Learning to love. Friends or Lovers?

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Friends or Lovers

Friends are about loyalty; lovers, about fidelity. Friends are about confidence; lovers are about trust. Friends are about secrecy; lovers, about intimacy. Friends are about sharing; lovers are about mutuality. Friends are about numbers; lovers, about exclusiveness.
The origin of the word ‘friend’ comes from the Proto-German, meaning ‘freedom’. Friendships set us free, since they accept us unconditionally; but drop the second letter ‘r’ and it turns to ‘fiend’!
‘Lover’ comes from the Latin: luber, meaning ‘desire’ (de-sire- pertaining to the master?).
Where ‘friendship’ implies ‘freedom’, ‘lovers’ imply ‘commitment’.

Last night a friend of mine was going on about ‘men’, and how happy she was without them. “They are so different from us” she said. And of course, we all know she´s right. Men and women are different. Our perception on life and our experience of it, have been proven to be reactions from different parts of the brain, as seen in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI’s). Even orgasm is integrated with different sensorial responses! A study we made in the Mexican National Autonomous University proved young boys initiated their sexual lives at around 14, with a ‘friend’; where young girls started at around 16 years of age, with a ‘boyfriend’. Boys don´t necessarily relate sex with emotions; girls, do. It is a physiological response.

Male erection is an autonomic response with a neural loop round the spinal cord. Women´s eroticism excites a response from the spinal cord, through the emotional mid-brain in the hypothalamus, to the rational cortex, before deciding to respond, sexually. One responds instinctively, for a couple minutes; the other, with an unconscious response to what could end up being a 9-month pregnancy.

Such differences make for different interpretations of what a ‘friend’ or a ‘lover’ implies. Nowadays, with ‘free’ open relationships among teenagers, sex is not a negotiated right. It is as freely given, as it is, taken away. Mutuality or exclusiveness are not conditioned. The effect of open pornography in marriages is just making sex a sport, covered up in lies. Truth and fidelity are now obsolete. So what is the difference?

I have come to believe that the difference is 'commitment'; not only contractual or social but in soul. We are bound by soul, to love, being responsible for each other´s spiritual growth! Sexual intimacy with a lover is a binding spiritual commitment. If women's awareness of inner consciousness is more developed, we are responsible to help our lover grow. 
As life turns the spiral of chance, lovers return. We owe each other a kind word; reassurance, in failure; memories, to keep the cold nights warm; gratitude, to lessen the burden of failure. They may need help or council. It is no longer about sex or possessiveness; but about ‘loving’.
Lovers get to know the soul where friends only touch the surface.

Learning to Love: Impotence

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

 Impotence

How can I blog about loving and not be able to help my 22 year old daughter when she asks “How can I get a boyfriend?”
Beautiful, smart hard-working, good grades in the University, responsible and very loving…but 22, when boys her age are still playing around and older boys are thinking serious. Her girlfriends and their relations describe the gory scenario youth is confronting…one-night stands; abusive affairs with married bosses; desperate efforts to rank in beauty competitions, with extreme risks such as anorexia. Just in her generation they have had to deal with abortions, AIDS, clinics for AA, abduction and violence and chronic states of depression and hopelessness. Now, it´s not everyone. There are those who have travelled abroad to help out in Africa and Asia; those who have won international recognition and project financing; those who are working in the International Court of Justice, in the government; those who have written books and poetry and started their own recording and DJ companies. What makes the difference?

My psychoanalyst, Honorary Founder of the International Association for Mental Health, Louis Feder, said we can always expect: a thirty per cent of the population to have to deal with risk, whether potential, triggered or occurred; forty per cent will be mediocre and go with the flow with no self-determination or conscious awareness; and the upper thirty percent will be resilient and work to help others.

 

By definition, this differentiation, determined either by genetic, congenital, or early learning conditions makes a difference as they unfold as adults. There is also their cerebral maturation process, which in the early twenties, develops abstract- reasoning in the frontal lobe. So they will begin to think for themselves, questioning their parents, social mores and their very reason for living… And of course, there is also Freud. We repeat patterns set by parents in our relationships, selecting and molding our lovers according to our parents’ early modeling. So, one finds oneself establishing co-dependence, whether it be as an addict, or as ‘rescuer’ of a partner in need; or choosing partners who are aggressive and abusive, or weak and submissive according to the roles we learned as children. That's when helping a daughter implies not damaging her.

