I was listening to a talk by Jean Huston the other day where she mentioned an old Jewish saying that says (I’m paraphrasing) that someone who really loves deeply is laughing for joy on one side of their mouth, and crying out of the other. Loving our life and the world connects us to deep and abiding joy and to a sense of creativity (I often use one definition of love as being the creative or evolutionary force of the Universe) that is out of reach of those who refrain from a deep commitment to loving. However, the flip side of this is that, by loving we inevitably sensitize ourself to the suffering and pain around us, and this empathic quality of love means that we feel the pain of others deeply.

I think one of the reasons that so many people fail to love deeply in their lives is that we get used to repressing our feelings regarding the pain and suffering that is around us. It is almost as if it is a survival mechanism that we are using to get by in life. The reasoning is fairly clear and goes something like: “If I don’t repress the pain that I feel when I look at my own suffering and the suffering of others, then my life is going to be sad and miserable. Repressing the pain just seems like the best thing to do in the face of the toughness and contradictions of life.’”

However, what we do not realize is that, when we repress our empathic response to pain we also repress our love response, our ability to feel deep joy, open heartedness and the resonant laughter of the universe. By repressing our receptivity to pain we also repress our receptivity to love, we become anesthetized to life, walking through our “seven score days and ten” like zombies, never really touching what it really, deeply means to live as an awake human spirit on Earth.

So, let’s really commit to loving deeply, to being that man or woman who is laughing out of one side of their face and crying out of the other. Let’s commit to feeling the world deeply and really loving in our relationships with courage. Yes it is going to be painful, to be really alive means to feel that pain, not pretend it is not there.

The other good thing about feeling the pain is that it makes it imperative for us to act on it, to do something to alleviate the pain of others (an ourselves), to become part of the solution and not disengaged perpetrators of the problem.

 © Toby Ouvry 2010, you are welcome to use this article, but you must seek Toby’s permission first: info@tobyouvry.com