Synopsis: Here you are consciously introduced to a calmly flowing form of love you probably experienced very early in life and likely would do well to experience a great deal more--Serene Love.
A Love You Know and Can Know Better
You have heard of Passionate Love, Compassionate Love and maybe even Adamant Love but what do you consciously know about Serene Love?Healthy, real love flows into its serene dynamic when it becomes calmly happy, safely and joyfully tranquil with emotional warmth and a sense of sanctified harmony. You might have (or hopefully have) experienced Serene Love as an infant in the protective arms of a loving parent, perhaps gently rocking you into a sense of deep, secure, love-filled, connected contentment.
Or possibly you might have felt something like Serene Love in utero in the later stages of development when your mother lovingly stroked her tummy and talked softly to you. Those and similar experiences probably planted Serene Love deep in your subconscious. It also helped save you from dying of the infant killer – marasmus and other failure to thrive syndromes. Now, with conscious knowledge of Serene Love, you may be able to add many enrichments to your personal and relational health and well-being.
What Is Serene Love?
Serene Love is what its name implies, love with serenity. And it is much more than that. Healthy, real love takes on its serene form when it is flowing calmly, peacefully yet powerfully all-around and all through us. Serene Love puts us into a state of feeling encompassed by very nurturing love while at the same time feeling very serene, fully content and profoundly tranquil. It includes a sense of being safe and secure with peaceful joy. When shared with a loved one (s), it often can come with an intense sense of being joined together and united with that loved one (s) in Serene Love . It is sometimes described as blessedly spiritual, intimately inspiring and providing a sense of total well-being and complete contentment.How Serene Love Comes to Us
As an adult you may have experienced Serene Love when intimately “spooning” as you went to sleep with someone you dearly loved and who loved and cherished you. Or perhaps it was when being preciously treated and gently held or tenderly cuddled. It may occur again when feeling deeply and very personally understood, thoroughly accepted and peacefully core connected while wrapped in heartfelt unity. Often Serene Love immerses us in its warm, gentle, restorative flow when we accept being cared for, consoled, comforted and especially highly, intrinsically valued by someone very important to us.Sometimes Serene Love arrives and helps us to thrive via sharing tender precious intimacies, at other times with a soft sunny lightheartedness and yet still at other times as we feel a deep awesome spirituality. When people experience Serene Love they are apt to smile and occasionally say awesome things like the following lovers quotes: “today feels like God is in his heaven and all is right with our world”; or with a loved one “right now with you I’m completely happily saturated with what seems like a perfect moment of our togetherness” or “it feels like we are soaring together as we flow into, around, through and totally with each other as we ascend into the cosmos itself.”
Serene love can be experienced in shared, tranquil closeness with another. It might happen walking hand-in-hand under the stars, being jointly swept along with great music, holding each other as you look at your children sleeping or just being quiet and entirely with who you love and are loved by.Mindfulness and Serene Love
You may miss out on the greatness of Serene Love experiences if you are not pausing to pay mindful attention to the possibility of their gentle, flowing arrival. This is because Serene Love often is experienced as a sort of quiet, subtle, placid drifting forward on a stream of contentment and connectedness, easily rushed past in a busy life. A full experience of Serene Love takes lingering in awareness of the existential now after turning off the troubling concerns of the past, the future and the outside distractions of the present. Then it is useful to start purposefully and appreciatively focusing on love and whatever might be serenely enjoyed in that moment. Doing that can bring you the rich, golden, healthy, halcyon happiness of Serene Love. When it is shared with someone you love, it can come with extra fine touches of tender, intimate, personal specialness.
Mild, Moderate and Intense Serene Love
Some experiences of Serene Love are only mild and momentary. They, nevertheless, are precious and to be cherished. In love relationships, a look of love, a few words of appreciation or affirmation, a certain loving tone of voice, a just right hug, an act of extra kindness, an intimate personal self-disclosure and thousands of other small showings of love can produce both mild and moderate Serene Love experiences (see “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”. However, it tends to work best, for those who will notice and linger a bit, in mindful awareness of the possibility of Serene Love being present.Serene Love also can be experienced intensely, especially by those who organize their lives to include time for this possibility.
For couples, romance can help. Savoring togetherness and not rushing on to the next thing is essential. It is important to make sure that romantic experiences are fully enjoyed and shared as they transpire, and are not just goal-oriented steps toward sexual satisfaction.
With children, parents, other family members or friends, having carefree, real appreciation of each other can open one to the mild, the moderate and occasionally even the more intense Serene Love experiences.
Being with yourself alone while being meditative sometimes can open you up to joining with a sense of universal love and your purely positive connection with the universe. That, in turn, can bring on great experiences of intense, serene love even having a Nirvana-like intensity.
Your Brain and Serene Love
Via the brain study sciences, we can point to Serene Love facilitating a neurological, parasympathetic brain pattern sometimes dubbed the deep relaxation response. That pattern sets off a group of body wide reactions generating a general state of calm contentment. Relationally, that state then tends to be followed by a greater propensity to being cooperative, kind, appreciative and affectionate toward others.Experimentally, those understandings were arrived at after research subjects, who were evaluated as being in healthful love relationships, meditated on those they loved while brain activity and various other neurological measurements were being made (see “What Your Brain Does with Love”). Here, the evidence is tentatively interpreted as suggesting the experimental subjects were experiencing at least a mild state of Serene Love which induced, or triggered, the deep relaxation response in their brains. That then resulted in increased relationally positive behavior tendencies. Thus, we might postulate that Serene Love thoughts beget more love feelings which, in turn, beget increased love actions. Or put more simply, love begets love just like the ancients taught.
