Our Entire Lives Happen in Relationship

Let's start our conversation around love with some fundamental, experiential basics about how we work in the world. So to begin, we must understand that all of life happens in and through relationships with people and things. That certainly sounds like a no-brainer but it’s one of these obvious statements which is incredibly subtle at the same time.

Because we go through life with such a sense of separation at times between ourselves and the world around us.

And once we realize that in fact everything is happening in relationship, we start to see that interconnection with not just everyone, every person, but everything. 

There's actually some relationship we have with it. There's some way we think about it. 

And it's not necessarily an absolute, it's how we in particular think about it through our own perspective. There is a unique relationship present. 

So if that's the case, if all of life exists in relationship, then by extension, love can only be experienced in relationship. Not in the abstract, not in a vacuum, not on its own somehow as some kind of separate phenomenon.

It must exist in some dynamic relationship. 

If you actually look and discover when you feel love and how we can actually create love, love is an emergent property. It's something that emerges through certain actions.

Personally, I can't think of any other way that love can actually emerge and be created outside of some dynamic of sharing.

Sharing, of course, can manifest in a number of ways:

• shared conversations
• shared experiences
• shared dreams
• shared vision
• shared life

There are many different ways sharing can happen, but in order for love to emerge there must first be some kind of sharing.

And remember, this is all kinds of love. Parent-child love, parental love, friend love. If we stop sharing, the love will diminish. Sharing is the necessary ingredient for love to flourish and to emerge as a phenomenon. 

As we’ve established, love is unity. And in unity, all we can do is share. But not all sharing is created equal. The kind of sharing that allows for love to emerge requires vulnerability, because vulnerability creates intimacy.

Vulnerability is the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of feeling harmed by what someone says or does. In short, being vulnerable means to be in a position to feel hurt. 

The closer we are to somebody, the more that they can hurt us. And that's true on the other side as well: the closer someone is to us, the more we can hurt them.

So we need to use that in a tender fashion, in a gentle fashion, and be sensitive to that. 

Now, chances are if you’re reading this you have some kind of mindfulness and/or meditation practice already in place. And if we look at love, why not bring our practice of mindfulness? Is there any more important area to bring mindfulness to than the loving relationships in our lives? Mindfulness, remember, is paying attention on purpose.

We want to pay attention to our breath without judgment, to our body without judgment, to our thoughts without judgment. We're doing it on purpose. And suddenly there's an opening, and things dissolve, and there's a magic that happens that I'm sure we've all experienced in our own unique way.

The same is available to our love relationships, our affinity relationships. Paying attention on purpose without judgment. If we really think about it, what is the greatest gift we can give to another person? Or what is the greatest gift that we can receive? 

Just think about what you really wish for from somebody else. You want their undivided attention, their presence, you want to be with them.

If you care about them, you want to share that experience in that moment together. And so the greatest gift of course we can give – if that's what we want – is our undivided pure attention, right?

That is just such a powerful way to be with somebody. 

You bring that pure presence and listening without judgment. Without any agenda. Just being with them, listening openly. And in that opening, we can experience more intimacy, more empathy, more compassion. Those are the ingredients for the kind of vulnerability and intimacy we're talking about here.

The present moment is the domain of intimacy. When we're sharing in that way – when we are really, truly present with someone – then love becomes present as a presence. 

We talk about it that way: “I have this feeling.” 

But what we're really saying is there's something kind of enveloping us, this presence between us… and it's this thing we call love.