Love is a Verb

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If you haven’t checked out the Learn to Love Podcast yet, give it a listen. I’ve been researching love for years now, so I’d like to think I know a thing or two about it; yet in every conversation I have, I learn something new.

Not only has each episode been incredibly informative, but with a new guest team time, we get a fresh new perspective on love.

At the end of every episode, I ask my guests, “What do you wish everyone knew about love?” and it is one of my absolute favorite questions to ask. Each answer is both an inspirational and profound reminder that few things are as beautiful or transformational as love.

“Love is so much more expansive than people realize,” said dating coach Marie Thouin. “Love is your birthright, and one of the most magical feelings in the world,” Relationship expert Jaime Bronstein expressed. “Love is the most real thing on this planet,” Author Ora Nadrich encouraged.

However, there is one answer that keeps coming up in almost every episode. It is a message that is crucial in not only understanding love, but also realizing why love has the capacity to completely change our lives.

Love is a verb

The message that keeps coming up again and again is that love is not a thing that you have; rather, it is a verb you can express. Love is an action and you can choose to bring it into your life every day, and in fact, in every moment.

When I interviewed sex educator Allison Moon, she said love is a practice. Earlier on, sex educator Marla Renee Stewart said love can always be given freely. Author and educator Bento Leal said love is not an agreement to be in a relationship, but a commitment to continuously care and value this other person for exactly who they are in the moment.

In other words, love is not something you receive but something you give, not something you feel but something you express and not something that happens to you, but something you choose to bring into your life.

Recognizing that love is a verb is one of the most transformational shifts of perspective we can have. It will change not only our relationships, but our very world.

You are not in a relationship

One of the most valuable lessons we can learn from most modern spiritual communities is that the unfolding and ever-changing present moment is all that exists. There is power in being here now.

The past is just a memory, the future never comes and this moment is the only moment where anything and does happen.

Thus, a common teaching in meditation communities is that if you are bored, you are simply not paying attention. If you think you are in a routine where every day is the same, you are basically asleep. Because every day is a new day, every moment is a new moment, this second has never happened before and it will never happen again.

The person who finishes reading this article will not be the same person who started it. The tree outside your window tomorrow will not have the same size and number of leaves. The cloud in the sky will shift, flow, move, expand and contract with its billions of water molecules in such a way that we can only lie in the grass and stare at it in amazement.

Likewise, the dancing and vibrating infinitely complex interaction of matter and energy that is your partner requires the same level of awe, presence, and gratitude.

You will never fully or completely know your partner or what goes on in their internal world. You can only remain curious, open, and committed to deepening your understanding of them and continuously growing in intimacy.

This not only applies to us and our partner, but to our relationship too. Any relationship is formed by the meeting of two people and it only will ever exist in the now.

Seeing love as a verb means recognizing that you are not in a relationship but that you are in a continuous process of relating. It is not something that you can accumulate, it is only something you can do.

And you can “do” love a million and one ways. As a result, love is walking a path of discovery; not only of the vast landscapes that is another person’s world, but also in all the ways we can offer our love to others, all the big and small gestures of kindness that make life worth living for ourselves and others.

Love is A Call to Action

Love as a verb asks more of us: it asks us to do something. It is a call to action, not just to sit on our butts and wishing love for others, but to actively be of service for others and to use one’s privilege to remove the obstacles in others’ way.

To me, this is the missing piece that so many spiritual and new-age communities are missing.

For observers of the hippy/new-age community, there is the stereotype of all talk and no action, great ideas but no plans or initiatives. While I don’t agree with the crudeness of the statement, when the South Park character Eric Cartman said, “Hippies, they want to save the Earth but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad,” I can see where the critique comes from. Saying “we are all one” becomes an empty phrase when the person saying it fails to see how their actions affect others in an interconnected world.

This has come to a T during the COVID pandemic, as so many people who are preaching “love and light” because the same ones believing masks and public health precautions are a vast conspiracy. However, wearing a mask and getting a vaccine should be seen as an act of love and compassion for others and a small action we can do to help alleviate the suffering of many.

There has always been a large overlap of modern spiritual communities and anti-science sentiments. This overlap tends to breed misinformation and pseudoscience, usually masquerading as part of holistic wellness, encouraging people to avoid things like GMOs and prescription pharmaceuticals in favor of green juices and breathing exercises.

While there is incredible merit in promoting a healthy and holistic lifestyle, it can fail to recognize the actual forces at play that bring suffering to people’s lives. Just as people with bad vision need glasses, and those born with cleft palates need surgeries, folks with depression sometimes need anti-depressants, those with cancer often need chemotherapy, and being healthy will not protect you fully from COVID.

Seeing love as a verb means recognizing the privileges one has and actively helping others with less. This might mean seeing how those in poor communities do not have access nor can afford the same healthy and fresh food as the more privileged, wealthy, and most often white, crowd can.

Seeing love as a verb means combining our love with activism, integrating our love with who we vote for, what we march for, and how we spend our money. Rather than talk about love we are asked to fully live it, not just on a personal level, but on professional and political ones too.

Breaking out of bypassing

Many folks are starting to recognize the narcissism so endemic in spiritual communities and the spiritual bypassing that enables it. The Buddhists have long known about the “spiritual ego” and how the ego can so easily hijack spirituality for its own benefit.

As practitioners experience growth through meditation and spiritual practice they can easily unintentionally adopt a “holier than thou” ascetic, thinking they are better than others. On the way to becoming “awake”, they begin to decry how everyone else is so “asleep,” a kind of narcissism that becomes so easily parodied.

The way out of an inflated sense of self, then, is a path of selflessness. A path of giving and generosity. A path of service, karma, and seva. The path of justice.

It is a path of seeing love as a verb, not just a subject to be worshipped in a temple or church, but to be actively brought into the world through concrete action.

Engaged Spirituality

Fortunately, in pockets, people are beginning to recognize the need for concrete and courageous loving action. There is an entire movement known as “engaged Buddhism” that seeks to apply insights from meditation practice and dharma teachings to situations of social, political, environmental, and economic suffering and injustice.

Meditation communities have faced criticism of naïve navel-gazing while the world around them crumbles. It should come as no surprise that Thich Nhat Hahn became a huge proponent of Engaged Buddhism when he was meditating in Vietnam during the war.

Now, in Zen communities you will find awakening to whiteness workshops. One Buddhist leader I follow, Joan Halifax, will tweet just as much about economic, racial, and climate justice as she does finding peace and discovering the reality of impermanence. Great leaders like Tara Brach are speaking out about racism and acknowledging their white privilege. One of my favorite meditation centers, East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, has social justice written into its core and you will find sessions on subjects like “Embodying the Timeless Wisdom of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr for Black, Indigenous and People of Color.”

It seems fitting to remember the quote by Cornel West that, “justice is what love looks like in public.” When our love becomes a verb and when we bring it to the streets and our capitals, it looks a lot like fighting for equality for all peoples.

I am also reminded of the poem that Elizabeth Alexander wrote for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration,

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

When we widen our circle of compassion to more and more people, we have no choice but to include fighting for rights for those most marginalized by society. Beyond familial, expanding the us in us versus them so much it eventually just becomes us.

Seeing love as a verb means seeing how we are all connected, how our actions, past, present and future connect each other, and if we are to love everybody, that means helping everyone too.

This is a lesson, like love, that we can return to, again and again, trying not to forget.

 

(Cover photo via Unsplash)