The Mission of Love

“On the path to self-improvement, we often find ourselves feeling confused. For instance, we confuse self-love with ego satisfaction. We confuse living in the now for living only for the present moment. If we want to conquer the anxiety of life, we live in the moment - or in the breath - but not for the moment. However, neither ego satisfaction nor living for the moment is wrong if we put them on the right mission. It's about focusing our attention on what really matters, and making our mission one of love and balance. Centring everything we do on love is not a mission impossible, but a mission that opens our lives up to infinite possibilities instead. It's a journey that teaches us stability and balance, the strongest ground on which to improve the self.”
— Mickie Kent

I always say that living well is a pose dedicated to balance. As such, we need to take a step-by-step approach to life, and all its aspects. For example, the intelligent placement of the body and breath or a well-trained, stable, and focused mind is an asset in every sphere of life, and essential for any spiritual endeavour. Without a healthy brain, we fire off unbalanced hormones, and this affects our behaviour and the very core of who we are.

Like love and life, the mind is bad thing to waste but a wonderful thing to invest in, and with such a step-by-step sequential, alignment-based life change will be gradual, and lifelong. When healed at our core, we can heal ourselves. Even in times of great stress, we have the power to recalibrate ourselves. It's an invigorating flow that builds up our strength to combat all difficulties life WILL throw at us. Our journey back to balance not only helps us defend against external issues, it will also help highlight any internal issues we may have.

I feel that the practice of yoga expresses this in physical form. It encourages us to practice diligently, listen carefully, and stay open to the outcome. Guidelines for how to live a yogic life will invariably include advice for us to incubate the will to practice, the time to reflect and the ability to let go, whilst nourishing and challenging our bodies. But most importantly, it forces us to be mindful of the importance of balance to pose, alignment and breath.

Establishing stability creates more freedom in your life. Knowing the importance of balance allows you to become your own moderator - even when it comes to the practice of yoga. You could practically do nothing better for your holistic health than go to yoga, but you certainly need to be very careful about your commitment. You can make immense positive change for your body and mind, but you can overdo things without balance. Often by appreciating balance we can "get away" with doing things considered "bad" for us now and then. Likewise, we need to moderate those things that are "good" for us as well.

With yoga, you'll hear people complaining of pain, muscle soreness, bloating, sciatica and other such problems that signal they've overdone it. It can be an incredibly quick to pay you back for your troubles. But allowing yourself to take a day off from yoga gives you a breather in your heart, mind and body - where you can meditate on what is going wrong. If your body is telling you it needs rest and space (to regenerate muscle tissue, resolve pain, etc.,) then you need to listen to it. Because without the moderation of balance, too-frequent yoga can become unsustainable.

And if learning brings knowledge, then letting go can bring wisdom. By letting yourself off the hook regularly once in a while, any guilt dissipates, and you regain balance on that day of rest. It's just like your own yoga Sabbath. So when you have aches and pains, take a day off and listen to them. When your yoga is making your body sore and unsatisfying then usually it means you have to fix your poses (if you're not overdoing it, breathing properly and taking enough water). Your body is calling out for proper alignment.

Balance, too, is the key deciding factor when we choose which particular style of yoga we should practice. The aim of hatha yoga, for instance, is to balance our lunar and solar energies, but our asana practice tends to reflect a bias for the solar, because we often emphasise sun salutations and heating practices in the quest for physical fitness. We shouldn't choose yoga for firmer buttocks or a slimmer waistline or tighter abs. The key is whether a particular style balances you or throws you further out of balance (and thus causes you pain). You begin, therefore, by looking at yourself.

Experts in this field will urge yogis to learn something about ayurveda (the science of staying balanced). Some have translated ayurveda as the "science of life", because it incorporates various holistic treatments designed to rebalance the body and mind - along with yoga and meditation - which are seen as integral to all round well-being. This ancient healing system is attracting a growing number of thoroughly modern, stressed-out Western devotees.

These holistic therapies, unlike conventional regimes, seek to address any number of ailments simultaneously, while allowing the body and mind to rest. Yoga and ayurveda see the health of the heart and the health of the body, mind, and emotions as inextricably intertwined - one affects the other. It's believed that heart disease is so prevalent, because we're disconnected from our hearts. We live in our heads, and suffer from depression and loneliness. Framed within this concept, yoga isn't about fitness. It’s a powerful tool for balance, integration, and empowerment. It's a tool not only for your body, but for your life.

Balancing the body of life

If we analogise life as our body, then we need to constantly connect with and know our heart and engage our core. It's said that the focus that you hold in your life determines how your reality turns out, and what you focus on expands. Thus, we must ground ourselves and remain focused on the next step we need to take to attain our personal goals. If exercise is a contract we sign for better health, then spiritual exercise is an internal agreement for a more balanced state in life. And when we are balanced within ourselves, certain truths open themselves up to us.

We realise we are deserving of love, and that self-love is about minimising the ego, not maximising it. We can end the emotional suffering at the hands of others - and ourselves - simply by realising that nothing really matters, except what we what to matter. Going beyond the realm of "me" or "mine", we untangle ourselves from a narrow perspective, and digging deep inspires what should really be important to us. It promotes a "selfless" kind of love, but one that is more connected to self than before. It should really be described as "egoless", where we are less selfish and foolish, and more aware of others.

