Writings on Love from Ammachi's Ashram

Love. There's something about it that we yearn for. Our heart is a magnet or a drain pipe always drawing love towards us. We can never forget love, once we've experienced it. Love touches us where we are most tender and innocent, where we forget to delineate the difference between self and other.

There is not always a way to escape from love. Sometimes the feeling is simply unavoidable - a white dove exploding from our chest in a flurry of feathers and breath. We don't know how it works. Sometimes love fills us with the most incredible ecstasy; other times it drains us until we feel as empty as a bowl with no fruit inside. Either way, love is a journey and a destination. It is a story in itself, being told through a network of many lives and many bodies.

Would love exist were there not bodies to feel it? Would love exist were there not an object to adore? Feeling love is the simplest, most beautiful thing on Earth, yet it has the capacity to attract many complications. Love without judgement is rare. Oftentimes love comes with more questions than answers - how do I express this feeling? Does this have to do with the other person, or with me? Will my heart be received or rejected?

Maybe John Steinbeck was right when he said, in "East of Eden," that the thing all humans are most afraid of is rejection. I can easily take trains by myself across India while relying on my innate strength and courage, yet it is more difficult for me to tell a man honestly about my tender feelings for him than it is for me to walk down a street full of beggars. I can hide inside myself when walking down the street, but I can't do that when I stand up for my feelings.

I would like to think that external courage begets internal courage. Where does the word come from, anyway? It comes from the word coeur, which means heart in French. Angeles Arrien interprets this to mean that courage implies standing by your heart. Being courageous doesn't need to have anything to do with journeying outside and away from yourself. In fact, it can be quite the opposite. It can require more courage to journey into yourself and see what lives there because there is no escaping yourself. When you are traveling, there is always the option of packing up and leaving a place if it does not suit you. With yourself, you are stuck. There is no one else who is going to rescue you. You are there all alone on your one little raft, floating on the endless sea of your own feelings. You can cry for help, maybe from God or from a trusted friend, and you can be blessed by grace. But you alone are the antagonist and the protagonist, the hero and the demon, or your own story.

In many ways, a new feeling of love requires us to shift our realities. Are we aligning with our own truth? Do we accept our own authorship of our lives, or do we shirk this responsibility off onto others through blame and judgement? Is there a new action, a change that is needed to reflect the feelings that we have inside our hearts?

I am always seeking to have my actions mirror my feelings. In this way, I draw out of myself all these internal escapades into a place where I can actually see them and interact with them in the real world of people and relationships, journeys and destinations. We are all called to do things which ask us to define who we are. In a way, we can define ourselves by our actions, by what we do with our time. This is not meant to be a judgement, only an honest perception of reality. How does time feel for us? Are we able to direct our own flow of time, or are we constantly following a schedule that was set for us by someone else? Do we even know why we do the same things day after day, without shifting the pattern? These questions can guide us into a higher state of self-awareness, so that we ensure we are the conscious leaders of our own lives.

Conscious leadership means being aware of all the factors which influence our choices, and knowing through some intuitive process that we are following our own truth. We don't have to see or understand all or ourselves to know we are on the right track. A self is a very infinite thing, and best perceived in terms of orbits and gravitational pull, rather than microscopes and the glare of a spotlight. We are all orbiting around something, and it is our job to become increasingly aware of our relationship to that something. What does the pull feel like? How does it influence our direction? When do we slow down, and when do we charge forward? These are all things which have to do with our center of gravity in relation to the mass or density of what we are orbiting around.

As we explore the various spinoffs of our central orbit, we come to understand what we are made of. This is something we can never truly see. John O'Donohue speaks of the human soul as something which can never be seen in an objective way, only felt and sensed by the subtle energies of the heart. When we get a glimpse of what we are made of, we get very excited. Our ecstasy begins to increase, along with our great love of empty spaces, epic stories, heroes and heroines, and things which call us into life. We don't have to forget anymore. With one whiff, we are resurrected from the threat of a life lived outside ourselves, and we want to know more. Where does this power come from? Is it mine? Can I cherish is? Can I grow this garden which I so adore? Can I cultivate the garden of my own soul?

And so begins the journey of a thousand lifetimes. A gardener's work is never finished. There is always something more beautiful to plant, another garden party to organize. In the same way, we are never finished with the exploration of our own souls. Would we really ever want to be? There is a sheer magic about new light dawning, of untold stories emerging from the shadows, of inviting new friends over to share a plate of soul food. I think it is a great gift that we can never truly see ourselves, for it allows us to go on exploring our frontiers until the end of time.

You might think this a lonely enterprise, this never-ending search for truth. But you see, truth is there all along. It never leaves. It is always guiding you, helping and consoling you along life's slippery waterways. The fact that we can never fully see ourselves allows us to grow closer to other beings who can then reflect the light of our own truth back to us. We can then see, through their eyes, what we are made of and how we grow into more beautiful and magnificent forms.

The gift of life is the gift of relationship. Without multiplicity we could never live this story which is so tantalizingly unfolding. There is no need to rush. We can be here, fully present, fully aware of our own role and our journey. After all. love is a feeling, and feelings take time to explore. Love is something we keep communicating, day after day. We keep giving it, we keep receiving it. In doing so, we nourish the very roots upon which we stand. When we remember to communicate love, we remember why we are here. Let us keep remembering. In our own unique ways, let us keep approaching the blinding light of our souls to weave the fabric of time back together.

Aho! Namaste.
Melissa