Happy Valentines to all of you. . . Let’s make it our mission to create more love. . .
“The planet does not need more “successful people.” The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds.” – Dalai Lama
The Biology Of Love
As humans we depend on love. Love is a dynamic intrinsic to the history of evolution, and the basis for our human society. The biology of love is a deep, cellular, visceral, physiological experience. This stems from the deeply rooted need, which is our powerful yearning for connection, an intuitive search for survival. When you look among insects, birds, mammals, and other animals, you will observe that this dynamic needs is inherent in all living beings. Striving for connection is not unique to our species. Yet, the many ways and levels we seek connection through is most highly developed in humans, because we have the capacity for higher mental functioning and thus complex feelings and behaviors. In the realms of both spirituality and sexuality, we call this love. This powerful conscious emotion is the fundamental celebration in all historical secular and religious literature, and regarded as the most important. In the spiritual sense of the word, love is considered the noblest human experience. Learning to generate, give, and receive resonance of love is the foundation of Tantra practice.
Love is both a quality of emotion and a bio-electric current of energy. Throughout the journey of our lives, each of us meets unique challenges that shape our emotional capacity to love and bodily openness to flow love’s energy.
We each develop unique closure habits in response to our specific life challenges. Tantric breath and somatic meditation techniques gently “rewire” the body-mind to allow a greater amperage of love and light energy to flow. Love and light gently release psychic and physical blocks that may be stored in body tissues (tissues store issues). The more you consciously practice openness, expansion of breath, body energy, and thus openness off mind, the less time you spend practicing closure, rigidity and fear by default.
The evolution in humans of our highly developed potential for the conscious and caring connectivity we call love, offers us the basis and possibility for a more balanced and fulfilling way of relating to one another and our planet. This is because our species has the cerebral ability to create language. We have a need to create language because we have to communicate with one another at higher levels than any other species, for several reasons. One is that humans have a longer period of relations with our infants that then grow into adults, than other mammals. Humans also have the instinct to make love year round because females are active sexually year round. We are also the only species whose female has the ability for multi-orgasm, so humans spend more time in the love making act than other species. It is believed that because our male and female communication is lengthened, we have developed a desire for language. Language gives us a vehicle to express internal feelings and thus helps us understand each others’ needs, which gives us an ability to create the possibility for lengthened, shared physical interaction, and procreation. We need love to be able to survive, and so need to be able to communicate emotions that lead us toward empathy and thus greater connection, or union. Hence, humans are born with the cerebral ability to create and memorize language. No other life or living form has these complex capabilities to do so.
When we explore the foundations of evolution and adaptation we identify both our need and our innate capacity for love. In fact the most adaptive development in the evolution of our own species seems to have been the development of our great human capacity for love and loving. Interestingly, this leads me to present briefly this common discussion over love being both spiritual and sexual. Prehistoric civilizations intuited that human sexuality (a striving for connection or oneness with another), the emotion of love (a striving for connection or oneness with another) and spirituality (a striving for union or oneness with what we call the Divine) were all linked as one in the same. Do we seek to find the Divine in the other, through human connection? It seems we have been taught that we only find the divine is spiritual practices defined by religions. That sexuality and emotion (though each quests for connection and union) are different or even lower forms of a connection. Are they?
Due to the many forms of mental illness that are often cured or helped by the implementation of certain chemicals into the body and mind, our modern science has been prompted to take interest in observing and examining the path by which the emotion of love has become so powerful to human sustenance. Researchers have identified biological similarities in chemicals created in the body and mind when engaging in all three forms of connection: sexual connection, emotional connection and spiritual union with a larger Source, whatever that means to each individual. These same (often synthetic) chemicals are currently implemented for cure of mental illnesses. Due to the discovery of these respective identical chemical responses, scientists have been observing that the three are connected to the same foundational source. What they are discovering is a new understanding and thus perspective of a deep, cellular, visceral, physiological human experience, which interestingly has fundamental roots in the innate need for pleasure. Pleasure is beginning to be seen and accepted as a primary root to the experience of a connection to love. Pleasure is a simple need, related to the need for love and connectedness, and thus survival. Throughout the course of evolution, nature has presented chemical rewards that provide our bodies with enormous pleasure both when we are loved and are loving toward others.
However, pleasure is a concept and motivation that is often shamed. Pleasure is often feared in religious text and society as a form or path to gluttony, defined as pleasure in excess and to the point of harm to self and others, and thus causing disconnect from spirit. This is true, if a person is disconnected from source and they turn to material gain or substance to feel better, and it is certainly detrimental to survival of themselves and in greater context, our species. We discuss this in light of addictions, cruelty, thievery, and rooted in separation from heart-centered, authentic self and source. However, lets not throw the baby out, as they say. It is not pleasure that is bad. It is the need for an excess of pleasure to fill that void; the emptiness and fear that true pleasure can fill, when in bonding, loving connections with self, nature, spirit and thus with others. However, shaming pleasure only makes humans recoil, and disconnect from source. This reaction to an unmet visceral and spiritual need becomes gluttony and self seeking. This becomes a confusing spiral wrapped inside of a pretzel. Let’s slow down.
