Marya Mann : Blog : KIND LOVE & ZEN In 2010

KIND LOVE & ZEN in 2010

Love’s sway over the human spirit has been labeled everything from a gift of the gods to a gush of biochemicals, a tool of the devil, and the creative mystery at the heart of life. Love may on the surface appear as all of these, but conscious love is so at center of the point and purpose for life on Earth, the unified point of it all, how do we stay on target? KIND LOVE, that’s how.

KIND is an acronym for 4 specific qualities that help us find and sustain committed love in our lives.

KIND reminds us of Kindness, Insight, Natural Goodness, and Daring.

Learn these words by heart if you commit to love someone, whether as friend, lover, mate, or business partner. Of course we love our business partners and associates. How else do you think great work is done?

Being KIND helps us to grow together as loving friends. Whether we are involved personally, professionally, even in politics and surely in the quest for enlightenment, every alliance in life is tinged with our ideas about love, intimacy, friendship, alliances.

K is for being KIND but also KINDRED. KINDRED spirits are people who make your soul vibrate. You can talk easily, be yourself. KIND loving people feel protective. They have each others’ backs. With their respectful companionship, a mutual liberation from the trap of limited thinking ensues. KIND LOVE accepts and is patient with natural movements, thoughts, and feeling, but hurries to the true side of life.
KIND LOVE exudes the sparkling shine of loving people who are brilliant enough to choose love, and strong enough to sustain it while it shape-shifts a kazillion times.

No one I’ve known had the patience to wait with gentle calm for that flowering in another like Granny. She didn’t mind being old enough to be called Granny as much as she minded whenever someone lacked kindness toward another. Her motto, her “Recipe for Happiness,” is inscribed on a cutting board painted in pink flowers with calligraphy that reads. . .

“One full measure of kindness. . .
A dash of laughter. . .
Equal parts of work and play. . .
A generous heap of love. . .

Stir these ingredients together with loving care. Add humor to suit. Sprinkle with good luck to insure best results.”

“One full measure of kindness.” Even when love isn’t looking like love — especially when love isn’t looking like love – in the kitchen-hot heat of daily living, KIND LOVE offers a metaphor and method, staying easy in ourselves, being kind to ourselves, and taking care to remember to be kind in our language, reminding ourselves at each juncture of something we already know: we are love.

Many of us were taught to reach out to grasp at an external “comforter” or “pacifier” as children, to grab for “grades” and “acceptance” from schools and peers later in life, and then to use the same kind of grasping attitude in spiritual, loving, and creative endeavors.

Kindness does not grasp. The art of love begins with acceptance and appreciation. First we learn to love and appreciate ourselves, and then we have love’s strength and inner power to responsibly love another. We all have tendencies to grasp, however. This is part of the human experience. And we have tendencies to forget who we are, why we’re here, where we’re going. That’s why we have each other and the dazzling drive to love.

To remember through and with each other, we find the comfort of love, and learn to stay centered in love. We give each other permission to flower from the inside out.

I is for the Insight that we are moved by love precisely because we want to feel oneness with each other. Accomplished, such unity becomes a perfect Zen moment, an awareness of our natural goodness, how alike we are in our vulnerability, how together we are in our oneness with all of life.

Feeling at one – at-oned, atoned, forgiven for everything that came before — is the whole point of love, the actual practice of Zen, the ancient spirit of Aloha, and the experience of Christ consciousness. We delight in the basic miracle of life itself. When we feel together with another, anything from enthusiasm to remorse, from unexpected humor to gentle sympathy, from profound appreciation to shared grief, we can recall the truth of Matthew 18:20, “For where two or more are gathered together in my name, there I am among them.”

N is for Natural Goodness, the delicious vibration of contentment, innocence, and peace. In KIND LOVE, we sense the rhythms of our own good heart and harmonize this inner melody with the symphony of melodies coming from those we love. We love via moment to moment choice. Love is the choice to remember everyone’s Natural Goodness.

Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? However, what I mean by choice is a carefully considered choice to love yourself first as you are, unconditionally, to love the god and good in yourself so much that the pure essence of love overflows out into the world. When we remember our natural goodness, we know ourselves as love, as being lovable, and as loving. We can share from our effulgence, not our desperation.

D is for Daring. The most loving people Dare to walk the path of harmony. We can be naturally at ease when we dare to nurture the natural mind, awake to its full potential. The thinking, feeling, memories, hopes and worries that create discontent in the mind are often untrue. If we’ve accepted these thoughts unconsciously, we can consciously dare to question them.

Dare to investigate the thoughts that seem to fountain up without our control sometimes, and notice if the thought either relaxes the body or tenses it up. Dare to think what brings ease and comfort, not the drama of disruptive thoughts.

Dare to feel more natural ease with feelings of happiness and love in your body and love will grow. We can befriend discomfort, work with difficult feelings as teachers, and tell the truth when KIND LOVE is practiced. We allow each other to be who we are, and rigid attitudes melt into daring new movement, dialogue, creativity, and love. We stir our inner wisdom, together.

KIND LOVE is not a whim, a quickly drawn line in the sand or a spontaneous vow based on confusion or fear. Love is a whole host of emotions that have led nature to hard-wire the desire and need for love into our human nervous systems.

Love is the springboard, the pool of water at the end of every perfect dive, a tool of serenity, a point of meditation, a gift, the presence of everything that matters.

This may sound like a whole lot of poetic semantics to some, but the WAY we say things and the WAY we think of things affects the outcome. Language dictates more than simple meaning; it vibrates inside us with the easy grace of sound and generates a host of other associations, desires, excuses, joys, memories, and connotations.

When structured poorly, language can create the exact opposite effect of what we really want. So when we make a choice to love, to be intimate, to share ourselves and invite others into our lives, we naturally make effective choices. What we think, say and do actually reflects our true intentions and we reap the results we want.

Our thoughts can lead to our highest selves or to our deepest fears. Nurturing thoughts to reflect our basic goodness, feeling KIND LOVE, helps move the world to manifest our wisest intentions.

Love is a choice. Love is an attitude. It doesn’t come out of a past-tense identification with an idea of love, or a memory. Love is the true thing, the event of our shared life now, and now, and now. Love is the realization that I choose moment to moment to be the goodness of love and the love of goodness.

I expect you to do the same. If a significant portion of the population let go of the old self-centered ways of thinking, of grabbing what we want to satisfy our need for love, we will enjoy a more satisfying way of being in the world.

MARYA MANN, Ph. D. Psychologist, Consultant, Author, & Speaker, offers private consultations. As “Noble Friend,” PSCYH-K Facilitator, and Co-Author of the book, Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves, she offers revolutionary new tools for traditionally creative living.

You can reach Dr. Marya here: Contact Marya