Here’s another installment in a series of emails that took place between Michael and one of his senior students beginning the Summer of 2009. May you find the exchange interesting and enriching.
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October 27, 2010 (#41)
Student: What happens when you fall in love?
Michael: We recognize ourselves through another, and then let go. This surrender feels so good that we usually end up clinging to it, which undoes the surrender, which leads to suffering. But if we can maintain an intimacy with the seeing what is sacred in us in others, without the clinging, were in for a treat.
Student: Yeah, its interesting. I know the experience of falling in love with a man, with my children, then recently with Awareness. But each day, Im finding that when I dont cling to any of it, these silly, little, day-to-day things occur and its like I fall in love all over again. I just drove by an old man hunched and sitting quietly at an outside table in front of the local Taco Bell, and as he was taking a bite of his terribly nutrition-free food. Right there, it was like I fell in love! It defies explanation. But the opening was unmistakable and beautiful. There’s an innocence, or something, there. What is this?
Michael: Sounds like compassion unfolding from a deep openness to me. We might also call this experience love without the tiniest bit of attachment. Open, free and full. And its constant since we start to see what is sacred internally expressed externally, in every situation.