We are more empathic, because we are on a journey to understanding how our feelings work, and that self and the ego need to be amicably divorced from each other. Case in point, if you're going through a divorce right now, and you have children, then it will be the toughest of times - but you still need to have an awareness of your behaviour towards your ex-partner, and how it will affect your children. Even if you've now decided you made the wrong choice as to the other parent, your children came to the world because of the two of you. No matter what the circumstance, or how you now feel about their father or mother, your children are one-half of you.

This may seem like blunt words for divorcing parents, but in such instances, every time we may feel like saying what an "idiot" the father is or a "fool" the mother is, or how bad the absent parent is or what terrible things that person has done, we need to be mindful that you are telling the child half of him is bad. You can be forgiven for doing this, if you're unaware of what it's doing to your son or daughter. But you need to understand that this is not love. It's acting from the ego. It's possession.

If we do this to our children, we will destroy them as surely as if we had cut them into pieces, because that is what it's doing to their emotions. Thus, if we don't begin to love ourselves with a less egocentric attitude, then in our mania to master and possess, we will think less of our children and ourselves. Everybody suffers.

It's the same with the self; it's not about shunning your ego (it's part of you after all), but accepting and learning to work with it, while not allowing it to dictate the relationship you have with your self. If you're in physical or emotional pain at the moment, then it's only YOU who can end this type of pain. It all comes back to what we feel we deserve for ourselves. Whatever happens around you, we shouldn't take it personally. In a very real sense, although it might seem to the contrary, nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.

The same goes for us. What we do is because of ourselves, not because of others. We're trying to fulfil a need, a belief or something we feel has to be given to us by another, so we take them personally. Yet, attaching expectations on an another individual to give us what we can't give ourselves - even if that person is the love of our lives - is wrong. Unless our soul is balanced enough to realise it's already whole, it cannot be twinned with another.

Until we realise this, we'll keep finding relationships that mirror back to us how undeserving we are by choosing someone equally undeserving. It deviates us from our mission of love, which is to discover our authentic self. First and foremost, love is an inside job. The less we love ourselves, beat ourselves up or focus our unloving feelings on the other person in our relationships, the more it will show up in our life.

Take up the mission of love

In my post "Can Love Restore Us?" I touched upon how love - romantic love in particular - seems to unbalance some of us, rather than provide us with the balance we seek. Looking at the science, when we fall in love with someone, studies show that our brains are flooded with hormones to provide us with feelings of euphoria and addictive-like feelings of reward and the desire to please. Some would say this is nature's way of getting us to procreate, and that romantic love is mere fiction we've invented for ourselves.

Even though scientists now say they've found romantic love in brain scans, people have suggested that this "romantic fiction" was made up by ancient Persians, while others have it that romantic love was an invention of the Middle Ages. Yet, when we look back at some of the "greatest love affairs" in human history, we see a common thread of pain and suffering that comes in denying true love (or when it's denied to us), not in submitting to it. The true story of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse d'Argenteuil is one of the templates of this narrative.

Abélard and Héloïse were prominent intellectuals of France in the 12th Century. Abélard was a man of noble birth, a prominent lecturer of philosophy and an adventurous thinker, constantly at odds with the Church. On several occasions he was forced to recant and burn his writings. He was 18 years older than Héloïse, who was a strong-willed and gifted woman fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but came from a lower social standing.

They fell in love, had a secret affair that produced a child out of wedlock, and were punished severely for their feelings for each other. Héloïse's uncle, himself a Church official, had Abélard castrated and exiled. Abélard became a monk, while Héloïse entered the convent - forever separated from the man she loved, who had been irrevocably changed by the cruelty of others.

We know of their love primarily through the letters they wrote to each other during this time. Originally written in Latin, the former lovers are passionate both in the remembrance of lost love, and the attempt to reconcile that love with their respective monastic duty to remain chaste. The tension between these two poles generates a huge amount of emotional electricity. Although Héloïse attempts to rekindle their relationship irrespective of the injury done to him, Abélard forces their correspondence to focus on professional subjects rather than their romantic history.

Abélard insists that he never truly loved her, but only lusted after her, and their relationship was a sin against God. He recommends her to turn her attention toward the only one who ever truly loved her, Jesus Christ, and to consecrate herself fully to her religious vocation. Scholars believe Abélard does this in an attempt to spare her feelings (or his feelings, altered from disrupted hormones), pointing to the damage of his hormones and psyche, but from then on the letters take an erudite turn. Héloïse acquiesces; having his letters is better than not having him at all.

Nevertheless, Abélard dedicated his profession of faith to her, and is quoted as saying that, "If I am remembered, it will be for this: that I was loved by Héloïse." When they died, their bones were interred together, and were preserved even through the vicissitudes of the French Revolution, and now are presumed to lie in the well-known tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in eastern Paris (although this is disputed). The transfer of their remains there in 1817 is considered to have considerably contributed to the popularity of that cemetery, at the time still far outside the built-up area of Paris. By tradition, lovers or lovelorn singles leave letters at the crypt, in tribute to the couple or in hope of finding true love.