A wide range of fields at a variety of universities and research institutions are involved in this type of brain/love research. At those, a number of repetitions and variations of the above described type of experimental procedures are ongoing, as are further analysis and interpretation of the existing experimentally obtained data. The works of Dr. Daniel G. Amen, Dr. Helen Fisher, Dr. Gerald Hüther, Dr. Geoffrey Miller and quite a few others may be consulted for further science-based knowledge on the subject.
The Many Wonderful Benefits of Serene Love
First of all, the evidence strongly suggests Serene Love is very good for your physical health, for your loved ones and everybody else. Stress-related illnesses and early deaths, according to some studies, are rampant and increasing in many parts of the world. In those places, they may account for, or be involved in, at least half the visits to physicians, more than half the prescriptions written and a majority of hospitalizations involving strokes and heart attacks.Serene Love experiences are seen as both a very helpful preventive measure and an assistive antidote for all that. Serene Love provides a potent path toward achieving the therapeutic serenity viewed as essential in the treatment of addictions. Being able to experience periods of Serene Love is thought to positively influence just about every biological process going on in your body. It has been surmised that recovery and rehabilitation from all sorts of different wounds, accidents and debilitating conditions can be assisted and enhanced by Serene Love.
Second, the evidence also strongly suggests that Serene Love is very good for your psychological health. Depression and anxiety in particular, but virtually all other psychological maladies are thought to at least somewhat, and often to a major degree, improve when patients participate in periods of feeling Serene Love. This probably can be done through self-love, couple love, family love, friendship love, pet love, spiritual love or any other kind of healthy, real love. It is surmised that recovery and rehabilitation from most types of psychological and psychiatric difficulty can be therapeutically enhanced by Serene Love.
Third, Serene Love is absolutely great for all sorts of different forms of love relationships. Experiencing Serene Love together with a love mate or spouse has been known to help cure the worst of lover and marriage type, relationship problems, get couples through the worst of relationship effecting difficulties and inspire the most positive and wonderful of love mate interactions. Something of the same can be said to be true for families, parents and offspring and friendship networks.
Fourth, for individuals and groups, spiritual, metaphysical, cosmic connection, universality, beatific and deity focused Serene Love experiences have been reported by many from all around the globe as perhaps the most inspiring, meaningful, beautiful, healing and life transforming of all love experiences.
In short, Serene Love provides all the healthful benefits of experiencing real love coupled with and intertwined with experiencing serenity.
Cultivating Serene Love
For a lot of people, having a Serene Love experience seems to come as something of a surprise. It also seems true that having Serene Love experiences are much sought after and hoped for but still rather unexpected when they happen. That may be because Serene Love is not broadly, well identified and, therefore, not given much conscious thought, learned about, or understood as something which may be cultivated.To purposefully cultivate the possibility of having a Serene Love experience, it helps to first be able to consciously identify Serene Love and then know something about how it might come to be experienced. Then it helps to put yourself into the situations or create the conditions in which Serene Love is thought likely to occur and merge into your conscious awareness.
Here are just a few potential Serene Love possibilities. You and a loved one comfortably cuddling together in beautiful surroundings, looking out at gorgeous scenery, being and not doing anything else or needing to. Quietly lingering while looking in on your safe and secure, sleeping child and gratefully marveling at the miraculous wonderfulness of the love you have with that child. Coming back to a very welcoming love-filled home after a long and arduous time away. Lying together with your very special love mate in a sense of complete awesome connection after superbly intimate tender lovemaking. Gratefully, appreciatively and prayerfully meditating on the beautiful, the incredible, the great, the grand and the never completely knowable marvels of existence.
Absorbing the awesome beauty of a symphonic piece or an exquisite painting and feeling deeply moved and thankful for the opportunity. Savoring awareness and intense appreciation of the precious, the intimate and the intangibly special wonders which help Serene Love sweep over and through you. Being un-busy in thought, feelings and/or actions also can set the stage for experiencing Serene Love. Staying appreciatively focused and concentrating on the positive and the meaningful while not attending to distractions or the should’s and ought to’s of life can be quite assistive. Seeking to empathetically and intrinsically know and be known by someone you intimately core connect with in love.
Critical to Serene Love are protective love actions. These are essential elements so that the safety factor of Serene Love can be established and maintained. Without a sense of safety and security, the dynamic flow of serenity is hard to establish and not likely to be sufficiently sustainable.
Hopefully these thoughts will at least get you started toward your own river of love flowing more often in its highly beneficial, serene dynamic. Perhaps also, it will help you help those you love and care about to be more often tranquilly immersed in the river of Serene Love.
One More Thing
Might you find it an enrichment to talk these ideas over with another, and while you are at it, let them know about this site’s mini-love-lessons for better love relating and spreading needed love knowledge?As always – Go and Grow with Love
No comments:
Post a Comment