The feeling of impotence is wrenching. You want to help a loved one avoid unnecessary pain, even bear it for them, but love is made of such relentless soul-tearing. Impotence renders us needing Higher help, as we deal with the mystery of destiny and fate. We may never understand why things happen as they do; we just have to live it.  It is the way we bear that which we cannot change, that makes the difference. We must develop the bulwark of virtue (lat- vir-inner strength) to deal with life´s reckoning with staunch integrity.

But that doesn´t answer my daughter’s question. All I can do is love her and walk the way of life by her side, as she blossoms and is rejected for fear and insecurity of others. We are living times in which we have to take a stance: Life or Death; Right or Wrong and be willing to fight for it.

Learning to love: Freedom

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

 Freedom

True commitment comes from freedom. If we are not the masters of our own ‘domain’ we have no ‘choice’. And the value of true loving is that we ‘will’ it. We should all be free to decide. Unfortunately, history is teeming with shameful evidence of the scarring possessiveness of man over woman, master over slave, and the strong over those more vulnerable.

Anthropology tries to ‘apologize’ explaining that, as nomads settled with the development of agriculture, man had to guarantee the legitimacy of his children to validate their inheriting his land. Thus he took women into possession, making them an extension of his reproductive organs. For centuries women have taken on men’s name, having to feed them, give them children and pleasure, with no right to inheritance, or freedom over their bodies. There was a time, when even religious councils posed the question of women’s having a soul! It was as late as the 1900’s that women fought for their right to vote, to have fair conditions at work, to have a right to education and, with the introduction of ‘the pill’, right to sex for pleasure, rather than for mere reproduction. Still today, women´s bodies are overseen by the State, as laws on abortion are passed determining the fate of their pregnancies, and their right or not, to heaven. Today, we can aspire to look our lover in the eye, from the basis of equality and not possession. Though we are not the same, we both have the right to love from our freedom of choice.

Glen Close’s magnificent representation of Mr. Nobbs, exemplifies the saga of women in the eighteen hundreds, as she plays the part of a woman and her plight with survival, when refusing to marry. She ends up dressing as a man, to work for a living. The drama unfolds when she tries to establish a personal relationship in a commitment of marriage and ends liberating the choice for same-sex relationships.

It is not only history that makes freedom difficult to attain. It is the need for personal mastery over fear, weakness, and self-complacency that takes its toll in our fight for freedom. It requires self-governance and full responsibility over our needs and deeds. It requires courage and endurance to live out the consequences of our decisions.

In freedom we realize that there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It’s ‘why’ we make our choices and ‘what we do with them’, that matters. Commitment made in freedom requires integrity and honor. To honor a decision made over a relationship, is to recognize the personal dignity in ourselves and in our lover. It requires being true to ourselves and to him/her.
In the Bible it specifies that we must undo a commitment made, before acquiring an added responsibility, whether it be to love God or man. It´s OK to change our minds, but we must undo our commitments first, honoring dignity. Such respectful recognition of our lover or ex-lover’s Higher Self, sets love above casualties.

In freedom I choose to love, through sickness and despair. In freedom I accept my limitations and respect my potential. In freedom I chose to forgive and continue loving.

Learning to love: Be There

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Learning to Love: Be there

We have each other to hang on to. In these times of uncertainty, where institutions, religion, family and social structures are breaking down, we have each other.
To love is to be there for one another. My parents taught me that. No matter what we’ve done, how we’ve differed or how far we’ve roamed, they have always been there for us. In life or beyond, such loving gives us structure and faith.

Cells grow an inner cytoskeleton to give their shape inner strengthen and make them locatable and dependable for cohesion in tissues. We have to develop inner trustworthiness to be there, for others. It requires generosity to give when we have enough; self-denial to share when others are in need; patience to listen when we are tired; strength to always back our loved one and side with him even when he is wrong. Loving requires walking alongside our lover; to be there for him when he needs us. It´s not about carrying him, or having him, carry us. It is about holding hands and giving a helping hand when asked.