At the root of all, is pleasure. For it is pleasure that we seek for survival. Lets think about a more primitive time in history, before human species, language and emotional bonding or intimacy had developed to the evolved stages we exist in today–– but when the need to survive was just as strong. Chemicals like endorphins (short for endogenous morphines) are opiates that mask a pain from a wound and provide additional energy for flight from a predator. Chemicals such as endorphins may originally have come into play primarily as opiates, to help a primate get away from being chased by a predator, even if they were in pain or wounded. Think about it, when in pain from some kind of a wound, being touched in a caring way will promote the creation of these healing endorphins in your body, giving you the chemicals to numb the pain and repair the wound. Hence we see animals licking one another’s or their own wounds for healing, or people rubbing or tending to one another’s wounds toward repair. As evolution of our species has continued, these chemicals have acquired an even more developed function. Now, in addition to helping an organism deal with pain in a fight-or-flight situation, these pleasure-inducing chemicals are developed as a means to promote the long term bonding involved in the caretaking, and even beyond this, the caring touch—required for the survival of what has become a more complex species. As we learn language to express needs, wants and emotions, and ability to receive the communications of others, we develop empathy, intimacy and thus life affirming connections.This connection and bonding can bring us to the state of euphoric bliss, found through a resonance experienced through bonding with one another and spirit, creating a connection to spiritual energy of magnanimous heart expansion and intuitive consciousness. It is what happens in our bodies that brings on a spiritual or trance like state. Meditative or trance like states involve chain in the electrical activity of the brain, recognized as altered consciousness, including changes in sense of time, space, identity, strong emotional and great changes in motor output. 
Mystics have often described their experiences in the language of sex and love, and a most common theme in the midst of both sexual passion and spiritual illumination is “love.”
The experience of “falling in love” is fused with a rush of chemical rewards that most likely explain the euphoric high. The emotion of love and the intense pleasures of sexual love are both associated with rising levels of certain chemicals, like phenylethylamine (an amphetamine-like substance) endorphins, oxytocins, and seratonins. Such chemical rewards a factor in the pleasure that mothers, fathers, and other adults (as well as children) can derive from caring for babies and why people in loving relationships speak of a great sense of contentment.
At the core vitality of all living beings in pursuit of a connection toward the strengthening of survival, in all forms–– sexual bonding, emotional love and spiritual union–– we experience the chemicals that take pain, heal wounds, create energy, give us a feeling of emotional bonding, and euphoric bliss. We seek pleasure for survival. We seek love and pleasure as a means toward continued evolution because this is an inherent need pulsing from our very core.
Think about all that opening your heart to finding ways to create, to experience, to receive, to give love, pleasure, empathy and loving brings to your life. . . Slow down and find ways to attune to your breath, your sensoric body, your senses, the nature around you, the heart within another, others. . . Find ways to create more love in yourself and in the world. . .This is the beautiful celebration of Eros, of Life, of Love, and of our species evolutionary survival. . .
THOUGHTS TO PONDER, EXPERIENCES TO TRY. . .
What is the beautiful essence of learning to cultivate pleasure from within your cellular body?
Self-pleasuring can be sought beyond simply seeking “release” to find pleasure. . . but instead by cultivating, channeling, generating and emanating pleasure in your ways of moving, experiencing, and loving! The way you feel fabric on your skin, the way you hear music, experience nature, move, dance, see color, take in theatre, ponder film. . . You can direct your mind to experience the sensations within toward focusing your mind and body on cultivating pleasure; by processing and integrate feelings and experiences with more than just an ego-centric experience, but by correlating it all to realizing the euphoric spiritual essence within all experiences, the connection to nature you as an organic being are gifted with, the ability to create more love in your being by cultivating pleasure that then radiates out into the world and become infectious source of natural energy to all you connect with! Wouldn’t you rather be a purveyor of light rather than a vampire, fueled by negativity and latching on to other peoples’ energy?
When you eat don’t just eat. Focus on learning your forgotten language of taste, no matter what the food or drink. Touch you food, feel the texture of it. Feel it with open eyes, feel it with your eyes closed. When you are chewing really chew, remember it would be disrespectful not to chew not to taste. This is the way of Tantra alchemy. Touch others let them touch you. Often we back away when we speak to someone and they get too close. We don’t touch we don’t hug we don’t enjoy each others’ being. Go to the tree and touch the tree. Touch the rock. Go to the river and let the river flow through your hands. There are a thousand opportunities throughout the day to get in tune and revive your senses. Don’t miss any opportunity. There is no need to make separate time for it. The whole day is a training in sensitivity. Use all of these opportunities to come alive. To connect to spirit through your body.
Standing under your shower use the opportunity. Feel the touch of the water falling across your skin. Rest on the ground. . . feel the earth’s vibration beneath you, within you. Rest on the beach, feel the sand. Listen to the sounds of the sand. Listen to the sounds of the sea. Rest in your bed, feel your sheets. Turn your television off. . . turn your music off. . . Listen to the resonances in the air. The quiet spaces between each thought in your mind. The vibrance of your natural heartbeat. . The trembling of breath in your body. . .Accept all that you are hearing and allow it affect you inside. Use every opportunity and then you will be able to learn the language of your sense again. . . The is the essence of the cultivation of pleasure and the life affirming vibrance of love. . .
“The planet does not need more “successful people.” The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds.” – Dalai Lama
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