The Three Hindrances of Love
(Teaching Love is Harder Than One Would Suspect)
By Jennifer Finch, LPC, SEP
March 31, 2022
In the Healing Ground, aspects of the large body of work by Dr. Judith Blackstone known as the Realization Process, we work with the “innate” qualities of the body. We explore the “felt-sense” (to use Dr. Eugene Gendlin’s coined term) of our own intelligence, power, sexuality/gender, voice, self and Love. We are of course not limited to these qualities, as humans with grand capacities, we can feel into and somatically explore any body-rich quality, such as compassion, equanimity, confidence, bliss, etc. The point of attunement to these qualities is to increase our somatic awareness, embodied presence, and to regain and reclaim our wholeness and fully integrated Self. When we integrate and root our fundamental intelligence, voice and power in our bodies for instance, we begin to feel more like our authentic self. To feel intelligent and female can feel empowering. To feel like you have a strong, powerful voice can help affirm your backbone.
Unfortunately, over a lifetime, our life-experience and undigested traumas have left many of us fragmented and separated from our authentic Self. We no longer feel like who we are, only what others have wanted us to become. We have stretched to fit others’ ideals, expectations, and broken systems devoid of compassion. We have become highly domesticated and covered up our authenticity layer upon layer. It will take some deep excavation to uncover and discern innately who we are, but it is hopeful that we all can, no matter how many layers we have. In many ways, we have lost our primal senses, our ancestral instincts, and we trained to live on the land instead of with it. This has become problematic. We have become manipulated by media, monopolized by capitalism, and weaponized by our family belief systems. Underneath all of that, I truly believe there is great benevolence. Environmentally conscious right action, right speech, right behavior, and of course great ability to live in Love.
I have been teaching these qualities for a little over a year now and I have become particularly obsessed with the quality of Love. Perhaps because it feels like the other side of the same coin as compassion, which has been where the majority of my research and teaching has been dedicated for the past decade. But Love feels even bigger and maybe even more important than compassion. Why? Because compassion is an action, and usually requires something of us, and Love is just Love. We can rest there. In order to return back to our fullest selves, we have to learn how to relax. Letting go and releasing into Love and resting there, seems a necessary step prior to any action of compassion. We have to stabilize ourselves on a very unstable ground fraught with conflict, stress and perfectionism, over striving, exaggerated expectations, hunger, drug-overdoses, loss, illness, and the brink of WWIII. Fighting to change all of that, we need to rest up. Regain our footing. Cultivate our strength and courage. Come back to our bodies and re-connect to our environment. We need to get beneath all the tumultuous waves crashing above us, driven by busy and judgmental minds, and discover our steadiness of our core selves in our sturdy bodies. Above all, we need to begin to feel good about ourselves, we need to feel loved. Otherwise, we don’t tend to bring our best self to others and to the world. And all those atrocities perpetuate from unstable minds and ignorance, rooted in negative and harmful beliefs, and a lack of Love.
We can begin with the simple act of attuning to Love. You will see how safe, firm, and immovable it is. A great place to steady our feet and tap into this undeviating source, catch our breath, and begin again.
It is mysterious how a group of individuals can sit together, feel into their own chests and heart centers, and attune to some feeling or quality that feels like Love. It is very subtle, but with practice we can learn to turn up the volume on it and even expand it in our bodies reaching every cell. We can also extend it outward to others, filling our whole bodies, and environment. It can feel incredibly powerful and breath-takingly healing when we sit together in a collective group, resting in Love.
To those whom this sounds extremely strange, woo-woo, and even far-fetched and ridiculous, I invite you to try it and see for yourself before you knock it or take my word for it. If it helps, there is a lot of convincing science to back this up. As a self-proclaimed avid researcher who tackles everything first through a scientific observational mind, and as a giant skeptic of new-agey practices, I have to say, this experience changed me. Maybe I was ready to open to it. Maybe my recent diagnosis of breast cancer has allowed me to surrender to life’s ups and downs more. Maybe my age has something to do with it. Maybe I have witnessed and experienced so much pain and suffering in this world, and I feel I have nothing left to lose but try the avenue of Love. Or, maybe, just maybe Love itself is a healing force, and this has nothing to do with me in particular. Maybe we have something beneficial to learn from the power of Love. John Lennon had this figured out decades ago, “All You Need is Love.”
The power of prayer has been studied in the scientific literature for a while now, and the outcomes are awe-inspiring, providing such hope to those who are up against all odds of survival.