Our loving may not be mutual and it may not be fair.  We differ in needs. For some of us, selfless loving and patience come easier than for others, bound to more materialistic demands. It should not deter our loving, much as parents who, though more evolved than their young ones, still accompany them along their growth. We are not the same. I learned that the hard way, when, as a medical intern I helped give birth to an anencephalic baby. The fact that an innocent newborn was unjustly bearing such a physical anomaly, shook the very basis of my belief in divine justice. I realized that the notion that we are all the same, is totally false. Some of us are fat, young, ugly or more or less intelligent. Some seem more evolved in loving than others. Whatever the explanation for our differences, we must continue learning how to love. It is not about what we do, but about why we do it. We can continue doing the same thing we do daily, but evolve to spiral doing it with different intentions:

- Our eyes first have to learn to see; then observe; then discern and identify right from wrong; to finally overlook wrong and choose to see only goodness.

-Our mouth has to learn to talk; then learn to keep quiet; then speak the truth; and finally speak only kindness.

-Our ears have to hear; then listen; then filter gossip and negativity; and finally choose to tune into harmony.

- Our hands, in balance, have to give and take; develop justice and compassion; then generosity and gratitude; to finally unite in prayer.

- Our feet, in balance, have to first stand up, take a stance and confront a problem; then, have fortitude to take a step, always in balance with prudence; then, develop tenacity to try again, always with patience; and finally, to walk alongside to accompany our loved ones.

- Our heads have to think; then understand; then comprehend; and finally be wise.

- Our heart has to feel pleasure; then accept pain; then forgive and finally love.

 

These are the steps we must take, each at his pace to learn to be there for others, much as angels are there for us.

 

Learning to Love. Surrender

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Surrender

 One of my big errors in loving has been- giving in, to my lover. I surrendered completely to him, delivering my personal power, as I handed him control over me. I gave him body, heart and soul with the false notion that it was a way of proving my devotion. In so doing, I lost myself and lost him, as he lost interest in me. I was left dis-empowered with no self-esteem; just shame. Myths and fairy tales are about this type of loving that erroneously values losing oneself, to the loved one. IT IS WRONG.

I was left empty, heartless and hopeless, with an after-taste of bitterness. It took me ages to ‘re-member’ who I was….as I put my broken self together again and picked the pieces of my heart up, from abandonment.

NEVER GIVE YOUR HEART AND SOUL TO ANYONE. They are yours to be treasured and cared for. They are the inner light of d’ignity and Higher Self. To do so is degradation that belittles self and he or she, whom you entrust. No, one cannot surrender and give oneself over to someone else. We are each, responsible for ourselves. Nor can we accept that someone else deliver his/her personal responsibility and dignity over to us. We cannot carry anyone other than ourselves.

Rather, we must surrender our Ego and yield unto our Higher Selves; not as defeat or failure, nor as giving up or submitting oneself to fate. It has to be done with the parallel strength of endurance. It requires inner stamina and uprightness to yield our lower, egotistical nature to our higher understanding of Love. Our lover may not like it, since it entails doing things right. It is not about pleasing our lover or submitting to his desires, but about personal adherence to everything that is good: kindness, generosity, patience, humility, temperance. It is yielding to our inner ´god-ness’.

 

Everyday little things can become opportunities for this type of surrender: awareness of others and their needs; a smile; a kind word to a stranger. With our lovers, it entails being True…true to ourselves and to him; true to God-ness.

To be righteous is a personal challenge and a profound responsibility that requires developing strength, courage and fortitude.  Invariably we will find opposition from others with criticism, cynicism and doubt. If your lover is worthwhile, he will value your Higher Loving. If he is egotistical he will be among those who attack you.  Leave him and stay away from those who belittle your efforts to surrender to your Higher Self.

 

Learning to Love. Lovers

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Lovers

We have each other for love. The idea of God, without Love-made-manifest through Man, is an abstract. God man-ifests (and woman-ifests) His Love through Man (and Woman!). In loving Man, I love God (and I mean Man as Higher Self).

 A Lover is one who touches the Soul. It is not just anyone. We all live surrounded by people, oftentimes, alone. A Lover is that moment of awareness of HigherLove recognizing and embracing the Soul. Lovers are not bound by contract, social mores or conditioning. They give mutual, exclusive and inclusive Love, freely and freely (if not despairingly), receive it. This Love comes from passion. Chemistry recognizes it and empathy relates to it, most of the time, identifying with shared pain and dejection. If destiny has it, this Higher Loving will come from a husband and last throughout marriage. Out of marriage, psychologists call it ‘satellite relationships’. It is not about adultery, infidelity or treason. It is about Loving from the Soul.

