Ouray, Colorado
One Deep Breath | Love
Newsletter
Perhaps the shortest distance, and yet the longest journey is the return to Love..
"One Deep Breath" is a weekly mindful newsletter that brings heart connected content straight to your inbox. Each edition features easy to read insights, and personally practiced tools to share and support you in deepening your felt connection to the present moment and the wonders of the world around you.
"Did you say Love.."
To those using the English language, that comes as a loaded word.
Various traditions, cultures, and vocabularies have attempted to capture and conceptualize the energy, essence, and experience of love through the millennia.
We could turn towards the hearts of literary poets, artists, and writers. Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Rumi to name a few, who have crafted and shared their unique expressions of the word.
To each of us, a flooding of emotions, feelings, unique experiences, and deep personal meanings surround this word.
While English may be one of the most impoverished languages when it comes to naming our sensations, emotions, or feelings.
Various other languages and cultures have long held a much richer depth of vocabulary and expressions for feelings, including that of love.
Let's explore a few together..
Greeks may be most recognized for their diverse language in describing different facets of love.
The main Greek concepts of love include:
Eros ἔρως
is found in romantic, passionate, intimate or sexual love.
The English word “erotic” stems from this word.
Tied to desire, lust, and physical attraction. Comes from the name of the greek god of fertility, with the Roman equivalent being the God of Cupid.
It is often connected to experiences in early stages of bonding where one is “falling in love”.
Storge στοργή
refers to the love between family members.
Natural, instinctual affection.
It’s a strong familial like bond shared by parents, children, and those close enough to be considered family.
A protective type of love that can withstand hardships and trials.
Philia φιλία
translates similar to the love between close friends, or brothers.
The deep bond of respect, friendship, loyalty, and camaraderie.
A deep kinship between equals.
Philautia φιλαυτία
means "self-love". To love oneself. The Greeks further divided this love into positive and negative, with the former meaning to attend to one’s needs as a form of self care, and self compassion. While the later, a form of self obsessive love akin to vanity and egotism.
Xenia ξενία
is an ancient Greek concept of love for strangers, hospitality, guest-friendship, or traditional welcoming.
Agape ἀγάπη
Is unconditional, selfless love. Devine love.
Refers to a love that God is (1 John 4:8, 16) and that God shows (John 3:16; 1 John 4:19).
The ancient Indo-European language of India, Sanskrit, in which the Hindu scriptures and many classical Indian poems are written, provides a rich vocabulary for nuanced terms surrounding love, describing its various shades and complexities.
A few Sanskrit descriptors of love Include:
Kama काम
is the sensory enjoyment, emotional attraction or aesthetic pleasure experienced in connection with beauty in arts, dance, music, painting, sculpture, and nature.
Kama-deva is the masculine god of love and desire.
Kama means “desire” or “longing.”, with Deva meaning heavenly or divine.
Rati रति
is often linked to erotic love and sensual enjoyment.
Named after the Hindu goddess of love, carnal desire, lust, passion, and sexual pleasure.
The name of the goddess Rati comes from the Sanskrit root ram, meaning "enjoy" or "delight in”, the broader context of sensual enjoyment.
Priti ति
meaning affectionate, kind, generous, and giving love.
Derived from the root prī (to please).
Priti is regarded to represent affectionate love, while her co-wife, Rati, represents sensual pleasure.
Vatsalya वात्सल्य
Parental or Maternal love, the affection of a parent for a child.
Sneha स्नेह
Love, tenderness, affection representing deep care, compassion, and emotional connection.
Signifies gentle care and warmth in friendships, and relationships.
Karuna करुणा
Similar to empathy, love through mutal and shared understanding. Especially involving the active desire to relieve the suffering of others. It's more than just pity, but a profound feeling of connection to others' pain, motivating compassionate action to help them.
Bhakti भक्ति
Devotion, worshipful love, particularly towards a deity.
Prema म
Pure, unconditional.
Universal, transcendent love. Love from, through, and of the Divine.
Love in all its shapes, colours, and flavours, is a topic that deserves much more time and attention, than a newsletter could ever provide.
In this writing, I am inviting you to stay curious to a much simpler experience of love. One we can practice everyday.
Here; I will share a way I am practicing the experience of love.
To me, when I feel into this energy of love,
I am not eliciting the desire of passion and lust, or the attraction towards the likeing of something.
While these are in no way wrong or bad, they are not pointing towards the way I am experiencing love.
Love comes easy when the world is to our liking. When things are working in our favour. When we are happy with our appearance, or proud of our latest achievement.
When a new relationship is full of shared infatuation and passion.
When our partner, or kids act in ways we enjoy or approve of. When we feel in control, pleased and satisfied with their behaviours.
This type of love, more akin to "liking" is conditional. It is proceeded by an expectation and follows with a desire, or need for a specific, and reciprocal response.
While the human experience invites us into the opportunity to explore the full spectrum of love. Alongside these various other experiences of connection.
The type of love I am practicing is the unconditional experience of acceptance.
It is the practice of Surrender. The unneeding of change.
This type of Love, is at times the hardest thing to do..
It is a choice of open heartedness in staying with the present moment, amidst a nervous system and mind pointing at all its perceived imperfections, needs and desires to change.
From this place of awareness, we experience life exactly as it is, allowing it to be in its unique perfection.
It carries no conditions, and has no pre requisites. It asks of nothing in return.
This type of Love/Acceptance is experienced not as a finality, or a giving up, but as a giving in.
It is an appreciation and gratitude for the way things are, in this moment, and the next.
In practicing this acceptance to life, we meet each moment with deep reverence. Each person with genuine curiosity, care, and an interest to learn, deepen and connect.
This type of Love/Acceptance is not something we do, but rather something that we are. In feeling into this as common humanity, we feel it in ourselves, see it in another, and begin to notice it in the world around us..
The journey from our head to our heart.
From our thinking, and controlling mind to our unconditional energy of acceptance, may only be 12 inches in distance, yet take a lifetime to travel.
Through my own mental struggles and healing path, I am deeply grateful towards Dick and the model he has created through IFS. It is a loving and yet practical model to directly and compassionatly meet the parts of our mind that are keeping us blocked from experiencing ourselves as the unconditional acceptance of love.
As a way to share something I feel worth experiencing. I have been creating free value add content related to IFS, to help bring awareness to ways we can practice relating to our parts, and in time returning to ourselves.
Today is the release of the final Week 5 of this series. If you've travelled through this far. Way to go you made it!
You can find a link to the full blog Series posts here:
Week 5 | Living from Wholeness & Self Trust
In this series it includes an overview of Parts Work, and also self paced exercises that help you to get curious in deepening your own connection to parts, and Self Understanding.
Loving Acceptance Invitation: Surrender Practice
In this exercise I am going to invite you into one way we can practice surrender.
Today's experiment with Surrender:
Bring your attention to a bodily experience or sensation that you are not enjoying.
Perhaps it's a pain, or ache. An emotion, or tightness in the body.
This time instead of pushing it away, or suppressing it down. Instead of judging the feeling, or critcizing yourself.
See if there is available a non judgemental awareness, an open heartedness of loving acceptance.
In this moment, This is how it is.
What we begin to notice, and learn is that these sensations are the wisdom, and language of the body trying to communicate with us. Often times trying to communicate an important core need of ours.
As we deepen our surrender practice, we allow ourselves to become more in relationship to our own inner experience. With time this deepened understanding informs us of adjustments we can make to move with more balance, love, and ease.
Wishing you a peaceful and open start to your week.
Acceptance and Love,
Greg
Responses