A Love Meditation

Say the word, “love” quietly to yourself right now, a couple of times, listen to the resonance of it, and wonder about what it means. The word love is one of the sweetest sounds in the language. Listen to how soft it is, soft as a glove.

Depending on how you’re feeling at the moment, you may be a bit defensive when you think about love, or you may embrace the opportunity to enjoy yourself. Accept whatever mood you’re in as part of the experience, and experiment with these questions:

When have you known love in your life?

When you think of what love is, whom have you loved?

In your current life, who is it you love the most intensely?

Remember some specific times when you have felt love. It could with another person, a pet, a wild animal, or some aspect of nature such as the ocean or sky, a tree.
Being with that dog, that sunrise, that grandparent, that child.

Listening to that particular piece of music, watching that wave.

Being awakened by the touch of your mate. Seeing a baby. Meeting a friend who has been away for a long time. Singing your heart out. Making love, holding, being held by your lover.

It could be a sense of well being as you gaze at a sunset. Or standing in a forest, feeling the presence of the trees, loving them. Receiving the warmth and radiance of the sun on your face as a loving touch.

Seeing horses running free and loving their noble spirit. Loving the sound of the stream flowing over the rocks. Reveling in water when you are thirsty and drink a glass. Or the way you cherish a breath of air when you step outside on a glorious day.
Have you experienced loving unconditionally? Being loved unconditionally? When have you felt, “I love everyone”? When have you felt yourself being loved, by a person, by God, by nature?

Let your heart bathe in this experience now.

Different faces might come, different sensations in your body, many different emotions. Everyone and everything you have ever loved, and everyone who has ever loved you, flowing through your awareness.

As you recall these times, how does your body change? How does your breathing change? What clues you in to this feeling we call love?

Now dwell, for several minutes, with all these impressions. Savor the way your breathing feels as you invite love into your body again.

Love wants to permeate you everywhere. Let it. As you remember the state of love, let the feeling flood into all the dark areas of your being, everything you are ashamed of. Let it flood into your best, most presentable, virtuous places. Soak it up, through and through, into your heart and belly, into every secret place.

Sitting there, or lying there, love your skin. Love your bones, and love the Earth attracting you in to the center. Love the air around you, the space around you, the light in the air. Let your love expand of its own accord in all directions, out from your heart to the front, rear, sides, down, up.

Every day, spend some time breathing with the experience of love. Think of anyone or anything you love, and simply be with the sensations and emotions, feel it all. Build the love back into your body and soul.

Every moment of love you’ve ever experienced still exists in your being, resonating now like a hum in your cells. This is more than an image, more than a memory; it is a living current that grows stronger with awareness. When you feel the movement of love flowing through you this way, you are tuning in to your personal body of love.

THE TENDERNESS OF NATURAL FORCES

Love is a tangible phenomenon, not just a romantic ideal. It is a sensory experience that can be cultivated, and that we can learn to dwell in.

Every moment we are being infused with extreme tenderness by the natural forces. Meditation is the process of delicately turning our attention to the ways that nature is always and infinitely holding and nurturing us. The techniques of meditation throughout the ages consist of many different ways of engaging with some aspect of how life renews itself – the flow of breath, or the rhythm of the heart, or the way that sound and silence play with each other. Through meditation and body awareness we move into a world we crave to enter, in which our dozen senses are awake to what we have. Through these modes of perception we directly experience the suffusion of love with each breath and each heartbeat.

Through such embodied meditation we come into rapport with ourselves, with our environment, and with the rhythms of nature. We become intimate with our biological rhythms, with the music of life, with the laws of gravity, space, time, magnetism, and light. To meditate is to become engaged with the deep movement of life, giving in to the instinct to love. When we are in rapport this way, we feel we are in the right place, living the life we are meant to. We feel grateful to be alive. When we meditate on our relationships, we renew the rapport that sustains and strengthens those bonds.

Embracing this inner connection powerfully enhances your health, deepens and clarifies your relationships, and is a wellspring of creativity. You are fully alive. You are at home in yourself, at home in the universe, at home in love, no matter where you go.