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

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

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

In fact, all the psychological tools we have gathered from the self-help movement in recent years were for this: to become lovers who stand expectantly at every door, flowers in hand.

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.

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:

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.

In fact, a crush is painful, so in spiritual consciousness, we may feel compassion for the person who obsesses about us in that way.

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