On Finding Love

Hello, Friend.

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, I want to remind you that love is a feeling we generate by loving.

That said, being loved is its own essential pleasure, and sometimes, in those late-night hours after a long day, when we’re finally in bed, and all is quiet, and the dark envelops us like a fathomless mirror, being loved—held, seen, wanted—by another can feel like the lost key to the life we long for.

For years after my divorce (and years during my marriage) I felt this nearly unbearable ache. By day, my life was full to brimming; I was creating and growing and caring for and providing, and this richness of doing filled me up. But by night, curled up in my bed, my heart would ache, and I longed for a man—“the man”—that I knew better than to make my answer, my comfort, my medicine, my arrival, my exhale, but nonetheless did.

Despite my rational knowing, I still sought love’s gifts of peace and comfort from another.

After a couple of relationships post-divorce, I was alone for the first time in my adult life. At first, the late-night ache in my chest felt like it might consume me. I would cry myself to sleep.

But rather than recoiling from this pain, I surrendered to it. I decided to tend it like I would the pain of any beloved: gently, attentively, holding space, offering love.

I shifted my focus, slowly, from my fantasy balm of a man beside me to my felt experience in the moment; my body. I dropped out of the story I was attaching to my ache (all the things I was making my aloneness mean), and focused instead on feeling the ache as pure sensation: heaviness radiating from my solar plexus, a dark pool spreading to my limbs. When the stories rose, I quieted them kindly but firmly and went back to feeling: noticing, locating the sensations, breathing into them, watching them transform.

By day, I found myself paying more attention to simple pleasures. I didn’t have to force it: doing so came naturally, as an extension of my practice of feeling what hurt. My morning tea. The sky at daybreak. My dog’s soft fur. My daughter’s knowing, gentle hands. My son’s twinkling eyes. And as I noticed more pleasures, I made—without effort, without force—more of them. I bought a frother for my morning tea. I made time to take my dog on walks in the woods and by the lake instead of around the block. I became even more present with my kids, feeling the exquisite depth of my love for them, as well as the bittersweet dawning of their adulthoods.

I found myself taking lavish care of my body: massaging my own feet with coconut oil at night, buying beautiful new sex toys, learning new recipes, taking long walks in every kind of weather, buying a standing desk to help with work, resting when I needed it, sprinting and sweating hard when I needed that.

One day, as I was talking to a friend, I realized that I hadn’t felt that old nighttime ache in a long time. That night, I noticed how peaceful I felt in my bed. My sheets—I bought myself new sheets, too—felt deliciously soft. My dog, a gift of endless love. My body, an instrument of orchestral aliveness. My mind, limitless. I was alone, but I was content. Did I still long for partnership, companionship, sex with another? To be loved in that way? Yes. But that longing felt playful, a choice; not crushing, a need.

I learned that love is always available to me, in every single moment. That I am the one who generates, very literally, the feeling of love in my body and soul, through the act of loving. I discovered an endless number of things to love, every day—including my own pain. Love is nothing more, or less, than the act of radical knowing: noticing, paying attention to, allowing, sensing, feeling.

As humans, we are geared for delight. We are wired for astonishment. Our senses seek the sensation of their affirmation, their existence: this is rapture. Engaging them is the act of loving. An act of love. We can start right now, wherever we are. Our bodies want it, our spirits need it. Without apology, without agenda, as an act of devotion and a ritual of communion.

Happy Valentine’s Day :)

Love,

Kirstin