Love Heals

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

1976. I had been leading Encounter groups in London and around England for about two years. I was establishing a small reputation, and I was clear I had found my life’s work. People came because good things happened for them in the groups, even though much of the time it seemed to me I had little idea what I was doing. What guided me was an inner trust that had awoken in me 4 years earlier in the first group I ever took part in. I simply knew now that this was in all of us and that my part was to create the space in which participants could realize it within themselves. It was a realization that had changed my life fundamentally and for ever; now, even if it wasn’t really yet mine to give, I at least knew how to invite it. I didn’t begin to call this work “the art of being” until ten years later, but from the beginning this was what my groups were about. I was teaching by learning. Every workshop gave me the opportunity to sit with a group of people and learn to deepen my trust in being. It didn’t matter what I knew or didn’t know. All that mattered was that I would keep being there with the group no matter what happened, daring as much as possible to express my own feelings and encouraging everyone to express theirs. I didn’t know what it was that worked, other than being there.

There was so much, too, that I didn’t share and had never shared: wounds made up of pain, grief, fear, anger and desperate longing from the years of my childhood spent imprisoned in a Catholic orphanage run by nuns. I was four years old when my mother, in poverty and desperation, put my brother and I into the hands of the nuns who terrorized us for the next five years. The wounds went on bleeding in me when my mother, who could never again be the bright shining goddess of my soul that she once was, brought me home at the age of nine with my brother who was no longer my brother to a home that was no longer my home and to a step-father who had spent his life in the army and knew even less about fathering than the father who had walked out on us when I was two years old. The circle of the encounter group was my path of healing; it was a classroom where I was going to learn to fathom the depths of my own nature at the same time that I was guiding people into theirs. And I didn’t know how! I only knew that I loved being there and that whatever I was doing, it worked well enough that people kept coming.

The wounds I carried manifested, as they do in everybody, in my day-to-day life. By the time I was in my mid-twenties I was already a father with a broken marriage and my home broken yet again. If I hadn’t discovered the world of encounter groups and personal growth I think I would have adventured my way right out of this life. Becoming a group leader may have saved my life, but it certainly didn’t save me FROM my life! On the contrary, it gave me to my life in ways that I could hardly bear at times. Especially, each love-affair was an excursion into joy and pain, mine and hers. I had been so in love with my mother and those five years of anguished and secret longing for her set the scene in every relationship I had. Sometimes I was happy, often I was troubled, and occasionally I was devastated. On this particular weekend I was devastated - and leading a group.

We began on the Friday evening, and as was my way in those years, I was saying little. If I ever said anything at first it was mostly to shoot down everything irrelevant – idle chat, boring conversation, all the things human beings do to make themselves comfortable in a circle of strangers. By Saturday morning the group was, as usual, expressing almost nothing and the tension was electric: I called this the cooking time! There was a man in the circle who was even better than I was at saying nothing. He had sat there since the beginning staring over the heads of the people opposite him in the circle. Mid-way through the morning, for the first time he spoke. It was in response to something someone else said. Very simple, just a few words, but they hit me like a truck. They were so loving, so caring, and so intelligent that they scared me to death; or rather, he did, the man who had spoken them. His name was Don.

A couple of hours passed, the tension kept building and I was beginning to be more outspoken and aggressive with people. Don had not spoken again, but I was as aware of him as a bird might be of a cat. Then the nightmare happened again. Addressing another participant, he spoke a few words that shone with warmth, understanding and humility. I retreated further into aggression, and within an hour or so the whole group was hounding me; it was a fox-hunt, and I was the fox. Finally I could bear it no longer. I put my head in my hands and sobbed. When I could speak, I said, “It’s this whole insecurity thing about you, Don.”

He looked at me with an expression of profound compassion and said, “Ah, I’m so glad you said that. I didn’t know what to do.” He had known all the time what was going on in me! I felt loved like I had rarely felt in my life. He didn’t take the group away from me as I knew he could have. He simply supported me. The workshop became very beautiful for everyone. At the end I told him I would like to meet him again. He invited me to come over and have tea at his apartment in London University. It turned out he was a therapist, a humanistic analyst from Canada who had led groups for many years. He was also a Catholic priest spending a sabbatical year as chaplain at the university. Had he not already demonstrated to me his brilliance, hearing that would have been the end of the story for me. We chatted for a little while then he said, “I see how much pain you’re in. I’m inviting you to tell me your story.”

It was the beginning of six months of soul-searching therapy. Three evenings each week, for two to three hours at a time, I would go and tell him everything there was to tell - past and present, dreams, visions, fears, desires, and all the agonies and ecstasies of my life that I had never dared tell anyone. During many of those sessions I was bathed in sweat, so afraid was I to open the secrets of my pain. Yet I did. I gave him too my journals, diaries, poetry, and he read them all. He accompanied me whenever I led a group, and between the sessions he sat and listened. And listened. And listened. He gave me assignments that broke my heart open. He wanted no money. He asked for nothing from me. Through him I learned also to listen, and how to use my own gift. He admired my talent and let me know how good I was. He loved me, and in doing so, he taught me what love is.

Two years later I went to India to meet Osho Rajneesh – Bhagwan as he called himself in those days. The last thing I wanted was a guru, but I had heard him speak on tape and I knew I had to find out what he was about. When I sat in front of him and he spoke to me, every cell in my being felt loved. I spent eight years close to him, learning and growing, until the day came when I knew I had to leave his world and follow my own path. Ever since, my life and work have been about learning to love with my whole being. For many years of my journey, it often wasn’t possible. Whenever I had to struggle with my old wounds of abandonment, or to deal with people in the course of daily life who are far removed from their own hearts or self-awareness, I had all kinds of reactive states available within me to protect me from whatever the imagined threat may be. Often it was only hours or days later that I would see how I had lost trust in simply being there with love, in love. My life work, the natural meditation of my ordinary daily life, has been learning to keep loving anyway, no matter the circumstances.

