Ebullient Love: Love’s Joyous River

Mini-Love-Lesson  #231

Synopsis: The dynamics of this all too often under-explored form or “River” of Love are presented, clearly explained with quick examples along with an outline for achieving ebullient love and its many upbeat, healthful, positive emotions.

The Champagne Kind of Love

Has your spirit ever seemed to bubble up with happy love?  Has your heart been effervescent with joyous love feelings?  Have you experienced the heady excitement of irrepressible, buoyant love?  If so, you have known ebullient love.

Ebullience is the quality of lively, zestful, high-spirited, effusive positive feelings often spontaneously, animatedly and exuberantly felt and expressed.  Literally it has come to refer to filling up with and bubbling over with  positive emotions.  The word itself has an older meaning, now falling out of use, which has to due with bubbling up and over with any type of feeling.

Ebullient love refers to bubbling up and over with love’s natural joy.  It is the sparkling, bubbly champagne type of love.  This kind of love usually is seen as wholehearted, vitalizing, sometimes rhapsodic, thrilling, ardent, vibrant, blithely elated, extraordinarily cheery and, even at times, spiritually awesome.  Descriptions like overjoyed and overwhelmed with love frequently have been used to describe ebullient love experiences (See “Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So!” Link “Pet Love”).

Examples of Ebullient Love

Ebullient love can be seen in the response of natural joy of an infant picked up and lovingly played with, cuddled and snuggled by a similarly effervescently happy, loving parent.  It also is often evident in the joyous greeting and heartfelt interaction of people reuniting after an absence.  Sometimes it is not so obvious but definitely felt in people walking hand-in-hand with a spring in their step and smiles on their faces.  Occasionally it comes more internally with mindful stillness as one person joyously observes deeply and reverently a person they deeply and reverently love.

Couples, deep friends, comrades and whole families simultaneously, mutually can become elated together with their ebullient love as they dance, hug, sing, shout with joy while they celebrate their connecting and uniting love on sundry special occasions.

Lovers fully present with each other in the existential now can repeatedly tap into their ebullient love and be infused with its happiness again and again.  This may lead to the most loving of embraces in the simplest and most ordinary of times, making such times extraordinary and very special (See “Many Good Feelings Brought on by Love”).

Small, Medium and Large Ebullient Love

Sometimes ebullient love is felt in rather small and also medium size amounts.  A sudden flash of momentary joy on observing someone you love just be themselves in some idiosyncratic way can trigger a bit of heartwarming ebullient love.  Receiving a special hand squeeze, a smile, a compliment or even just a nod or a wink may trigger a surprisingly impactful, tiny spark of ebullient love joy.  Sometimes couples dancing together in intimate connection brings on these precious, ebullient feelings.

Engaging together in prayer, mutual meditation, rituals of the spirit and the heart and jointly appreciating the awesome and the grand can bring on a quieter, deeper form of ebullient love.  When that happens, people sometimes describe their love joy as jointly feeling at one with each other and the universe, overwhelmingly awesome, deeply spiritual, exploding with joy and beyond their ability to describe what they are experiencing.  Profound mixtures of love and sex experienced together can do the same thing.  A great sense of total connection and unity also can  be part of the ebullient love experience.

The River of Ebullient Love

Ebullient love flows like a river full of delightful twists and turns, safe but exciting little rapids, eddies, tributary waterfalls with rainbows and endless other precious, elation surprises.  It is the kind of love that keeps you aware of and fully feeling the here and now with little or no attention given to the disturbances of the past or the future.  It is like you might repeatedly feel traveling down a pleasant but exciting river.  Furthermore, it tends to create memories that you can later tap back into and by doing so re-experience a bit of the abiding nurturing which ebullient love often provides (See  “Living Well via Loving Well” and “Quality Love, Quality Life?”).

Reward – Reinforce – Motivate

All the rivers of love - Adamant Love, Compassionate Love, Passionate Love, Serene Love as well as Ebullient Love - have their rewarding functions.  However, nothing rewards us quite like ebullient love.  This form of love often is immediate, obvious, easily experienced, lighthearted, fret free and very delight-full.  It can be seen as providing a great many of feelings which help make living with and in love extremely desirable.

Ebullient love provides strong reinforcement for doing all the other things we do about love.  Its wide variety of various joys and other good feelings reward our learning how to seek love, relate with the love, behave with love, improve with love, bond with love and bask in love.  Not only that, but ebullient love helps make love attractive, intriguing, playful and fun to share.  It, therefore, is a great help in making life feel worthwhile.

Ebullient love plays a major role in helping us celebrate our love connections, strengthen our love bonds, mutually and repeatedly nurture and enrich each other, live happily and feel fulfilled.  Beyond that, it also is a part of letting us experience and appreciate the majestic nature of love itself.  Because of all that, ebullient love is a great motivator to seek and keep doing life in ways that bring and share many of life’s most wonderful experiences.

Infectious Ebullient Love

People usually enjoy being around those experiencing ebullient love.  That is because it tends to be automatically infectious and, therefore, very easily shared.  This makes it great for relationships.  Being part of a mutual, ebullient love event can make for a sort of happy, upbeat bonding.  It is the sincere “I am happy for your happiness” and the “your joy is my joy” type of heart touching, ebullient experience.

An Outline for Growing Ebullient Love

How good are you at being happy?  Lots of people are not nearly as proficient at getting themselves happy as they might be.  Lots of them grew up being unknowingly trained to think that things and events come along to make us happy or not.  Too many grew up in families where they absorbed the non-conscious, antiquated idea that overt happiness is frivolous, suspicious or even sinful.  That is a leftover from the Puritan days when secular happiness was considered Satanically inspired and only the somber were godly.  We now know that usually happiness has much more to do with your mindset and mindfulness than do the things and events which happen to you.  Your mindset and your mindfulness are things you can do something about.  We also know that not making yourself sufficiently happy, frequently enough is a very unhealthy way to live.

If, on an average day, you are good at making yourself happy and you are good at the getting and giving of love you may be able to produce lots of ebullient love experiences.  Perhaps you know someone or are yourself the kind of person who is really proficient at enjoying being loving and loved.  Some of the people who are described as romantics are experts at this.  Their mindset is to enjoy the manifestations and elaborations of romantic love and they do it with relish.

Natural Happiness, it turns out, is extremely healthy.  So is Real Love (See “Wellness: Its Necessity, Healthy Real Love”).  Learn to focus frequently on the things that you can savor, enjoy, appreciate, be inspired by, find enriching and be delighted with as you also learn to deal with and dismiss more quickly unhappy stuff and healthy happiness is likely to come your way quite a lot.  Along with that, become increasingly love centered, love oriented, love mindful, love knowledgeable, love active and love receptive and you are very likely to be quite healthfully often happy.  Do that with others who are doing likewise, and maybe with a super special other, and that is a way to voyage on the river of ebullient love.  So, work on your mindset and your mindfulness habits for love and happiness and ebullient love is likely to become more and more a part of your life.

Now, let me suggest you happily go talk all this over with a perhaps lovable somebody.  In the process, you might tell them that they can regularly receiving our mini-love-lessons via our free subscription system?  That may help put a bit more much-needed love knowledge into our love hungry world.

As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question:  Is it “love makes you happy” or “with love you can make yourself happy - or not” ?