Dr David G Benner

INTENTIONAL LOVE

A commitment to love as a conscious choice provides the one giving the love with a steady source of invitations to awaken. It does so because intentional love calls forth who we really are. The more intimate the relationship, the more it will inevitably present us with opportunities to awaken.

The most important of these invitations to awaken are associated with the tensions that necessarily form a part of any relationship. Our default response to these tensions is annoyance (fight) or defensiveness (flight). Awakening demands quite a different posture. It demands hospitality to the tension or conflict and presence to your self and the other.

Intentional love also involves an expectation. Instead of looking to the relationship primarily for either gratification or shelter, we welcome its power to wake us up in the areas of life where we are asleep and where we avoid naked, direct contact with life. This approach puts us on a path. It commits us to movement and change, providing forward direction by showing us where we most need to grow. Embracing relationship as a path also gives us practice: learning to use each difficulty along the way as an opportunity to go further, to connect more deeply, not just with a partner, but with your own aliveness as well.”

Along with suffering, intentional love is probably the most accessible of all paths to awakening. Unfortunately, failing to choose the path of love, by default most of us are left with the path of suffering. The path of intentional love is, however, available to anyone who is in any form of relationship. Such relationships do not need to be romantic, nor even ongoing – although the more ongoing and the more intense, the more opportunities for awakening the relationship will present. Cynthia Bourgeault suggests that, “The bottom line is not the ‘who’ but the ‘how’: the direction of the energy flow. On a path of conscious love the energy is always radiating outward; it is never self-defended or congealed.” The ‘how’ is a path of love. It is love that allows one to move from defensiveness to openness, and it is love that allows people in a relationship to stay present and open to each other when they otherwise would want to either attack or run and hide. It is love that allows partners to work their way through inner logjams that would otherwise normally take much longer to resolve. On this path, love is in the service of awakening and awakening is in the service of love. The two become almost indistinguishable.

From, Spirituality and the Awakening Self (2012) ©Dr. David G. Benner ... See MoreSee Less

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