Love is very simple. It is as simple as Yes. The mantra of the open heart is this single word. When a mother gazes on her child with love, all she is saying is “yes”; yes to the being of her child. Her yes gives her child its presence; not just its right to be here, but its delight in being. This is why we love to be loved! There is nothing more affirming of our existence than to be in the presence of someone whose whole message to us is, “Yes, I appreciate, accept, enjoy, encourage and support you being you!” This is what love is saying, and why love heals. All our wounded ways, all the behaviour that creates disharmony between ourselves and others, all the potential gifts and talents in our being that remain unopened and undeveloped, all the tricks and drugs of modern life we use to desensitize ourselves so that we don’t have to feel our wounds or be too touched by existence, they are all consequences of us having been less loved, less said Yes to, in some essential aspect of our being. We may react physically and become weak or fat or anorexic or incapacitated or ill. We may react psychologically by developing personality armouring that manifests in neurotic dramas, depression, aggressiveness, powerlessness, lack of feeling, or more severe forms of psychotic disorder. We may react by becoming spiritually anaesthetized so that we have no awareness that we belong to, and can never be separate from, the eternal and infinite consciousness-in-love that is commonly known as God.

Mostly, and quite normally, we survive our wounds of not having been loved fully by blossoming less in all three realms of our being. We don’t nurture and nourish our bodies as caringly as we could, we put up with our psychological stress unless it becomes unbearable, and we stay busy enough in our lives that we don’t have time to remember and draw sustenance from our connection with the divine, with the spirit that is our very essence. When we are loved in who we are – not just for how we behave but loved because we are – the love has the effect of inviting us to become alive and expressive of our being. It is very important to understand what this means, because it makes it much easier for us to allow and accept our own healing as it is happening. When we are loved anyway, we begin to feel in ways that we didn’t even know about.

This is the most fundamental effect that love has on us. It awakens us to ourselves. Literally our senses awaken so that we see, hear, smell, taste and are touched more intensely by existence. Being touched by love affects us profoundly. We are not just touched on the surface of our skin or in our physical musculature; love touches us to the core of our being. So it touches all our woundedness too, with the result that we feel our pain, anger, fear, grief, anguish, hopelessness, and so on. But the love is saying, “It’s OK, you are beautiful in all that you are experiencing. Feel it all. Let it all be included in your song! You are here to sing your song and dance your dance, and if your song and dance have also dark and sorrowful themes, don’t deny or suppress or condemn them. Don’t shut up the things that you don’t like in yourself as you have been doing all these years so that they just go on hurting you and keeping you frightened and lonely or isolated from existence! Your wounds are also your resources. When you learn to feel them through and through, they eventually become valuable sensitivities in you, with which you are able to understand and accept others. In this respect, they are your essential lessons in learning to love.” No need for words; love is saying all this as we open to it and it is very hard not to open to being loved.

It’s important to understand that our wounds do hurt! So our journey of healing through being loved inevitably brings us at first into the very feelings that we don’t want anything to do with. It is just these feelings and experiences we have learned to mistrust and may have spent decades learning to suppress and control. This is why love can feel so dangerous. Even in this though, love helps, because in the same moment that we are opening up to all these inner states that we have learned to regard as dangerous, the love is giving us the trust to allow them. This person out there who loves us is quite happy and peaceful about all the turmoil we are experiencing. Their whole being is saying, “It’s OK, feel it all. It’s only your fear that believes you shouldn’t.”

And why feel it all? Because it is so! In this recognition is found the door to spiritual awakening. To be here now is to be with what is. The only way to be totally present, totally here with all that is, is to be able to include all that you are in this moment. If you are tears, include them. If you are anger, feel its fire. If you are sexually aroused, receive your excitement. If you are joyous, be radiant in it. Healing means learning to trust our inner weather and let it be. Because it is! If we continue over time to let love touch us, we gradually open to deeper and subtler states of feeling and being. The love keeps inviting us into more of all that we are. In time we realize that our capacity for being is actually infinite. We open to the boundlessness of our feelings and of that which we experience in existence. We know then what ecstasy really is!

And all of this happens, can only happen, here and now in this very moment. We cannot experience the past, only remember it. And to experience the present is to be not in time at all! To be here now is to step out of time into the eternity of the moment, and in the eternity of the moment we find ourselves inseparable from all that is; all one; alone! Not lonely. Loneliness is a state of separation from ourselves and therefore from all that is. Aloneness is the communion of being open to all that we are and therefore awake to all that is, here, now.

To be all of this is to be in love, because to be in love means to be Yes to all that is. This is to say that our healing journey, no matter how wounded we may have become growing up, brings us into love. Not only does love heal us; it makes us healers. We become beings who are in love. When this is so, whoever we are with feels loved, and in that love they are invited to open to their own being, which will eventually awaken them too to living in love. What I find most awesome about this whole journey of healing into love is that when we eventually surrender to being the whole gift of our own existence - body, heart, mind and soul – and begin to experience what it is to love as we have been loved, we discover that if being loved has been the loveliest experience of our life up to now, it is even lovelier to love! This is because being loved we are dependent on the one who loves us. Their love is what keeps us growing and blossoming. We need them. When the love we keep receiving eventually opens us into being, we realize in that very moment of being that we are this love. It is still very beautiful to be loved by another. But now it is our own too. Now we can be there even in our own darkest moments, for they may still happen, and our own love whispers to us that it is OK to feel this, to keep being here, to trust, to accept, to embrace all that is because it is. For me personally this is what is meant by “the love of God”. It is our home-coming into the recognition that to be here now is to be in love. And this is the nature of eternity!