I can't help but ask myself, had they not been denied their chance to be together, what balance could they have brought to their lives, their writings, and to the world with their ideas? And still, cut down in their prime, their love persisted, even despite their own attempts to turn against their relationship and bury their love. The suffering this caused is evident through their writings, but it has also been an inspiration for all those who believe that romance is not mere fiction.

Be the love you seek

As the story of Abélard and Héloïse shows - whether love is entirely in our brains or not - it's very real for those that experience it, and there is no greater guide to fuel our drive or inspire us to greater things. But it's only when we realise the point of love in life is to bring balance and harmony, and we are the instruments to that purpose, that it will bring value to our lives. But if we want true love, then first we must be the love we seek.

Moreover, if we want to improve ourselves, we have to understand that it has to be a mission of love. If we make this our ultimate mission, then it will be one where the end can truly justify the means - because we cannot really love what we hurt or harm. In essence we don't ask what love will do for us, but what we can do for love - and so what we do for ourselves simply becomes a method to gain balance on that journey. Even times of imbalance are beneficial, if they help us to seek balance. It's all how you use the difficulty to your advantage.

Thus, although self-stupefaction of any kind is arguably wrong, the path of pleasure is never wrong if it feeds into our true nature, which is divine and eternal. Correspondingly, we may sometimes need to live for the moment, to reward ourselves when a goal has been achieved, as a treat for a job well done. We may find we need to satisfy the ego now and then, rather than burying it in a subconscious minefield only to blow up in our faces later and completely deflate our true self-worth. You also need to keep in mind that whether your future will be disappointing or exciting for you depends only on your attitude, and how open it is to influence. Our brain is wired for empathy, and emotions - like yawning - can be contagious.

We are affected by the emotions of others around us. We can catch a negative emotion from someone like we catch a cold, but so it's true of positivity, too. Laughter is infectious. Love and kindness are addictive. Seeing others be kind makes us happy, and inspires us to do the same. Similarly with joy. But all these can be unbalanced by "energy vampires" unless we counterbalance this with a strong self.

So, as we redesign our lives, let our strength be built on love. After all, the best designs are based on a love of something. When we are in love, our eyes are more attuned to beauty, and like art, it reinvigorates us and opens us to the infinite possibilities in life. This isn't about superficial beauty, which is as brief as a fashion trend, with a price tag just as heavy. For true beauty isn't about having a beautiful façade, but a beautiful heart, mind and soul.

In the same vein, our inner strength will be a much needed commodity for the coming years - which will undoubtedly hold great changes and entirely new challenges for us all. Because even with all the negative upheaval predicted in the West, this year the Chinese are celebrating the Year of the Horse for the lunar new year, said to bring prosperity and wealth. For some it will mean new investment opportunities are coming, while others may simply want to start cutting back on junk food or be more accepting of differing opinions.

Whatever our personal goals, we have to be on a mission that has us looking at the bigger picture - instead of running around in ever increasing circles. No one can rescue you from the vicious circle you find yourself stuck in, unless you understand that it comes back to what we believe we deserve. No one can say to you, "I've arrived, and here is all the love you're missing" - because relationships are not just about taking love. It's about loving back.

We don't fall in love because we want someone to make us happy, but because we have so much love to give we want to make another person happy. If you can't give yourself love, you can't give love to anyone else, either. And if you don't believe you deserve love, how can you believe anyone is deserving of any you have to give? If you want happiness, you must start feeling you deserve it, by doing things that make you happy. If you want love, you must start by feeling you deserve it. Don't withhold it from yourself. Follow your conscience, follow your heart and follow your wisdom, and in doing so, find ways that express love for you. Then love everyone else, even if they deserve it or not.

Love in its best form, therefore, is a competency, it's a way of thinking, it's a way of doing that you apply to life. It's about acknowledging your heart. This will eventually promote a healthy relationship with yourself, because it will allow you to get in touch with your authentic self. Communicate honestly with yourself. Communicate the truth. Listen to yourself, to your needs and wants. Your body is your messenger, and if you're not feeling good, it may be your body's way of telling you to rest more, change you diet, or go to bed earlier. Whatever gender you are, try to balance the feminine side of listening and receiving, with the warrior side of taking action and achieving when dealing with challenges. Meditate on the heart to get in touch with the gratitude that always lives there.

Be your own best friend. If you label things as "good" and "bad", don't go against yourself by doing "bad". And if you do, forgive yourself. Learn balance from it. By learning to access a deeper part of yourself, to recognise and change habit patterns that don't serve you, will help you have a more compassionate relationship with yourself. So if you want a healthy relationship, start by feeling you deserve it.

Every human being values being loved, but they need to realise they deserve it, too. Remember the mission of true love is not simply to match us to a partner. It's to make love itself THE mission of our lives. It's the guidance we use to choose the path we want to take in life. It's the bigger picture that helps put our lives into context.

Love is either everything, or love is nothing. The medieval story of Abélard and Héloïse taught us that, and Love's will shall be done on Earth only when we learn what that really means.

Yours in love,