I read Hands of Life: An Energy Healer Reveals the Secrets of Using Your Body’s Own Energy Medicine for Healing, Recovery and Transformation. In it Julie Motz identifies four basic emotions: anger, pain, anxiety, and love. Each energy moves through a specific part of the body. Anger moves through muscles, pain moves through bone, and anxiety moves through nerves. All emotions are clean and neutral as they move through their appropriate path. When they don’t move through that natural path there are problems.
Emotions are clean. They are pure like weather that necessarily comes and goes in an ecosystem keeping its balance. As a highly emotional, empathetic person it is liberating to think of emotion as neutral, clean, and valuable, yet not ultimate. Emotions are not a problem if they move in a healthy way.
In her four-‐emotion construct Motz calls the energy of love “the weak force,” weak in that it moves indirectly, almost imperceptibly through lymphatic, synovial, joint–oiled places. This inextricable, weak force also lives in atoms and the abundant grace of water, that powerhouse of life.
Weakness is something I know about. When I weep or laugh my vulnerable strength is refortified. God appears. How odd is that? The feeling of letting go, surrendering seems to open the space for this force. This makes me think of play. Play is indirect, purposeless, light, sneaky, spacious, and tricky. Great ways to find the weak force in the body is to
Squirm around and oil your joints.
Wobble your body and head
Breathe and hum.
Roll, rest and flop around on the floor
Rock or slosh the water in you.
Snorkel
To Foster Soul Love it helps to
- Hunt for love. Look for people who extend themselves to others. Love is generous. Learn to see it, get near it, and welcome it even when humans are unreliable at providing it. In religious places people agree to report their glimpses of divine love and honor it.
- Look for people who affirm. Affirming environments are conducive to soul. You’ll see people’s faces exude light. They rarely recognize it themselves, but you can see it.
- Play with whole, whole bodied, wholehearted quiet or ecstatic activities. Real play is unconditional. Mistakes are part of the fun. Don’t be distracted about whether the play is spiritual.
- Discover your big bodyspirit. You are not bound to a single moment, sensation, or form of knowing. Your bodyspirit extends into ancestry and the future. Present time is not a minute or day. It’s an experience bigger than any event of fear and hate, a place that precedes injury, the place of fore giving. Can’t reach that place? Ask the saints and ancestors to take you there. They know where it is. Otherwise, focusing on what is wrong leaves you in the hell of prolonged pain, distress and disease.
- Literally dance between the great body of Love and today’s struggle. This is the easiest way to include all of life.
- Practice receiving. Rest, waiting, and relaxing are ways to receive. We can simultaneously give and receive, a key to the ability to flow with life and love. One of my FAVORITE ways to connect is a hand-‐to-‐hand dance of heart, eyes, and more. With a partner, you can enter a profound yet manageable dance of intimacy. In a time of disease we can adapt this form to include more space.
Connect the space between your hand and your partner’s hand keeping a feeling of overall connection.
In a matter-‐of-‐fact way follow the connection. letting the hands lead both of you off your spot on the floor.
Return to stillness.
Play by relating with shapes. Change shapes faster than the speed of the mind.
Stop and hold still in a final shape.
Play with dropping the connection. Notice what is it like, Restore connection and release it again. Can you imagine something bigger holding the connection?
Put on music and let the hand-‐to-‐hand connection lead you in a spirited dance.
When the music is over, come to stillness. Thank your partner
Take time to notice what it was like to follow the connection. Was it graceful or challenging? Did you breathe? Was there a moment where you felt particularly “at one”?
It is slow work to love, but love is the one thing that really makes a difference. Loving is living. Like Deena Metzger says, “there is only time to work slowly, there is no time not to live.”
“I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough.
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough.
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough….
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
Walt Whitman
When I told my grandpa that I was getting married, his response was to quote Shakespeare, “True love doesn’t always run smooth.” Indeed!
Mystics are as healthy and unhealthy in Love as anyone, maybe more since we feel so intensely. We may lead others on the journey to understand Love, but, Love is mysterious.
We move along in the great organic improv of life, simultaneously dancing between passion and impassion, comfort and panic, security and adventure, home and strangeness, connection and letting go. This Dance requires trust and that biggie–surrender to the Dance itself. Add the dynamic of attraction. Attraction makes us feel happy, uplifted, serene, affectionate, playful and affirming. When it’s present, we enjoy creating meaning together. Conversely, we get tied up in knots if we focus on someone or something unavailable or gone.
Love Pain, the opposite of attraction, stirs up grief, loss, isolation, abandonment, anger, rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, depression, highs, obsessive thinking and behavior, and spaciness.
Do we listen to our body or not?
If we look for Love in heightened experience alone, we miss the portal to the peace that passes all understanding. This peace is the great Love organizer. Once rooted in it, our world and relationships flourish and grow tall. Contradictorily, we cannot find this peace unless we learn to listen to our own body, move our energy, breathe, live and play with it all.
In InterPlay, grace invites us to notice and affirm our bodyspirit data. We ask, “What does my body want? Will it be good now and good later?
In a more relaxed state of play, old patterns make themselves known. Old pain offers itself up to be rewired. We step onto a dance floor into a choreography that leads beyond us. Our bodyspirit communicates when something is missing, lifeless, freaked out, disorganized, traumatized, or biochemically challenged. We can shake it out. We can listen to the whole of experience. We can plant our hearts in the long Dance.
I am so grateful for the wisdom teachings of Love, natural gifts that welcome Love, and for the Source of Love Itself.
I appreciated reading Joan Pasco’s writing this week. She is an astrologer and artist who highlights all the forms of Love that emerge in a group, with a friend, animal, nature, studying a beautiful idea, practice, or in direct connection with the Sacred. Her forecast for this time is worthy of note.
If love pain is a real deal you might check out the forty questions for love addicts anonymous for clues about love confusion. http://www.loveaddicts.org/40questions.html.