We may think with our mind and speak with our mouths, but we truly come to understand the world with our bodies. Our lived experience is our reference point from which we measure everything else, which is why it can be challenging to wrap our minds around the eternal mystery of love.
But before we get to love, let us first consider how our bodies frame our experience. We think an ant is small because it is much smaller than our own physical bodies. If we were a bread crumb being devoured by an ant however, the ant would seem quite large.
A mountain, on the other hand, we say is quite large. If we were the size of Jupiter, a mountain on Earth would seem quite small.
The importance of our embodied experience in framing our realities can also be seen in our frequent and mostly unconscious use of metaphors. Although many people think you have to be a poet to come up with metaphors to describe the human experience, in reality we use metaphors all the time.
A World of Expression
Metaphors are a natural part of our language processing center. You do not have to explain how metaphors work to children. They understand without much help at all, which is why fictional characters like Amelia Bedelia, who take idioms, figures of speech, and metaphors quite literally end up being quite hilarious for young minds.
Pretty much everyone understands metaphors because they are based off of our lived universal experience. We might say, “that person gave me the cold shoulder” and almost everyone will understand this expression, because we all have the experience of cold in our bodies. Similarly, if we say, “I’m feeling down,” we know what this means because we have all experienced going down and up.
The same goes for someone who says, “I had a rough day.” Although you might not know anything about what happened to a person who uses this phrase, we know the embodied experience of roughness, whether it is the abrasive sandpaper kind or a rough road with a lot of bumps and potholes.
All of us have experience in the sun and sitting around fires; the color red is almost universally associated with warmth and heat. The opposite goes for blue, which almost universally means cold.
So metaphors are based on our lived experience, just as any other frame of reference is also tied to our sense experience.
A World Beyond
One of the hardest things for humans to understand are those that go beyond our embodied experience; to think of realities and physics that do not match what we see and feel. We want things to be linear, make sense, and follow intuitive rules like cause and effect.
This is why such concepts as quantum mechanics are so hard to wrap our minds around. We are used to being in a physical body and moving forward in linear space and time, so to think that events happen through randomness and chance just does not make sense. Even Einstein himself was heavily resistant to the ideas being put forth in early quantum mechanics, emblematic with his famous quote, “God does not play dice.”
It can be hard to wrap our heads around concepts that run contrary to our actual lived experience.
This is why one of the greatest, most eternal mysteries of humanity is that of love, of what it is and what it can be. This is because love exists in a different plane, a different realm of reality than the one we are used to. It is in the realm of non-reality that does not follow the laws of physics we are used to and it does not match up to our lived experience of being in a body.
The World of Love
If we were to base love on our lived experience, it would become quite limited. We might feel like we have 100 pounds of love we have to split up between people in our life. People may feel they gave all of their love away and there is nothing left over for themselves.
However, that is not how love works. Love is not a zero-sum game; it never was. It is not a limited resource or something you must divvy up between people in your life. As the writer Andrew Solomon points out in his TED talk, Love, No Matter What, love follows an additive model. Any love strengthens all of love.
Just ask any parent. They have one child and experience a world of love for their offspring. New parents feel their lives completely transform; they feel like for the first time of their life their heart is walking outside of their body. A human birth is a miracle any which way you look at it.
So, what happens when a second child comes along? Do parents feel like their loved has already been used up by the first child? Do they then have to split up their love between their children? Of course not. They feel just as much love for the second as they did for the first and the love they have for the first one is not diminished.
The more you give, the more you have
This is the crux of the matter: love is never a zero-sum game. Love plays by its own rules, which often runs quite the opposite to what we think, contrary to normal reality. Love is not a finite resource. It is infinite.
In fact, the more love you give away, the more love you have. The more loving you are, the happier you become. The happier you become, the more loving you are.
When I interviewed Dr. Erin Watson on the Learn to Love Podcast, she confirmed, “If we focused more on giving love, we would be happier ourselves. It is better to focus more on what you can give than what you can get.”
That is right. Love doesn’t follow our normal experience. Normally, if I give you my favorite shirt, I no longer have that shirt. However, if I offer you one of my favorite love languages, words of affirmation and tell you that you are a miracle of existence, that the world is lucky to have you, that I appreciate you and the beauty of your being, an extraordinary thing happens: I feel it too.
Dr. Watson then took it one step further by saying, “it is fear of losing love that prevents us from experiencing love in the first place.” Why do we fear losing love, an infinite resource that only grows the more we give it? Because we are used to our embodied experience; that giving away means losing out, that we have to physically hold on to something to make sure it doesn’t leave.
Who wants their partner to desperately hold onto them? No one. Who wants their partner to say, “I love you, and I love you so much that I will let you be exactly who you are. I hope you feel my love through all the things I say and do”? We all do. We all want to be loved for exactly who we are and to be in a healthy relationship; one that is not heavily codependent, but happily interdependent.
Knowing that love is not a zero-sum game and fully living in this truth taps us directly into the nature of the heart, which is a totally different way of living than in the mind.
The Reality of The Heart
I have many favorite quotes, and most of them revolve around the reality of the heart. One comes from the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami,
Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.
Again, this takes us back to the world of metaphor; another world of potential, another world that takes our lived experience to describe the immaterial. It can be easy to think your heart is an organ in your ribs, but that is simply not the case. Your heart is something else entirely, it may seem small, but in reality, it is enormous.
Indeed, it is like a great river. The more you open your heart, the more love that flows out of it. The more love that flows out of it, the more obstacles and resistance it takes along with it and even more flows out. It is endless, if you allow it. It is infinite, if you realize it.
If even the size of a great river does not seem big enough, consider the words of the Indian Philosopher Swami Prabhavananda put it this way,
The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not.
For us to truly understand just how that “little space within the heart” could be as great as the vast universe, we have to step out of our belief in ourselves as a small and insignificant being at the center of a vast and limitless universe.
Rather, we have to realize that it is our being that is imagining the universe in the first place, capturing the idea in our mind. Just the same, we can encompass all beings, all entities everywhere, past, present and future, inner and outer realms, with our love.
The true reality of the heart tells us we are not a drop in an endless ocean, but the entire ocean in a drop.
