Learning the Language of the Body - Part 2
What can we learn about ourselves from our excitement, infatuation, love, and joy?
The first time a boy I liked told me he loved me, I was a teenager living in Pakistan. We had been talking over the phone (a landline), which lay on the hallway table of my joint family residence, at the nexus of three corridors, visible to all. Despite living in a culture where dating wasn’t allowed, and being a veritable goody-two-shoes, I had still decided to “rebel”, but my relationship played out, rather innocently, over late-night phone calls and covert glances in large gatherings. This was the first time someone other than a parent, aunt, uncle, or sibling had ever told me he loved me; I should have been bouncing off the walls with joy. Instead, overcome, I ran to the bathroom in tears, hoping nobody had overheard my conversation or witnessed my emotional turmoil. Deep down, I was ecstatic, but that was just how happiness felt to me - painful.
In retrospect, I realize I never really knew what joy felt like. Granted, joy must feel differently to different people, but I had no concept of what my joy felt like. It was an emotion I’d been conditioned to believe I wasn’t allowed to have. Because that would mean experiencing pleasure, and the messaging I had always received was, “Good girls give others pleasure; they don’t take any for themselves.” When I look back over milestone moments in which most “normal” people experience joy - every birthday and graduation, my wedding day, the day my son was born - I realize what I felt in those moments was more akin to anxiety or pain. As if whatever was happening was too good for me, too overwhelming to process.
“Hurts so good” is a phrase I understood only too well.
It took me a long time to figure out what my joy felt like, once I became more mindful of my feelings and the messages they were trying to convey. There is so much we can learn from our emotions. In Part 1 of this series, I covered the importance of pain, fear, grief, and shame/guilt. Here, I focus on the pivotal role our more “positive” emotions play - our excitement, infatuation, love, and ultimately, joy. In the next installment of this series, I hope to talk about the importance of empathy and intuition, too.
Excitement
Think riding down a rollercoaster with hands overhead. The anticipation of unwrapping a present. The delight of playing with a brand-new gadget. The thrill of exploring a foreign country.
Excitement is a spark, an arousal. I feel it when I’m immersed in something I love, like getting lost in the pages of a new book or having a sudden epiphany about life. Sometimes situations that cause us dread can be exciting, too, like public speaking or performing on stage. During more intense moments of both anticipation and fear, we experience excitement’s close cousin, exhilaration, like when breaking the rules or letting ourselves go.
When we’re excited, we’re tapped into our life force, our creative and sexual energies, closely intertwined as they are. This feeling - butterflies in the stomach, tingling all over the body, a rising swirl of energy, however you experience it - is like a huge red arrow pointing us towards our joy. DO NOT IGNORE IT.
Like an electrical switch, our excitement literally turns us on and guides us towards that thing. That thing which is ours and ours alone, which brings us a sense of purpose. That thing which sets us apart. Breathes color into the world. Transforms mayhem into meaning. Swells with emotion. Stutters in trepidation, but rings out in defiance and envelops the world anyway. For me, that thing is my voice. My awe at the wondrous nature of the little things in life. My desire for connection. My storied sensibility. But I wouldn’t have known any of this, as embroiled as I was in my growing pains and insecurities, if I’d never paid heed to what my excitement was trying to tell me.
Infatuation
Unlike a fleeting crush, being infatuated with another can feel very much like love. The intensity of it thrills us. Though it feels amazing, we don’t realize we’re often attracted to people with whom we share similar wounding patterns. Wounding patterns? What does that even mean? To put it simply, we like being around people who feel familiar. Who feel like home. And that wouldn’t be such a terrible idea, if it weren’t for the fact that “home” wasn’t always a safe place for everyone. Some of us grew up with an abusive, narcissistic, or neglectful parent. We felt abandoned, rejected, or unloved.
Chances are, if we had a difficult upbringing, one of the ways we coped was by cutting ourselves off from our bodies to avoid experiencing painful feelings. As adults who are either numb, withdrawn, or too busy constantly distracting ourselves, we are actually dying to feel the sweet tug of another’s fingers on our heartstrings. We want someone to draw the music out of our souls, as if we didn’t have the power to do that ourselves. The desire to submit to another is overpowering.
Our wounds, having lain dormant since childhood, don’t just disappear. They are always with us, lying just below the surface of our consciousness. They are still tender and sensitive to the touch. A gentle caress over the wound from a loved one can feel heavenly. But a targeted jab from someone who wants to hurt you, even if they’re hiding behind a smile, causes searing pain. That’s when we get “triggered”. Although we are dying to feel again, the intent and pressure behind the touch we receive makes all the difference.
