
of it, out to the world around me. I practiced it, like I practiced throwing the ball to my
golden retriever.
I sent the love out, sent it out, always making sure that with everything I did and with everything I enacted there was some degree of love in it. This, of course, didn’t always work, so I would try again and learn from what hadn’t brought what I had intended. I kept at it, because I wanted to change what I was feeling from bereftness to acceptance. I am writing this to you, sending this to you, because I found a way to bring the love out and I see that each one of you needs this. You need a LOVE MUSCLE.
Now I know that this is a good idea and you know that this is a good idea. We know that this is a good idea. All of life and all people know that this is a good idea. So my question that I write of here is why doesn’t it work a lot or most of the time? What is in the way of it working? Why can’t we trust each other and live in harmony and peace? Why especially in families and with those we love the most, can’t we find a way to coexist in peace, without judging and choosing sides and mounting a charge against someone? What is the mechanism through which we continually have to separate from others?
When I asked the question that way, I got a clearer answer. Separation is how we learn union. It’s how we come to a point, finally, that nothing matters but loving. When that happens, all of the reasons why we don’t can’t, or won’t love fade away. No amount of trying or thinking or planning can accomplish that. We can’t think or “should” our way into loving. Love is too smart for that! It is too rich for that!
As much as I am told and observe that love is “natural,” a “natural state of being,” I see the opposite. I see that it is conditioned and metered out and is dependent on behavior and beliefs and directives. I see that there isn’t anything that shapes love from the heart if the mind tells it ‘yes’ or ‘no’. We can’t love if we are in our head thinking. Period.
When I used the LOVE MUSCLE I would first feel the love that is there. Not toward someone or something, rather what the essence is. What the inner wisdom of love’s essence exists “as.” What does love exist as, for you? That question brought me to realize that love’s existence isn’t separate from love’s motion. There is a motion to love, a movement toward. That’s why I call this a muscle. It’s like the muscle wants to be used and strengthened and chosen. We have to choose to use the muscle of love. We have to exercise it and exercise it so that it becomes a natural response to life, to breathing and to being.
What I have come to understand about LOVE is that we are each given an unlimited supply. There is no one or nothing doling out an amount that we have to earn or has any condition on it. You have an unlimited supply of love. The fact that we don’t seem to know this and don’t seem able to use it all the time is a misunderstanding. It’s also important to realize that loving isn’t an art we have to perfect. Love is a state that is there all the time when we pay close attention. It is a gift that we are given with our first breath.
If we use this LOVE MUSCLE then, as a way to ‘be’ rather than a way to get anything or to fix anything, we start to change our relationship with love and then, with others. It is assured for us that when we love, love is there and we are love. We become love rather than loving or being loved or having it or not having it, or not having enough or too much, or whatever definition we might put on this as a world conditioned with amounts and living in separation and judgment. We begin then to just be love.
Float it up to the top of the heart. See where it goes. Direct it from its essence instead of from the mind. Then the division that has grown inside that defines love as a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, a good or a not so good, a true or not so true love fades in the presence of love. Conditioned love fades in the presence of the essence of love.
The flowing out, toward, happens then naturally. You will find then that there is a peace inside that assures you that not only is there love, but love is yours, its ours, its real, it doesn’t go away or get less or have a reason to stop or turn away from you or anyone.
We have to redefine love here, now, in our lives and in our world. It is colorless, sexless, society-less. No way to define it anymore. When you, we, stop defining it, then it can define itself. When we stop controlling it then it can be itself. And when we no longer look for it outside of ourselves or base the amount we love on the amount someone else loves, we are free to love and love will be all there is.
I care so much that you not suffer (that husbands and wives and children and siblings and friends and neighbors live from this love that is real, strong, lasting and unflappable), that I go around every day (it’s different than a day but I will use that word so that you understand this to be my mission) doing my best to tweak the LOVE MUSCLE in each of you.
I will talk next month about Forgiveness, which is the result of true loving. Forgiveness and acceptance. Until then, I pledge to help you develop and use your LOVE MUSCLE to be love.
For that is the essence of life.
All my love,
Jayn Adina
