Images of love

Once you are done, maybe go get a coffee or something and after 30 minutes or so, come back and look at the images or words that you had put down on your paper.
Images of love

BENGALURU: When you think of love, romantic love that is sensual love, what comes to your mind? Just take a moment to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let the images come to you. Take your time, don’t try to force it or do anything. Just let your mind bring you what it will.When you feel you have something solid enough, hold that image and maybe even write a few lines about it for yourself before you go further.

Sometimes, our minds have a way of playing with us, and what we think we know very clearly disappears within a few moments, like much of the dreams one has in the wee hours before we wake. Though the dreams themselves seem so solid and important while we are dreaming, the moment we wake, they go away and try as we might, we may not be able to remember them. So, don’t let your image of love disappear. Spend a few minutes holding it, looking at it, feeling it. Write it down or draw it on paper. Let it become real, so to say.

Once you are done, maybe go get a coffee or something and after 30 minutes or so, come back and look at the images or words that you had put down on your paper. Just sit with it and see how much of that image is about you. Do you find yourself in this idea of romantic, sensual love that you imagined? As you are – whatever age, shape, size that you are in. Did that image of romantic, sensual love include you and keep you in the centre of it all, or was it an imagined scenario, a stylized, abstract version of love that seems to happen with other people and you are not really in the picture at all?

Chances are that the image that you had pictured was the latter  – some abstracted version of humanity, people that may not even be based on anyone you really know but through media and cultural tropes. Chances are that you pictured people who are of a certain age only, and probably of a certain kind of body. Chances are that even if you pictured yourself in that image, it would have been an idealized you – maybe a fit, young, lithe version of yourself, with great hair and what not. You would have very likely not pictured the warts and the farts.

Even as we are told by everyone and their monkey that we should aspire to love and be loved, and that love is the greatest thing ever, even more than the much vaunted sliced bread, we are rarely shown how to see ourselves in the picture as the person loving and being loved. If you did keep yourself right there in the middle of it all, chances are that you might get told off for being self-centred or worse.
Having read all this, try again. Draw yourself into the loving picture. Let it happen.

(The author is a counsellor with InnerSight)

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