“I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.” Forrest Gump
This is hands down my favorite line in a movie! It reminds me that the beauty and power of love is hidden in its simplicity, a powerful realization that brings me to tears. The line reminds me of just how much I still struggle with understanding love and it leaves me with questions. Why do we all struggle so much with such a simple concept? Why is the journey to more self-love, and more love towards others such an arduous one? Why is something so simple, so darn difficult? Well, maybe part of the reason love is so challenging is, because as the line from the movie suggests, our smarts aren’t going to get us very far when it comes to love. The line from the movie reminds me that love doesn’t really have anything to do with intelligence, at least not in the way we are conditioned to think of intelligence.
So how do we learn about love? As I think back on my 57 years and ponder what I have learned about love, I think about the joy and the pain. The roles I’ve played as daughter, friend, mother and spouse, and my work as a teacher. All the roles I play consistently reveal to me how capable I am, or not, of giving and receiving love. I’ve learned that whatever I do know about love, I couldn’t begin to teach anyone in an intellectual way. I do know what Forrest meant, because all my experiences of love have allowed me to create more experiences of love. We all have experienced love in our lives to a certain degree, without it we would not be alive. However, the degree to which we can give the experience of love to another, is the degree to which we have had some experience in the giving or receiving of love in our own lives. Could this be the reason that the simple and pure concept of love continues to challenge us? How do we get better at love if learning it is incumbent upon an experience that we may or may not have? If it were as easy as teaching someone what love is, then we would likely all want to be schooled in the art of love. We’d likely want a Phd in the subject. Instructing children about how to treat each other gives them rules, but it doesn’t ensure that they will have the capacity to love others. Our great spiritual teachers, even the Dali Lama himself, can’t impart the ability to love upon his followers. The teachings of our great spiritual leaders may be experienced by us as a loving act, and that experience maybe what ultimately makes their teachings an experience and allows us to know more love, but even they can’t instruct us into loving ourselves more. It doesn’t seem we can be taught to love in the traditional way one teaches a subject. Some may disagree with me but I can say with certainty that I have never become more capable of love by hearing about love or thinking about it or reading about it. The need for love drives most of the actions and decisions we make. A lack of love is the reason for most, if not all, of our problems. So if attaining and knowing more love, is not a problem we can solve using our intellect, how can we acquire more love and gain more ability to give love?
Any understanding of love that I have come to thus far in my life has been the result of two things:
- Loving myself enough to take the risk to speak my truth to others thereby creating an experience of loving myself.
- Acknowledging the people in my life who have the capacity to love me, then confronting and relinquishing my defenses so that I can receive and experience that love.
Since love can only be learned through experience, and an experience always involves having a feeling in our bodies, knowing love involves us having a somatic experience. The word somatic is derived from the Greek word soma, meaning “relating to the body, especially as distinct from the mind”. So the feeling of love, the emotion of love, in and of itself, requires a somatic experience. If the goal of our spiritual practices and our healing therapies is to know more love, then we need to be sure that these practices provide us with the experience of love. In the 1990’s, an form of somatic therapy, known as “somatic experiencing therapy” was devised by Dr, Peter Levine. Dr. Levine’s work led him to the realization that the creation of somatic experiences is a powerful technique in helping people to heal. Somatic experiences unify the body and the mind and provide a natural and powerful medicine for healing both. The simple act of creating needed emotions in our bodies can relieve stress and put our minds at ease. If we are struggling in our present, if we have found ourselves in conflict with someone, or suffering in any way, it may be possible to explore the situation in terms of where we are suffering from a lack of love for ourselves. We may find a way back to the places in our lives, especially in our formative years, where we were hurt and unable to experience love. We can experience any love we missed out on, in spite of the limitations of the influential people from our past. Neuroscience has proven that the experiencing of our emotions is what allows our rational minds to understand our life, and that that understanding is essential to our mental and physical health. Neuroscientists continue to explore the ways in which our body’s feelings affect our thinking minds, and the science is validating the success of somatic therapies. Somatic therapies allow us to process emotions in our bodies, and most importantly for healing, they allow us to rewrite the events in which we were denied the experience of love. The body only needs to use the mind’s ability to imagine in order for us to experience, feel and know what love is. It is important here, to point out the difference between '”pretending” and “imagining”. When we are pretending we are outside ourselves, watching ourselves having an experience. When we are immersed completely in our imaginations, we are fully engaged in the moment, we are one with the scene we have created in our minds. It’s a perfect moment of union in which the mind is fully involved in whatever the body is experiencing. Imagining is a form of concentration that allows the body to have the complete experience without the mind observing or judging. Our imaginations provide us with a powerful tool for processing emotions and healing. When we are imagining, our bodies are experiencing whatever we are imagining as if it were really happening, and in this way we have a means for experiencing love and healing the past.
Here’s an example of a somatic exercise:
Go back to any place in your past, preferably as far back as you can, and pick an instance where you feel that you needed loving understanding from someone but they were unable to give it to you. Perhaps you were angry or in pain from whatever was transpiring. Now go back and talk to that person from the place of your need for love. See if you can see their eyes feeling for your pain. Eye contact is very powerful. It can’t be that they ‘feel sorry for you’, but that they too actually know pain and can relate to your suffering. If you can't imagine that particular person ever being able to feel for your pain (which often can happen) then pick someone who can fill that role. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself expressing things you needed to express all along. The exercise may bring up some other emotions, but ultimately the goal is to get to the love you needed. I have found that walking into uncomfortable situations in our minds takes a lot of courage. We don’t want to feel the discomfort. Time and again, I have had to face my resistance to the vulnerability that is required for somatic work, but the results were always worth it. The processing of my emotions and the empathy I receive, always allows me to experience more love. Ultimately, I not only gain more compassion for myself, but I always sense a physical shift that brings with it less stress and more energy.
One thing I’ve understood about love is that the more I know love, the more I find myself having the courage to provide it to others. I’ve learned that love is so simple and pure, and that is what makes it so frightening and complicated. What I do know for sure is that love has everything to do with the body, with a feeling, a feeling that informs us about “what love is”. In the movie Forrest tells Jenny, “I know what love is”, but he can’t help her because he couldn’t force her to experience that love, she had to do that. None of us can ever teach anyone to love, we can only hope that they will allow themselves the experience as well. The capacity to love comes from a place far beyond the capabilities of our rational, knowing brain. Like all pure emotion, our rational brain has very little to do with it. Emotions are pure energy connected to the source of creation. When we connect to pure emotion, we are better able to connect to our own self, to others, to the world, and to the source of life itself.