Throughout the hardest moments of my life I have always had a Lover, whether a husband or not. Through it all, there was someone to love me. It is as if Lovers were the fingers of God-ness reaching out with Love, to us. It sounds ‘X-rated’ but it’s not. Lovers continuously ratify unconditional acceptance, vindicating that we are worth being loved. In my case it was as if, having challenged God´s Love through sin, I were trying Him to see if He would still forgive me, and Love invariably, reappears in my life. Not everyone needs this sort of ‘saving hand’! However, through different moments and different people, the experience of Higher Loving seems to be the same.

Yesterday, I heard a talk show where women were sharing problems with loved ones. One said she could not relate to the husbands´ infidelity, others were complaining about. Rather, she had fallen in love with one of the other Kindergarden mothers! Much to everyone´s surprise, the expert being consulted, said that although society would certainly deem it unacceptable, she should open her heart up to the experience of receiving Love; not necessarily physically, since that would be conflicting with her religious beliefs, and certainly not openly for she would destroy her marriage and lose her children.  

Such advice shook me. I am still trying to work my opinion around it. What is certain is, that the space where Lovers relate, is not external. It is a private, intimate internal experience. Lovers share the hearth of the Soul where we interact with God. Given their sacred uniqueness, Lovers should be kept private. This inner capacity to cherish Loving, secret, makes it holy, and as such, will kindle warmth in our lives forever.

Learning to Love. Eroticism

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Eroticism

“Praised be the three aims of life, virtue (Dharma), prosperity (Artha), and love (Kama)”. This is the introductory invocation in the Kamasutra. It goes on saying “Love is necessary to satisfy the mind; ethics, to satisfy the conscience; and spiritual seeking for peace of soul. Without food and clothes, the body becomes thin and weak. Without eroticism, the mind become restless and unsatisfied. Without virtue (ethics), the conscience goes astray. Without spirituality, the soul is degraded.” Thus, Master Vatsyayana describes the science of moral eroticism, leading to spiritual realization and not the sating of the passions or the encouragement of pleasure seekers.

Whether love surges from an abstract ideal or from a feeling or passion, it is manifest in the body. If there is no body there is no Eros (living vital energy). As a Science, eroticism follows natural laws; as a spiritual guideline it is a path of human development where “I”, becomes “We”. It all starts with the body and its senses.
Twitter wisdom says that without loving oneself, one cannot love another. However, it’s worse.…if I don´t like my body I will reject anyone who comes close, doubting his intentions, which I defensively see as malicious. In a society where the cult for a perfect body makes people spend fortunes for the physical torture of re-designing one’s body, it is hard to accept, much more, love one´s imperfections.
My boobs are beginning to sag and I am fatter. How can I love my body that way? (Thank goodness aging comes with losing one’s sight, so that imperfections are much less visible! ) What is heightened is sensitivity. Touch, warmth, softness, all relieve the tension of resistance that melts into the acceptance of a safe embrace. In the arms of our loved one, looks become irrelevant. It is all about feeling. Fusion begins with kissing, exchanging breath and chemical receptors in the saliva that unchain the physiological reactions of desire. In the Kinsey Institute, sexual therapy requires you to hug your partner and regulate your breathing to his or her rhythm. This allows us to develop awareness with a keener focus on our loved one. Thus we open up to a shared reality, in the here and now. Mutuality becomes commonality and the skin ceases to be a barrier. Time is suspended and the “quick of my being skips a beat”.

Learning to Love. Bonding

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Bonding

Life is bound by a meshwork of relationships. Relationships between higher and lower orders of life; chain reactions; empathy; dependence and co-dependence; homeostasis; cause and effect… Bonding is about linkage between these relationships…the contract (in small print!) that binds all life unto unity.

Bonds differ. There are tight-knit tissues in the network of the Mystical Whole. There are loose ends. There are holes and gaps; ‘see-throughs’ to nothingness.

