The dictionary defines love as a an intense feeling of deep affection.

Scientists like Dr. M. Scott Peck define love as “”the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. Yet, Dr. Peck admits that he does not know WHY a person has the will to extend one’s self.

That is because Dr. Peck and most people ignore the obvious, that love is something that we FEEL in our bodies.  Feelings, like the feeling of hunger, are what motivate us.

One thing that can be said about love is that it feels GOOD, even when it hurts.  In fact, sometimes the pain or hurt of love is what is so powerful about love.  We can long for union with someone who we are physically with, the longing feeling being the love, and that longing hurts SO good that it is so intense we feel we are going to die or be burned up in the feeling.

We do not have to be limited to this feeling just for a person, we can feel it for a concept like the idea of ‘God’ or country or freedom or just about anything else

The point is that love is a FEELING and the more we are willing to feel that feeling, including the intensity that feels uncomfortable at times, the more love we will have in our life.  From the perspective of the person in the drama of romantic love, this idea can really suck.

Yet, on the other side of this coin, fully going into the pain of love and staying there to long can be physically, emotionally and mentally damaging to the human instrument through which one is experiencing life.  Too much can be a bad thing.

This is where discipline and sensitivity comes in.  We first have to be sensitive in our bodies and mind to know when we are on the threshold of damaging ourselves so that we can then use our disciplined skill to stop the pain.

Without this sensitive and discipline we will continue in the pain until we damage our human instrument or condition it away from love.  You can tell a person who has done this for they are shut down to caring about most if not all people and life itself.  They become what I call ‘conservatives’ for they ‘conserve’ or hold back their love.

Both sensitivity and discipline come with practice.

Sensitive comes from practicing feeling what we are actually feeling in our body, not just the activity in our brain, our thoughts, but what is happening below the neck.  This is not just feeling the gross sensations we normally feel, but also the subtle ones, the beating of our heart, the movement of the blood through our blood vessels, movement of the subtle energies as the body communicates with itself.  Feeling this takes practice being still and watching/feeling what else is going on.

Discipline comes from keeping at it no matter what happens, even if at first you lose your focus and get distracted you go back to the practice.  That is discipline.

If you want love, unconditional love, then you have to develop sensitivity and discipline.