Making More Love – The Hidden Path to the Heart

August 23rd, 2017

Contributing writer for Wake Up World

Most everyone wants to be more loving. So we try to be kinder, more generous, compassionate, and helpful. This is all good stuff, but this kind of loving is most often built on top of our suffering, not from of it.

To become more deeply loving, more genuinely compassionate, more sustainably helpful and giving, take the love you already feel and turn it towards the places that hurt inside, the places of unrequited love.

With this self-compassion, let yourself grieve and let out the anger and longing, sadness and rage for where you were never met by caring and trusted others. As the pain releases, “who we more truly are” beneath the pain meets our conscious self-compassion. They marry, connecting our unconscious depths with our conscious loving.

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This builds love from suffering, instead of constructing an unstable edifice on top of your pain; it dissolves the pain and liberates your unbidden and nameless joy, just as you would peel an old coat of paint off before a new one is applied. The amount of new love you want is up to you and how far and completely you will excavate the ruins of your past hurts.

This process simultaneously releases our long-held pain that blocks every aspect of our lives while infusing us with more love from our “source.” We can tap this “source” for conscious love, which is the popular meme. But to tap it for unconscious love is to mine the dark, and once we do, we widen and deepen the river from which love shows and flows from our bodies.

It allows us to show up in acts of love, not just love’s feelings. It allows us to “sacrifice” to be there for others and the natural world. It allows us to show up more fully, enduringly, and fearlessly for others that suffer (when friends disappear in tough times, it is often because they have not done this deeper love-work). It lets us keep our commitments, and to notify when we cannot. It lets us care and challenge our own denial, to change our beliefs, and find meaning and purpose.

When we mine our pain to make more love, this is emotional depth work. In my experience, this liberates our bodies more than yoga, meditation, and other mind-body disciplines. It is the quintessential mind-body practice: yep, deep grief-work to free our pain and make more love out of ourselves. And, the yoga and the meditation will help you do this body-centered release work—by making the switch from a focus on physical body sensation to emotional sensation and its stories carried in the flesh.

Because this is a deep body practice, it is embodied, which connects us more to the body of the world around us: to others, to daily affairs, to other forms of life, to the Earth itself. It is embodied spirituality which takes care of spiritual bypassing and beliefs in “spirit.” It is the way to bring what we imagine as “spirit” into flesh, rather than the manual and coercive methods of will power. Instead, we clear the way below—on earth, in our bodies—so “spirit” can inhabit us more deeply and fully through all our affairs.

This grief-work process of making more love doesn’t just release our pain. It liberates all our best qualities that have been stuck in pain’s sticky web of stagnation: our compassion, courage, creativity, inspiration, and our sense of awe and beauty. These qualities embody our unconscious, unbidden love as a zeal for life in a grounded, earnest sense—not one of constant hoopla, drama, or the latest craze, which are too often the substitutes for the beauty of clearing our deep hearts of the pain they have carried for too long, usually generations back.

This is not the easy path to making more love. Yet, it is an integrated one that salvages the places in us that have been blocked off by emotional pain. It is one that leads to more genuine and full-bodied loving. It is also one that can heal one another and the Earth beneath the shit-show of human lies, posturing, and drama in all forms. It is cure enough for the dishonesty, coldness, and bullshit we experience with other human beings. And in more honest moments, even with ourselves.

To learn more about how to go about making more love this way, you can listen to the first track here.

The Nourish Practice

Jack Adam Weber’s “The Nourish Practice” is an easy, guided meditation-Qi Gong practice in radical gratitude and self-love. It is an Earth-based, body-centered practice — at once physiological and mythological — that is deeply relaxing and replenishing, especially for modern-day burn-out syndrome, and requires little physical effort. “The Nourish Practice” resets your nervous system and fosters a rich inner life.

You can purchase The Nourish Practice as a CD or Digital Download here.

The first installment in Jack Adam Weber’s new “Emotional Transformation” series, entitled “Healing from Heartbreak”, is also available here — a valuable guide to embodying self-compassion, healing and love.

About the author:

Jack Adam Weber, L.Ac. is a Chinese medicine physician, author, celebrated poet, organic farmer, and activist for body-centered spirituality. He is also the creator of The Nourish Practice, an Earth-based rejuvenation meditation, and Healing from Heartbreak, the first installment in his “Emotional Transformation” series.