How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

Love is a connection that is caring, intended for good, respectful of freedom, and genuinely sensitive to another’s needs, even making those needs as important as our own. This shift in attention to the needs of others deflates our own sense of self-importance. What power love has to help us let go of ego!

The five A’s, like the food groups, are not arbitrary. Each of them is a specific and necessary building block of our psychological makeup. If one is missing, we feel the deficiency, and a part of us suffers. Here is how each A contributes to our psychological health: Attention is necessary so that we can be known. This makes it possible for us to

Love is a force, but it is sometimes called a feeling. When we imagine that love is a feeling, we may be disappointed because we notice that we cannot keep any feeling up and running all the time. A feeling is an intense, immediate, sensate/physical experience. Feelings have a beginning, a middle, and an end; love is ongoing. Feelings are responses

We simply notice it with bare attention and keep returning to the present moment by focusing on our breath, what is real right now. In mindfulness, we are so attentive to our thoughts and reactions that we see precisely where they lead and how they do or do not produce suffering for ourselves and others.

The one thing to remember is that those who give us what was missing in our past also show us what was missing. That combination of fulfillment and grief can be hard to hold, so we have to be patient with ourselves.

Bodhicitta is the awakening of agape within us, since it arises from caring about the spiritual welfare of others. Our yearning in bodhicitta is to free others from the suffering of being caught in fear and ignorance. It is unconditional, unrestricted, and universal, so it actually represents a commitment to love fully.

Acceptance is about welcoming personality traits; allowing is about supporting the choices and lifestyle that follow them. Allowing also involves welcoming the full emergence of all that someone really is. Preventing full emergence results in more than a personal loss. It is a blow to the purposes of evolution itself, which requires everything each

love is not a feeling in itself, but every feeling can happen with love:

Another example from Buddhism helps us see how we are becoming prepared to love. It is bodhicitta. This Sanskrit word refers to a longing to be enlightened and to help others find that same enlightenment. From the perspective of bodhicitta, we can say that we are not complete until we share ourselves. Since love is our deepest identity, that means

We ask four assurances of love from a partner or significant other. A yes to each of these questions gives us evidence of a caring connection. Each yes can become a commitment to the building of true trust and fearless love: Are you there for me and how? Do you care about me and how? Do I matter to you and how? Are you interested in me and how?