Love is such a sought-after feeling that entire industries are built around it. Love is a TV genre, a movie genre, a book genre. Magazines obsess over and feed the ideal of romantic love. And yet so much of what passes for love leads to disappointment and pain. It’s these two sides of love—the joy of connection and the pain that comes from attaching and clinging—that meditation works with.
When we fall for someone or something (face it, human beings are so easily lovestruck we can fall for a car, a cell phone, or a brand of body wash), we feel pulled in the direction of the love object. When it’s a person, we feel a little lightness in our head, and warmth in various parts of our body. We can literally become weak in the knees. We are pulled out of ourselves and want to connect, so we flirt or touch or dance; or more.
The connecting part seems so natural. We form bonds with all sorts of people with degrees of connection varying from the mildly warm to the wildly passionate. But sometimes the power of the passion can be so great that we don’t…
