It is important to understand love as a feeling versus love as a practice (as a discipline). If your wife or husband isn’t looking so hot and you don’t get a feeling, a frisson of love or fancying them in the moment, it doesn’t matter. Tell them that they are beautiful anyway. In this way, you’re not simply responding to a feeling of love, or a sight of beauty; you are actually creating the love and the beauty.
Your partner can become the arena in which you practise love. When you get better at it, then this can begin to flow over to other people.
If you just do normal things with your partner, then that’s just being normal. However, if you do things to develop your relationship, then that’s a practice. A practice is therefore a conscious and systematic engagement with yourself, with God or with another person.
Being loving because you’re having an emotion is different from practising love because you want to create that, because you want to create the love. It’s the difference between creative/ proactive/conscious love and unconscious/reactive love. Most people have at one time fallen in love, and we feel naturally like we’re entitled to natural love all of the time, but life just doesn’t work that way. So many marriages fail when both partners believe that they are entitled to love, and when they believe that the love that they show the other person needs no conscious effort, no creativity.
In some ways, when love is practised consciously, it produces and reflects a deeper love, as it comes from a deep well of creativity and intention. You’re giving love into the world, where otherwise there wouldn’t be love. You’re saying, ‘Hey, I want to feel love; I want to create, grow and develop this relationship’, rather than saying, ‘I feel love and I am reacting to it.’
Thus we can see that love is not only a reactive feeling, but it can also be a creative action.
If you are spending some time listening to your partner, this practice shifts your intention from listening because you feel like listening, towards listening as a loving gift to your partner.
Similarly, if you’re complimenting your partner on his or her inner and/or outer beauty, you are showing appreciation not because you see and react to the beauty, but because you’re committed to creating beauty. You’re appreciating something you want to bring forth, rather than something that’s already there.
You can do this with other family members or friends, colleagues, neighbours and acquaintances as well. For example, if a teenager is lying to you, if you say, ‘You’re a liar’, then you’re reinforcing the identity of what you don’t want. You can create beauty by giving appreciation for the beauty before it’s there. You create the beauty. You are consciously shifting energy and creating love.
I believe that we not only are able to do this, but moreover, we have a duty to consciously co-create love; co-creating with Spirit. There can be no higher calling for us.
So, show love, give space, give affirmations to the people close to you. Do it as an act of generosity and honour to the Divine and to that person.
Richard Charles Anderson holds a Coaching Certificate from the Institute of Leadership and Management and he is a fully certified Awakening Coach. His background is in economics, accountancy and senior management in the public sector. He has managed up to 2,000 staff with a budget of some £80 million. His foremost objective is to transform lives through coaching, meditation and energy healing. Richard lives with his wife and three daughters in Seaton, Devon, UK.
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