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

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.

We have boundaries but have erected no barrier,

Allowing is supporting someone’s choice even if we do not agree with it. Allowing does not always mean accepting, but accepting always includes allowing.

We feel love now as we first received it; we give love the way others gave it to us. Thus, since love is unique to each person, we read and write love, receive and give it, in the style designed by our past experience. Yet, like good handwriting, our unique signature can be read by others.

Some specific ways of practicing love are by showing what I call the “five A’s”: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

In a world in which we’re scared of reckless loving, only those who please us or seem worthy deserve our love. In a world in which we’re ready to be awakened, everyone deserves love because it is not based on merit, good deeds, or willingness to reciprocate, only on being alive. That kind of limitless love is what we mean when we talk about the ful

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

Even in our infatuated state, we may realize that this is not the right relationship for us, that it has no future. Yet we often can’t let go. We may refer to this inability as our heart speaking, when it is actually our adrenals. We are under the influence of our own adrenaline, the hormone that keeps us attached whether or not our feelings are re

We are touched by what Virgil, in The Aeneid, called “the tears in things.” We appreciate that built into all existence is a grief about impermanence; a vulnerability to disappointment, hurt, and loss; a resignation to suffering. That touches us both as participants in the givens of the human story and as loving witnesses to it.

Being an adult in love means being adult about love and loving. Psychological adulthood—maturity—is letting love in carefully and showing it responsibly. Spiritual adulthood consists of expanding our love so that it is unbounded, a practice requiring recklessness. Since love sits in us someplace between trust and fear, a commitment to love requires