People are the cells…relationships are the articulating construct…feelings are the receptors that bind. Like in cells, there are specific ‘gages’ that ‘engage’ with specific other cells. So, feelings link us to others, either, attracting or repelling. Some, relate in tight fitting networks; others, with laxer spacing. (Tell me, who has been married several times, bound with all sorts of different contracts).

Feelings are then basic to unify me’s into us.

Unfortunately, our society disregards educating the heart to feel with constructive bonds. Rather, we are taught to respond with feelings that destroy… such as hatred, envy, meanness. So, the social tissue of life cannot expand awareness unto another level of consciousness till we learn that I am US; that I am incomplete without you; that to know you is to love me; to know me is to love you.

We have to learn to master our reactions to feelings.

Now, feelings are not emotions. Feelings are the reactive response of sentiment to what we feel on the outside.

Emotions, as their Latin etymology implies, are the motor of passion within.

The first, respond to external stimuli. The latter, respond from the soul, within.

Feelings then, are a response set off by external stimulus. They are basic for survival. They are the body´s language that responds and alerts us to external conditions. We decide how to interpret, and respond to these stimuli.

Emotions are what moves us from within. They come from passion, not from reason. They are borne of the soul, not of the mind.

Virtues are the muscles of the spirit that willfully control response. They are the response to reason.

All feelings are immature forms of love. They are determined by our perception, rather like colors through a prism. Therefore bonding with feelings, may make our links to other people, weak and unstable, though with time and consistent usage, bonds will grow stronger.

Emotions are our unconscious response to CONFLICT. They are the filters of the passion that moves us from the soul.

Will is reasoning controlled by decision-making, from the mind.

Virtue is inductive bonding of the spirit..

PD- Did you know that oxytocin, a peptide that stimulates uterine contraction, is called the ‘monogamy molecule’ because its sensitivity to ‘touch’ stimulates mating, grooming and cuddling in both sexes?

Learning to Love. Sex

L´earning to  Love

Gloria Ornelas Hall

Lesson 17: Sex

Hands come together, in prayer. Bodies come together in Love. We need two hands to pray; two wings to fly; two bodies to make one soul.
The etymology of the word “sex”, from the latin: seco/secare-cut in half or division, may refer to the split which cut man in half according to Aristophanes in Plato´s dialogue “The Symposium”.  Plato describes man, as originally having had four arms and four legs, with a single head and two faces. He goes on to say that man´s pride was such, that he was daring the gods. Such insubordination obliged Zeus to split him in two, breaking his power in half and duplicating the number of people that would give him tribute. Since then, man yearns for his/her other half, longing to make his soul whole, again. Theosofists like Edgar Cayce, believe that when karma is paid, man will again be rejoined with woman and be whole again.

It wasn´t till the early 1900’s that the word ‘sex’, was openly related with ‘sexual intercourse’, as used in D.H. Lawrence’s controversial book “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.  In it he also talks of the division between man and woman but in this case, separated by social class. The book explores different types of love: a cold relationship between husband and wife; an abusive relationship and the passion between a high class aristocrat and a low-class gamekeeper. It seems to question the split between body and mind, so rigorously severed for religious and puritanical beliefs, releasing the passion of sex.

In Book 4 of the Republic, Plato says that the soul is divided into three parts: the appetitive (responding to physical cravings); the rational (or logos, from the mind or intellect) and the spirited (desiring honor and love). In fact, sex can be experienced physically, as a natural response of heightened erogenous arousal; sentimentally, as a subjective interpretation of sensorial romance; rationally, as a relationship taken by decision and free choice; and spiritually, as the bond of love. The challenge is to integrate this diverse experience into one integral response. Love comes from this ‘integrity’.

 “Marriages are made in heaven” is a Yiddish proverb that relates love, to fate and destiny. Jewish tradition holds it, that love is predestined to a divinely fore-ordained spouse or ‘soul-mate’. This idea of completion, reached only when we are with our true ‘loved one’, is also subscribed in predestined karma. It seems to be the soul that recognizes our “complementing other half”, and not our body. Such sexual attraction gives unconscious, instinctive, intuitive, inspirational, libidinal enlightened bliss. This is what the Kamasutra is about. It is not a manual of ‘sexual postures’ but a holy guide written in Sanskrit between 400 and 200BC, describing the virtuous and gracious art of loving.