About Love

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Recorded by Natalia Kedrova's studio at the Kiev conference in 2014

I want to share with you two thoughts. The first thought is human, and the second is therapeutic.

Human thought: People need love and often try to receive it from the other, as if love is something that is in the other. And the more we try, the more pain, despair and suffering they experience. Trying to get love for yourself from the outside, you have to be excited, active, identify the need, differentiate the other and his attractive qualities, approach and be aggressive, take risks, bite off and assimilate. But love remains something elusive: no matter how you look for it outside, it does not appear inside.

I recently thought that I feel the most love in the paintings of Levitan and Van Gogh because there is a lot of space and a lot of sunshine. I think that everyone has their own image. I wondered why Levitan's paintings moved me so much. There really is a lot of sun and air, it's warm to be there and it's easy to breathe deeply. It seems that there is nothing special in the plot, but the feeling from these paintings that there really can be felt and experienced love. No one gives anything to anyone, does not extract anything, for the artist he creates a special space, a special atmosphere, and in this atmosphere a special experience arises in me - love. You can feel love in yourself and for yourself, around. What kind of circumstances can give the opportunity to meet this experience? What should be in the atmosphere?

Here you can look at the pictures and there is a lot of space and safety. This is something welcoming, something sunny, it is usually in a relationship and that we can meet in the look. For example, when you meet a warm and welcoming gaze, it's easy to feel loved at that moment.

If we are talking about relationships between people, then in order for this to happen, a completely different way of contact is needed. Not contact with the goal of prey from another, but such being next to another, so that it is possible to feel the warmth and tenderness and beauty and everything else inside.

Then it turns out that in close relationships, it is not the usual contact curve that comes to the fore in the form of approaching another in order to get or bite off from him, show aggression and shake something out of him, but such contact, when possible, feeling energy, excitement to be close to another in tension / from which something can be born / in which you can feel and experience something completely different. This contact is not about the aggressive change of the other, but about the opportunity to experience the depth and beauty of the moment next to the other. It is very difficult. Because excitement at first is easily recognizable by people as hunger and / or danger, and the contact is built on the principle of "come to and take from". This model is strongly related to the need to satisfy hunger, as the need to get something for yourself. And then the whole system is tuned in to the fact that the other is perceived as an object to which it is necessary to approach and get from it. And if he resists, then more aggression is needed, there may be very kind aggression, but all the same aggression aimed at obtaining, remaking another and using it.

And in order to experience love, you have to follow a completely different path: to be close to the other, to maintain excitement and tension, to keep close to the other this tension of uncertainty and openness so that it can become beauty and warmth. At this moment, there is no exchange of the type “you are for me - I am for you,” this is an opportunity to be touched by another.

This is one thought that I wanted to share.

For a small child, love is a background state, an atmosphere in which he lives. And I think that he gets love through background things - in the look, through the atmosphere that makes him feel loved. They talked about Paris today. Paris is an amazing city where you feel loved. Everything is done there to make you feel good. Nice to the eye, nice to smell, nice to the body, nice in time. Everything there is a little beautiful, a little redundant, but very targeted. And there you feel that this is all done to please you. The child also finds himself in an atmosphere when people look at him with pleasure, when people around him talk in gentle voices, this creates an atmosphere in which one can feel loved and live it. When this is not there, then longing arises. Longing is an experience when something important is missing. Experiencing the opposite of love is melancholy. There is nothing very important, but it is not clear what. Something that I have never met, but I know that it must be somewhere. Such an experience of a meaningless, pointless, painful deficit, which cannot be washed down, seized, it still remains.

And I think that the feeling of love is unaddressed. Love is an experience that is difficult for us to realize. For example, sympathy. Sympathy is targeted. Respect is targeted. But love is what refers to the background. It is an experience that arises in the presence of someone and that extends to everything. I think there must be a catalyst, or someone with whom you can share this experience. But it is more than a targeted attitude towards a person. Can you imagine anything beautiful? Music? What is this feeling that fills you when you listen to music? And to whom is this happiness directed? To the composer, to the violinist, to the conductor? When we love a person, we can love something in him - his appearance, his look, his voice, and love is always a little more than something concrete. This is the difficulty, because you can realize and express it in something concrete, and the experience is always greater than this concrete one. And the experience of some imperfection remains. It seems that he did and said, but still something remains. I think there is gratitude to the person who allows you to experience what you are capable of.

Perhaps we are looking for a person to love because we cannot withstand this tension inside, and we are looking for a person, or a dog, or mathematics. But this is what a person creates and is able to experience within himself.

The second thought relates to therapy … Laura Perls says support is in the background. And about love, we can say that it refers to the background. We don't always talk about it and we don't often teach it. But creating a background in which something can appear is very important.

Experiment. Try to imagine a space that contains what you love. Feel yourself in it. Then open your eyes and try to place your partner in that space. You don't have to try to love him, just try to see what you love around him. Just talk to each other about something and see what happens. Then switch roles. Discuss whether you managed to create and feel an atmosphere of love. How it was experienced.

It seems to me that it is very important that we can create a field in which we will feel comfortable and on which we can rely. And this field can be an important support for the client.

Question: - Can this be regarded as reality or is it an illusion?

Natalia: This is your ability to love.

Question: - But what about love suffering? When I have a lot of love and I don't know what to do with it.

Natalia: I think there are a lot of glitches here. The first is that the source of love is perceived as something belonging to another. The person does not recognize and does not recognize this as his ability. This happens if a person does not feel well at all what is in him. For example, if in childhood love was not accepted from him, but only given. Then a person may not notice this source in himself, that which he generates and creates himself. Then he is looking for someone who can give him this experience.

The stage is very important when a feeling just arises in you, the experience only begins and you can recognize it as something of your own. It looks like a background, a pre-contact, when there is still no concrete, no object.

The second zone where suffering arises is the inability to find a form to express your feelings. When you feel that there is something, but you do not know how to express it.

Love is a background that we cannot completely exhaust. It is a state, an experience that is greater than the capabilities of the language or body. If we try to reduce it to some specificity, we will be faced with the impossibility of expressing and the vagueness of the very word "love". For a long time this word was rejected as imprecise and incomprehensible: tell me exactly what you want from me? And this incomprehensible component is very important. But it is still present and requires some kind of incarnation. The term "sublimate" means to get rid of the experience, and "to experience" means to find a form for embodiment.