“All my armor falling down
in a pile at my feet
and my winter giving way to warm
as I’m singing him to sleep.”
~ Fiona Apple, Pale September
In romantic love, there are moments when all of your defenses dissolve. In that precious span of time, you are both wrapped in unconditional acceptance, and perhaps for the first time, you see one another. You see the other person not just with your eyes but with all of your senses and with your entire body.
It happens when you take everything on the surface and just set it aside. When you stop looking for a resolution. When you stop making judgments. When you stop looking for a good reason or a justification for the love you feel towards this “other.” When you stop looking for safety and assurances.
A space deep within opens, creating a gaping, flowing sensation. The presence of “other” becomes palpable and clear. The energy of “other” becomes vivid and inseparable from the energy of “self.” Beneath every obstruction, every single obstruction, inexplicable love is this very mind.
In tantric Buddhism, all things are approached in this way. The immediate surroundings, whatever they may be, and everything in the present moment in its intrinsic timelessness, becomes the lover. If you can open to this as it is right now, this everything that is in front of you, the opening is the same, and you can carry your opening into every social encounter and romantic interlude.
Defenses can temporarily numb the raw suffering inherent in our separateness, but when the defenses truly come down, there is no one there to suffer. The entire self is just a big defense. The ego, which is simply the conglomeration of thoughts and mental representations of the self in relation to “not self,” dissolves, which is to say that all of those thoughts and mental representations simply stop being perpetuated, and what is left is this immediate experience of what is, which “you” cannot even own as “your” experience, and your immediate experience of this everything is your interconnection with everything, a consciousness of contact, a consciousness of being everything.
You cannot experience this everything without dropping your armor, so the opportunity that presents itself in romantic love to learn and train in opening is exceedingly precious, especially when there are challenges. Go beyond logic and, letting go of all short-term romantic goals, let the opening itself be the aim. There is no reason to look for the partner who will meet your every need or every criteria. The ideal is someone who will simply allow you your opening, but even then, criticism, dislike, rejection or absence pose no challenge. None at all. Love is a meditation. The goal is to open to everything. Whoever inspires this, let them. They give you something no one else could give you, a doorway to the unconditional love in which you swim.
Suddenly, every gust of wind becomes a lover’s touch. Every tree becomes a lover’s body. You touch the smooth bark of branches arching across the mulch trail, and you experience it consciously as caressing the skin of your lover, the universe. Even ordinarily painful sensations become ecstatic perceptions of contact with the universe, a warm, affectionate dance with existence. You are never disconnected from it. You never stand apart from it. You are it.
