I was a newborn. Swaddled tightly and embraced by a mothers hug. I was warm. I felt safe. And my whole being was overflowing with love. There was nothing to do. Nothing I could do. All there was, was love. Flowing fully, and freely, for the first time.
I wanted to resist. I felt compelled to “earn it”, to do something worthwhile, to be someone worthy of that kind of boundless love.
But there was nothing to do. And love kept flowing.
That’s when I realized: love is not an activity of the heart, nor an idea of the mind. It’s a universal force.
Love is the experience we get to have, when we open our hearts fully. Love flows from anywhere and everywhere to us, and when our hearts stay open, it flows through us and grows with us.
That’s what Father Zassimov means when he advises the old lady on how to lose all fear of death:
“By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.”
This was certain for me. I had taken a therapeutic Dose of MDMA, was laying in a bed, a face mask covering my eyes, listening to a curated playlist from MAPS, and experiencing love so purely, so directly, that I awoke to the fact that it was not something that needed to be earned or deserved.
I was reborn.
There was nothing to do. All love needed was openness through which to flow. All I needed to do was to allow it, to be open for it, to receive it.
Why did that seem so hard before?
Keeping my heart open, at all times, seemed as insane to me as leaving one’s car doors unlocked in all neighborhoods. How did that make any rational sense?
You’ll get your feelings hurt, and your car stolen.
Congratulations for being a nice guy. The world needs suckers, I guess.
When I was 6 years old, my heart was broken by my first love only weeks after my heart was shattered by the death of my father. I saw the destructive impact of love all around my family, and decided to never be hurt again. I became dedicated to the idea of living a life of strength, and to protect everyone I loved with that strength. And to do that I decided to never risk opening my heart fully again.
What I didn’t understand back then, was that love can never be destructive. What's destructive is the walls we build around our hearts to protect ourselves from getting hurt.
The more intense love flows, the more we ought to keep our hearts open.
Easier said than done.
Because love hurts. It’s supposed to. Sometimes. All fully felt emotions are a form of love. Pain, anger, fear, rage, hate, all are but different notes in the symphony of love.
Love is life energy. And the fuller life energy flows, the more intense we feel.
And when love flows strongly, and we close down to it, we turn into little paper boats sailing against the stormy wind instead of with it.
A surfer can’t control the waves, and can’t make them stop.
A human can’t control love, nor stop it. Who we love, how we love, how love feels, is out of our control.
But we can flow with love, we can surrender to its flow, and with that we can grow it when its current flows low, and calm it down when it’s raging wild.
To love and live fully, we have to grow our hearts, make them strong and wise. And our hearts only grow, when we keep them open, exposed to challenges of real feeling.
Eventually you awake to the reality that all is well, all is love, and there is no reason to be so afraid of any of it. That, at least, is what happened to me that day.
I was awakened and reborn. Given a new chance to restart my emotional life, to open my heart fully, and feel its incredible power and grace.
Now all I had to do is keep it open.
Easier said than done. But I would try anyway.
“What I didn’t understand back then, was that love can never be destructive. What's destructive is the walls we build around our hearts to protect ourselves from getting hurt.” LOVE THIS! ❤️