What Dr. Blackstone is teaching here is definitely not new. In fact, it is centuries old and derived from myriad ancient practices that are coming to fruition with cutting-edge neuroscience, psychology and neuro-biology.
In my short discovery of teaching Love for a year, I have discovered two camps of individuals:
1. Those open to feeling Love in their chest and expanding it to their whole body; 2. Those absolutely NOT open to feeling Love at all, anywhere in their body.
Interesting. Why wouldn’t everyone be open to this simple somatic experience? It feels amazing!
I will share the three most common hindrances that I have discovered in my teaching that keeps students from opening to Love.
Let me first provide a little context. Love in this practice has no context:) It is simply a somatic experience. It is felt as a quality in our body. It does not pertain to any storyline or content. It is not love for a child, or a spouse, or a pet, or a mountain view, it is just Love. A kind of Universal Love. Far removed from the trenches of heartbreak or pain caused in love or out of love by someone else. This is a different nature of Love, in its subtlety, and also in its enormity. Subtle in the way we can examine and feel it as a pervasive quality in our body, but also how we can expand it universally.
1. The first hindrance that students come across is:
usually when they are attaching Love to a storyline or a past experience full of context, usually negative in nature and recall, i.e. love causes wounding and unbearable pain.
1. The first hindrance that students come across is usually when they are attaching Love to a storyline or a past experience full of context, usually negative in nature and recall, i.e. love causes wounding and unbearable pain.
How to work with this: Drop the story, and just feel the feeling. This is Big Love. Love that doesn’t require any return in relationship. There are no expectations or hidden agendas. You can immediately relinquish any idea that you have to perform in some certain way, or give, or take, or DO anything. Nothing is required. It is just an experience.
Notice how love with any context asks something from you like an automatic request gets stirred up: “What is Being Asked of Me Here?” If there is something being called for, notice how our idea of love begins to shift. Usually, we coil up and get dodgy. We have over-coupled some past pain or fear with love. Here we are again wrestling with love in a context or storyline. See how it is the context and storyline that actually makes us shift around and change in direction within us. We push or pull against it, or glomp onto it and grasp it in a tight fist. Love can never hurt you! Only people and contextual love does. This is a much, much bigger Love. When something ignites a particular response from us, such as expressing love back or prompts some other form of communication like, “run as fast as you can in the opposite direction,” drop the story and come back to the body. Just feel into your own heart and rest there. Using interoception, bring conscious awareness to what it is you actually feel there in your own chest while attuning to Love. It is an open, free-form exploration, like a child in their own backyard. What do you feel there, in your own heart? A gentle vibration? A warmth? An opening? A tenderness? Nothing is wrong, or right or correct or incorrect. It is quite specifically YOUR experience of living in YOUR own heart touching the awareness of Love itself.
The second hindrance students complain about when opening to love is:
when they want to list all of their traumas across their lifespan and defiantly state that there is no way they can know what Love is because it has never been felt or “given to them!”
2. The second hindrance students complain about when opening to Love is when they want to list all of their traumas across their lifespan and defiantly state that there is no way they can know what Love is because it has never been felt or “given to them!”
Again, this is attached to some storyline of how love is supposed to be. How we visualize love in our mind, or some idealized notion of how it is supposed to feel, like what we know from watching Disney movies. “You Complete Me” love. Blerg. Love is not love with a story. It is just a somatic experience. If you must insist on a story, you can think of it like Godly Love, Universal Love, more spiritual in nature. Love that feels stable, constant, and can hold everything at once without crumbling. Unflappable. Strong and unwavering. The Ground of Love. Love that holds the cosmos and the core of the Earth. And also, you. It holds ALL of you.
No matter what you push and thrust upon Love, it only reflects pure and raw Love back.
The third hindrance that becomes problematic for students to open to love is:
the temptation to name, categorize or get a fix on exactly what Love is.
3. The third hindrance that becomes problematic for students to open to love is the temptation to name, categorize or get a fix on exactly what Love is.
This is a deal breaker for a lot of students because they simply cannot handle not being told step-by-step how they are supposed to feel Love in their own bodies. Quite literally they bow up to argue, revert to some younger feisty self, turn off their Zoom camera or just never return to class after break.
