LOVE AS A HEALING FORCE
The revelation, received during a meditation, that my mission was to heal through love, was truly a blessing for me. So, for many years, my priority was "Healing through Love" - the title of my first book. Later, I came to realize that this work was more deeply about restoring wholeness through love.
So what's the relationship between love and healing? What is love, after all, and how can it help us achieve wholeness? To define it functionally, let's say that love is the awareness of our kinship with all things, and an impulse towards unity.
If you focus on a situation you want to change, then recognize your relationship with that problem, and accept it with love, you've taken a huge step towards wholeness.
On the other hand, if you deny, repress or refuse the situation you want to heal, you create a separation that veils and obscures wholeness. As I said before: "what we can love, we can heal".
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Leonard Laskow
Love is the most powerful healing energy and catalyst for transformation.
Aspects of Love
Excerpt from the book: Healing with Love
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Love, as I refer to it here, has three aspects: awareness, feeling, and action. Love is our awareness of the inherent connection that we share with everything else; we experience it as a feeling; and we express it as an action.
Thus, love is the felt sense of knowing we are a part of everything, a recognition that each of us is a part of a vast, universal order. These connecting, unifying qualities make love the subtlest and most powerful of all energies, which is why it lies at the heart of our healing work.
Behind and between the awareness, feeling, and action of love is the energy of being — the energy of the Self. When these three aspects of the energy of love become coherent, your being universalizes, extending beyond itself to become one with All.
Three Levels of Love
Love can be experienced at the physical level, the personality level, and the higher levels of the transpersonal self. Love at the spiritual level filters down to the personality and physical levels, where it is expressed in thoughts and feelings, words and deeds. The quality of the experience of love is different at each of these levels.
When we begin to experience love at the spiritual level, the heartfelt love of our soul merges the lower and higher levels of loving awareness. At these transpersonal levels, love is characterized by resonances such as compassion, caring, peace, gratitude, and joy. As these levels evolve, our feelings and thoughts gradually dissolve into a transcendent awareness of oneness, a state of bliss, no longer aware of the object of our relatedness but only its energetic essence. This state of love is unconditional love.
We become aware of how we're one with all others in the universe only when we can see the differences that make us think and feel we are separate.
Unconditional Love
Unconditional love is inherent in our consciousness. We become aware of this, and of the ways in which we are all one, only as we learn to recognize the boundaries of our individual selves. We become aware of how we’re one with all others in the universe only when we can see the differences that make us think and feel we are separate. Thus, your sense of separation is like the outward bound part of your journey home.
The full realization of one’s self and one’s value allows for the dissolution of conditional boundaries, which include our fears, our beliefs, our desires, and the state of our bodies. When these boundaries are dissolved, self and nonself come into resonance and become one. This boundless love has the capacity to resonate with all others — that is, it has a universal “frequency.” In this respect, unconditional love expresses the innate harmony of the universe, the common chord that is heard in every individual song, be it the song of the atom or that of the entire universe.
Conditional Love
Although we all are capable of unconditional love, loving with conditions is far more common. When we love another because he or she meets our needs, we are loving conditionally. Similarly, when we give to get, we are placing conditions on our love. This is the way love is usually defined and the way most of us are brought up to understand it. Conditional love is but a pale reflection or dim remembrance of the universal force we call unconditional love.
“Falling in love” is conditional love, a projection onto our loved one of our own idealized image of him or her. In effect, our attraction to the other person is primarily our attraction to our own projection. While falling in love in this way is not unconditional, it can give us glimpses of unconditional love; through it we may be able to come to know and to relate to the essence of our own and another person’s being. Having “loved and lost” is not in vain when we have allowed ourselves to seek and sense the qualities of unconditional love that lie between and beyond our projections. Such experiences illuminate the world for us through a deeply heartfelt oneness, leaving us with a new perspective from which to view all things.
Loving Expressions
Respecting others by seeing and accepting them as they are is an expression of unconditional love. When we give unconditional love, we provide people with a mirror that reflects back their own image so they can know themselves. We love unconditionally when we allow intimacy with others, granting them the freedom to be and to express themselves in new ways each day.
Being committed to our own growth and that of another person is another expression of unconditional love. It is giving and caring and responding without concern for getting something in return. By expressing in these ways, you provide yourself and your loved one with feelings of security, pleasure, trust, acceptance, room for creativity and change, and permission to be vulnerable, honest, and intimate. Thus, feelings of separation, fear, shame, and abandonment are greatly reduced.
Feelings of separation that result from the feared inability to love or to be loved frequently bring illness into our lives. Illness is often a cry for help, a call for love and a deeper sense of connectedness in one’s life.
HEALING WITH LOVE
presents a highly regarded physician’s practical, step-by-step program that shows how to turn on the power of our whole beings — hands, heart, and higher
consciousness — to heal ourselves and others. Here are the extraordinary and learnable techniques that have transformed lives around the world.
