There is nothing as delicious as falling in love, and nothing as devastating as falling out of love. When this happens, we have a unique opportunity to open more fully to our experience and to more complete relationships with others. This requires that we step out of the “pseudo-religion” of romantic love so prevalent in our western culture and engage in the real romance of care for another person. (source: Judith Simmer Brown)
To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability, your warriorship is untrustworthy. – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
On Saturday, March 24, 2012 I was not paying attention to the road properly and drove the wrong way on a one-way street with a policeman directly opposite my car on the other side of the road. I was fixating on my broken heart rather than using broken heart to keep awake. The dralas must have been protecting me. ( The principle of drala refers to the sacred energy and power that exists when we step beyond aggression.)
Previous to this incident, on March 21, 2012, my crystal mala broke while I was practicing a sadhana. I felt it was symbolic of a heart that had broken into tiny pieces, and thought of the song by Janis Joplin “Take another piece of my heart now baby.”
But I have been suspicious of “falling in love” because I have at times embraced the negative connotation. This produced a struggle between my genuine nature as a romantic on the one hand and my concept of falling in love on the other.
The Negative Romantic: But it’s also a kind of madness if based on projections and fantasies. We build on the fantasy. It’s not real. We are projecting what we want the other person to be. We are the director and star of our own movie! Passion and aggression work together here — passion fuels the fantasies and aggression pushes away anything that would make the romantic question their fanatasies. We are “in love” with a projection, not the real person. A heavy dualistic picture emerges that makes the fantasy even more solid. This produces a struggle. The struggle leads to further aggression. <Judith Simmer-Brown>
I should hasten to add that I do not think that choice has anything to do with falling in love. To me, it’s choiceless. Based on karma.
Genuine love on the other hand involves choices. Unlike falling in love (the negative type as described above), it takes courage, bravery and an ability to smile at fear because it involves a conscious intention to go beyond our default position of operation, namely, ego.
Some sources for futher reading:
http://tinyurl.com/y748k5z
http://tinyurl.com/75hbag8