Here is the secret for success: no one can teach you how to feel love. Because Love is in everything. It is taught by everything and also nothing. It is there the whole time within us and outside of us. In Music. Art. Drama. Poetry. Literature. Architecture. Dew Drops. Rainbows. Kittens. And Surprises. (Easter egg for the real music lovers out here:) We simply FEEL it. And when we can FEEL it, we cannot separate ourselves from it. It is us! We don’t need to define it. In fact, when we attempt to define it and put it in a box; organize it with a shape, a color, a temperature; we diminish what Love actually is.
I will talk more on this third hindrance as it seems to be the most problematic. I have seen students quite literally close down on themselves, move into constriction, and defiantly reject Love. As unbearable as this is to witness, my aim is to teach even the most Love resistant, Love-phobic individual that it is okay, we all start where we are, and we can instead learn how to gently work with this level and intensity of resistance.
When we confront anything that is outside the domain of ego, our natural response is fear. We begin to feel like we are losing our reference points and the ground underneath us becomes unstable. When we face something that is not already part of our fixed, ego-world, we become afraid. We always want to draw it in, tame it, name it, categorize it, apply to it some kind of concept, know it and understand it. In doing so it feels more familiar and this steadies our feet, and our ego.
So, in the teaching of Love as strictly a somatic, felt-sensed experience, a quality of the body, see if we can resist this temptation to categorize, quantify and box up Love in qualitative data. Work with your ego’s demands to define Love. Become aware of your tendency to pull away, and simply return to the experience of Love itself in your body. This is an application and dedication of mindfulness, remembering to return again and again, as many times as necessary, to the subtle underlying texture of our experience of Love in our chest/heart center. Keep coming back to the body (it works if you work it). Get out of the grip of mind and the grasping for some kind of known definition, and just openly explore what it feels like to sit in your own heart.
Working with resistance.
First know that resistance is natural. It is the ego’s reluctance to yield to something that it cannot control. When you notice resistance in yourself to experiencing Love (which is beyond labeling, categorization, and control), ask yourself: “What is the problem? What is so unacceptable about this?” When you want to run away, ask yourself, “What are you trying to run away from?” and then take a direct look. Strangely enough, your own response of resistance gives you the inspiration to actually look more closely at the Love that is manifesting at that moment in your body.
See if you can open more fully to the texture and feeling of Love. Allow yourself to go deeper and deeper into the texture (using your expansive sensory platform) of Love. Remember it is distilled. Much subtler than any storyline or definition. Pervasive. Constant. Can hold EVERYTHING.
If you still bump up against stubborn resistance wearing a hard hat: at this point, you might want to use an image to help you go deeper. A suggestion might be to visualize the image of a thousand-petal lotus in your heart center and imagine that the lotus is opening from the outside into the Love. The outer layers opening and softening, layer by layer working inward toward the center. At each layer, contemplate the quality of Love and tap into the somatic experience, the “felt-sense” in your body.
With practice, you begin to notice how Love is stable. There is a stable ground of Love. Not like the ground under your feet, but a pervasive ground of Love everywhere around you and within you. Above you, and below you. Like a 360 degree gyroscope. It is subtle and static and felt. But, we can never hold onto it in any way. We can only experience it and know that it is always there.
Our ego-psychological process might meet Love and want to label it as “sadness,” “bliss,” “pain,” “fear,” or “negativity,” but when we do this, we freeze the process. If we can follow steps here to reduce resistance and find antidotes to the hindrances, we can relate to Love in a nonconceptual way. When we can do that, we can begin to discover how it is always there and is a vast healing source available to us.
Our body is an extraordinarily profound teacher if we know how to listen. If we are open to it, Love is the guru.
When we attune to Love in the body, hear its voice, and surrender to its call, we are satisfying the fragmentation within us and becoming more whole. And when we feel our wholeness, we heal. We are left with a mind that is empty, peaceful, and free. We live in full awareness of Love and at any time can be enveloped by Love and enjoy its vastness. We begin to know that we are made of Love.
I am made of Love. I am made of Love.
When individuals come to this work, many are broken from unspeakable traumas. And when they begin to feel love, in their chest, they begin to regain that sense of empowerment. They begin to question: “How bad could it?”, “How bad could I be?” “I'm made of love.” “I am made of love.”
And that is very healing. That is self-love, that is self-acceptance. In Buddhism it is called Basic Goodness. A deep, and fundamental knowing that I am good. At my core, I have basic goodness.
It's the key to the rest of the healing. It sends the loud and clear message that we're worth healing. And when we know that, and feel that, imagine how different the world would look. How beautiful it looks.
So, Love, it might be one of the more important qualities that we attend to in the body, maybe the most important one.
