Between positively and negatively charged particles is a center point of light. When two lovers are attracted to each other the light of love can change them and their world forever.
“Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you, pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you” said an Kwakutl Indian in 1896.
“Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you, consumed by fire with my love for you, I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me, I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain, where are you going with my love? I am told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye”
“Love is a temporary madness” wrote Augustine. “It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision.”
“You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
“Because this is what love is.
“Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.
“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
“Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”
Whilst I am neither Catholic or a celibate monk, I agree that love transcends lust.
Being a romantic at heart, I can’t say that the idea that love is merely a biological trick very inspiring. We are attracted to someone, say evolutionary psychologists, because we intuitively sense a person is good breeding material for the next generation.
However, we cannot ignore the biological reality of love.
In the weeks ahead we will provide daily exercises from the Merkabah Method designed to improve your relationship with yourself, others and especially your lover.
You will experience more pleasure as long lasting meaning in your life and love.
The chemistry of Long Lasting Passion
MRI evidence explains there are three brain centers triggered by romantic love. Love is not an emotion according to neurological love researcher Helen Fisher, but a craving, just like craving for chocolate.
“The same thing that happens when a person takes cocaine” said social psychologist Arthur Aron,
“Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly” said Fisher.
In the elation of early love we crave sexual intimacy as our brain is bathed with lust inducing chemicals The brain centres for reward and motivation are flooded with dopamine when we experience pleasure and the centres for calculating gains and losses fire up said Fisher.
“The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it’s almost impossible to stamp out” said Plato.
However, research tells us of loves second stage.
Perhaps this is the stage that Augustine would approve.
The brain is increasingly bathed with oxytocin and vasopressin that encourage couples – enter the picture, encouraging couples to form emotional bonds.
In intimate moments of prolonged eye contact, hugging and sex oxytocin rewards our brain with pleasure encouraging us to form long term love. .
We now know that marriage need not drift into an emotionless void.
Brain researcher Bianca Acevedo at UC Santa Barbara studied married couples still ‘madly in love after thirty years .
She found that doing novel, exciting things together boosts marital happiness and flood our brains with pleasure chemicals. So does plenty of sex.
“There’s a connection between being engaged in the relationship – especially affection, disclosure and intimacy – and oxytocin.”
Couples administered with oxytocin can better calmly mediate conflict and to empathize with their lover.
It can help even if you have fallen out of love.
Click here and you will learn to enjoy the pleasurable reward that come from understanding each others hierarchy of values and by being supportive.
Changing your loving style is not as difficult as you probably believe.
