Personal Love vs Universal Love

“Love is a many-splendored thing,” someone once said. In polyamory communities, there’s an oft-heard adage known as, “Love is infinite; time and energy are not.” Polyamorous people believe that they have the capacity to love and be in relationship with more than one person at one time. Not everyone is necessarily built this way, but no one can dispute that we all have multiple loves, of different varieties. We love our spouse. We love our parents, we love our kids, and we often love our friends. We are all maintaining multiple relationships at the same time, but with varying degrees of intimacy and different levels of time and energy commitments. The sexualoving component does not actually change that reality that much, except that we’ve been conditioned to believe that it should.

There is also another concept that most westerners don’t talk about or grok well or are even aware of sometimes. There’s a difference between personal love and universal love. I am able, especially while in the role of priestess, to tap into what I call the universal love. This is the source of all life, love and pleasure in the universe. Name it what you will, most religions have some sort of concept for this. I simply open myself up to it, dissolving my small, human, egocentric boundaries and allow myself to connect in to the web of all being. From here I can access the compassion to be able to accept someone in all their human faultiness and frailty while simultaneously honoring the glorious divine within them. Each person who comes before me as a supplicant, I love. In that moment, they receive all the love I have to give, totally and completely. When that moment is over, I may feel a lingering sense of that emotion, but it does not tie me to that person, and it doesn’t necessarily herald the beginning of a personal relationship with them.

I have even been known to “make love” to a whole crowd of people, while they watched me dance. I opened that energy channel wide and poured out all my love onto every single person I made eye contact with. In that instant of connection, I allowed myself to love that person completely. And just because it only lasted a second or two, and just because I then immediately moved on to someone else and established a loving connection with others, doesn’t invalidate that true moment of communion I shared with the first.

Each moment is precious and exists independently of every other moment. But of course, moments flow one into the other seamlessly, and we sometimes attach too much significance, expectation, obligation to each individual moment, which lessens its magic. Appreciate the moments of love and grace that touch your life, and you will be better able to appreciate your life as a whole, and the lives of those who touch yours.

www.TempleRedLotus.com