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Columns: Modern Meditations

As a doctor of transpersonal psychology, Jonni O’Connor has facilitated thousands of groups and tens of thousands of individuals through conscious and subconscious vision quests where they attained the riches of insight and integrated them into the practicalities of their everyday lives. She can be contacted at both www.jonnioconnor.com and www.modernmeditations.com.

Mastering love

I’ve been teaching about love lately. Even its opposite, which is often called fear, is love. It’s really just fear of love. We see this fear as resistance, or as attachment to outcome, or as control, worry or doubt: all elements of forgetting - not remembering - to love, and to be love.

Many years ago I used to be annoyed because all I ever heard in books and lectures was ‘love’. “Choose love.” “Love is everything.” “Love is all there is.” I did not feel the messages – at least not to the depth that I now realize. I felt there was a language problem and I needed an interpreter, because I didn’t get it. How am I suppose to choose love if it doesn’t choose me, I would ask? How do I do that? The replies were often a smile with a patient understanding, as they listened and rephrased it for me in countless ways. I would walk away, still asleep inside, still unaware of what it all really meant.

So many of the clients I see are still in that slumber and now I am the one with the patient smile, who sits with them and works with them and reflects the love they have inside, back to them. Like a parent mirroring love to their infant as they hold them close to their heart; like a lover glowing as they breathe in their partner’s presence, I reflect the love they have within them, right back at them - so they can see they are already there. They are in love. They are love. They had simply forgotten. I may listen to their resistance, their shame, their perceived lacking, their excuses and justifications and issues of every kind, and I still reflect the love they are keeping hidden. They cry, they get angry, they close down, they attempt to deny. They express all the emotions within them, and still I sit until they remember that they are love. They are in love and they are of love. I teach them to master love this way.

The mastery of love means that all other lower level emotions of fear of love are like a slave to this master. But because the master is the kindest and most benevolent ruler there is, the other emotions are completely willing to serve and honour this love. You just need to let high levels of love truly rule you. No doubts, no fears, of any kind. Just love.

Love is of your being, your energy. Love is a feeling that permeates your thinking, your physical body, your every emotion. To get at love, you need to connect with it, within you. It’s not external and it does not involve your thinking or wanting. You need to get out of your mind to be in love. Then connect to that love often and well, and let it seep through you, rising from your very core, outwards. You feel the energy and emotion of it as the vibration it truly is. And yet it is so much more than just emotion. But only by the experience of it will you come to know this.

Your body and mind feel the tingling, the expansive energy buzzing throughout you. Your emotions feel heightened, vulnerable, alive. This combination creates the synergy that conducts the love as feeling. This powerful pull seems amplified within you, but the love you have within you is bigger still. This is merely the tip of the iceberg. But it’s a great start.

The training in the mastery of love begins at this point. You have to be connected, plugged in to yourself, which is the oneness of all. Now you work with honouring that love as the real you, the master that you are. That usually takes time, and always depth, but the most important element by far is commitment. Commitment to yourself. And since you are love, that means a true commitment to love. It’s a win-win situation and the most important one to which you will ever challenge yourself.

So I’ve been teaching about love, because there is really nothing else – just a disconnect from it. Most of us live in the disconnect at one time or another. Perhaps it’s time to welcome yourself back home. To remember love. To remember that we are love and that the experience of us is the expression of love. We must remember, if we are ever to master it.

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Modern Meditations
by Jonni O'Connor, Ph.D.