As adults, we often unconsciously attract others who help us recreate our childhood traumas. Some of these highly charged connections can feel magnetic. If only we maintained our objectivity, we might notice the red flags. On the face of it, the object of our affection espouses characteristics we admire, characteristics we believe we don’t innately possess ourselves, even though we do. As we allow the relationship to unfold, we may realize our partner neglects and degrades us in a way eerily similar to how our parents or other guardians behaved with us in the past.
The people we attract and surround ourselves with are like mirrors, reflecting back to us those traits we either have, wish we had, struggle with, or deny. As observers of the Self, we can actually learn a lot about our Shadow Self from people we are attracted to, as well as triggered by. When we become infatuated with another, they reflect back how we feel about ourselves. The deeper our capacity to love and accept another for who they truly are, without feeling the need to “fix” them, chances are, the more we love and accept ourselves.
We can use this information to find out how far we’ve traveled on our own path of spiritual evolution. Over time, we can observe if we still get attracted to people who embody the characteristics we possess but fearfully resist. Are we still drawn to those who, in the long run, make us feel powerless, hurt, or unworthy? Or do such people now inspire more pity than passion? Has the hold they had over us weakened? Our infatuations can serve us well, but only if we allow them to.
Human Love
So how do we distinguish real love from infatuation? I believe when it comes to love, we continue to feel loving energy towards another, even when we know we cannot possess, control, or change them. We experience joy for the mere fact of their existence. This can be likened to a mother’s love for her child, but that doesn’t mean only mothers have the capacity for unconditional love. One day, we might meet someone with whom we feel simultaneously maternal/paternal, romantic, sexual, and child-like. Such label-defying love allows us to tap into our true nature - expansive and boundless.
Such love colors each of our senses, allowing us to taste the infinite in the everyday, feel rising heat even when it’s cold, hear harmony in silence, smell fragrance in friendship, and see beauty in even the darkest of places. However we experience love, the qualities that attract us to our loved ones, are likely embodied within us, too. These people are our closest mirrors, even in ways, perhaps, unknown to us.
According to writer, Maria Popova, “Love is both the tenderest mirror and the cruelest. How much and how well we show up for love reflects what we believe ourselves worthy of. What we desire reflects what we believe we deserve. What we long for reflects both our limitations and our restless yearning to transcend them. In love’s mirror, we are revealed to ourselves, stripped of the ego’s flattering self-image, our vulnerabilities and inadequacies laid bare — a revelation laced with the sublime, both beautiful and terrifying to the bone.”
If we are lucky enough to find a love that is accepting of who we are and enduring in the face of challenges, we must be careful not to become so attached to the other that we forget ourselves. The temptation to lose ourselves in blissful union can be breathtaking, but the real “feeling” comes from the friction between bodies, the meeting of minds, and the shared sinking of souls into submission to the One that brought them together in the first place.
Divine Love = My Joy
In this world of dualities, some say love is the opposite of hate, others say it is fear or despair. In truth, Love has no opposite because it is the default state of being into which we are born. Renowned Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi, famously said, “You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean within a drop.” He is referring to the ocean of Love because, at our very essence, we are Love.
Everyone has access to this Love, but not everyone is conscious of it. There is so much to be said about gratitude, and how being thankful for even the smallest details can help us flip the lens through which we view life, from glass half-empty to glass overflowing. There is so much to be said about humility, and how humbled we feel when we awaken to Love and realize how blind we were not to have noticed it before. There is so much to be said (and perhaps I will, another day), but in the end, only silence suffices. When we awaken to our true nature, we realize that no words can do justice to the experience of being Love.
Most of us go through a cycle of remembering, then forgetting, remembering, then forgetting. Each time you awaken to Love, it will guide you back to your center. Human love is beautiful and wondrous, but it’s only one of the many manifestations of Divine Love. Love is a bridge between our two worlds, our two states of being, human and spirit. Over time, with each cycle of remembering, we begin to see Love in everyone we meet and everything around us. We begin to rely more on the universal energy of Love running through us, connecting us to all things in existence and beyond.
***
So what does my joy feel like? It is peaceful, pervasive, and accepts me, and this world, as we are. Depending on the day, I may feel joy to varying degrees - on the level of words only; on the level of words and feelings; or on the level of words, feelings, and spirit. The greater my self awareness and connection to my own consciousness, the deeper my capacity for joy.
Finding our joy is just the first step. Once we do, we can turn our attention to what we want to do with this joy, and how we want to share it.
I wish you joy, on every level, today and always. In your search for Love, I hope you remember where to find it - staring back at you in the mirror every day.
Beautiful and eloquent, thank you for sharing your wise words, as always, expressed so fluidly.
Another beautiful read, my dear Nida! Reading these pieces is always one of the highlights of my week. Full of beautiful and much needed reminders and wisdom. I hope you are always able to see the wonderful, beautiful human being that you are every time you look in the mirror. I pray your words and wisdom reach all the people that they are meant for - your words truly have the power to change the world.💛