Love

Sex, Love, and Dharma: Finding Love Without Losing Your Way
by Arthur Jeon

Will I ever be happy in love?

In Sex, Love, and Dharma, Arthur Jeon answers these and other common questions like "Why do I always fall for the wrong person?" "How can I stop sabotaging my relationships?" and "What's the secret to a passionate sex life?" with compassion, humor, and honesty. Drawing on the teachings of the dharma, Jeon provides a fresh way of looking at relationships that doesn't rely on someday finding "the one." Instead, we learn to embrace the opportunities to love in the here and now, no matter what the circumstances.

Applying the timeless wisdom of the dharma to the joy, challenges, and heartache of contemporary romance, Sex, Love, and Dharma offers a better way to be in love and will help you achieve the true love you always imagined was possible.

Here's Looking at You, Kid
Get over your Self and simply love.
Drop yourself and love.
You are your Partner
Your Lover is You
You are your Lover

— Anonymous

We all search for love. We want it. We think it will make us whole. We think that we can finally be happy if we can find the love we desire.

We all make the mistake of looking outside of ourselves for that love, looking for somebody who will fulfill our every need and fantasy. We seek that external love and then completely forget to express love in our daily interactions.

Spiritually speaking, we get confused between the false love of the ego, which flows from a mindset of scarcity and need, and the love that comes from knowing one is part of the Divine in the universe and thus can never be empty of Love, because love is what we are. We are looking at it all the time.

Sounds good, you might be saying, but what the heck does that mean?

There is an old parable about a young bird that has just learned how to fly. The bird swoops and swirls and spins and flies. When it gets back to its nest, it has some questions for its mother.

"Mother, what's this stuff called 'air'? Everybody keeps talking about it. They say it's everywhere, but I can't see it anywhere."

This is exactly the way we are when we are searching for love rather than expressing it, when we are looking for "the one" rather than being "at one" with all we encounter. Because the currency of love is available all the time, supporting everything that we do, every single moment is an opportunity to give love, tapping into the flow of it. Don't look for it, for you are it.

There is a cashier at my local Wild Oats market who embodies this way of being. Her name is Reisha and she is a large woman, with natural warmth that slows you down, creating a hiccup in your impatience to get through the line. The other day I was waiting for her to ring me up and we were chatting. I started out in a hurry, but just being in her presence relaxed me.

"How are you today?" Reisha asked me with a welcoming smile.

"Good," I replied. "How are you?"

"You're looking at it." She said, smiling, unknowingly quoting a David Mamet line from his movie Heist. Or maybe she'd seen the movie. Regardless, her response was filled with a rueful knowing about life's ups and downs.

When the young person bagging my few items started to put the ripe peaches into the bottom of the bag, followed by heavier items, including a half-gallon of milk, Reisha gently stopped him.

"Okay now," she said patiently, pulling the items out of the bag. "This is the way you want to do it so the peaches don't get squished."

"Oh . . ." The young man was embarrassed by not getting something so simple right.

"Don't worry, you'll be fine once you get the system," Reisha said.

"Thanks," he said.

With that, Reisha turned to me and rang up the items before turning to the woman behind me, who had been watching the whole scene impatiently. Reisha smiled at the woman.

"How are you today?"

"Fine," said the woman. "And you?"

"You're looking at it," Reisha said. The woman loosened up and smiled in spite of herself.

Reisha was at it again, expressing warmth and love to one person at a time. She wasn't asking for anything. She didn't have anything to give except her presence. She was in a job most people would find beneath them. And yet she was expressing love, instead of searching for it.

In your life, in the smallest interactions with everybody you meet, there is an opportunity to express love. This way of being in the world changes the flow of energy between you and the rest of the world. It changes a dynamic of "not enough" into an outflow of "more than enough" - in fact, so much that here's some for you. And the more you exercise this expression of love, the more it grows.

This is because love is a verb. If we believe that love is a noun, then we think that it can be traded, given, withheld, sought after, possessed, and lost. If, on the other hand, we know love as a verb, giving or receiving it is ultimately the same, and love is both inexhaustible and infinite. As the Persian poet Rumi said, "Only from the heart can you touch the sky."

This is not dependent upon finding that special one person. When you feel you need somebody special in order to express love, you are ultimately weakened - you see yourself as dependent on other people as the source of love. This is a setup for disappointment and suffering. And anytime they don't meet your needs in the time, place, or manner you desire, in your disappointment you may try to seduce, cajole, manipulate, control, attack, or even kill that person. This is just the spectrum of human response to loss. Most of the time it doesn't escalate into violence, but often it does; we have all seen or even experienced physically or emotionally abusive relationships. The perpetrators of this violence, besides reenacting what they experienced as children, are trying to keep from losing their source of love, their "love supplier." But what they don't realize is that they are this source.

Right now, understand that you are the source of the love you feel, and nobody else. And the anxiety caused by the loss of that love is also yours.

In this awareness that you are love, you don't make anybody special, you make everybody special. Express your love to the world, in a sense making everybody your soul mate. Then the question isn't where you go to "get the love that you deserve," because you don't have to go anywhere or to anybody. Just simply unblock your own heart and let it flow to everybody you encounter.

Love is energy. If you hoard it, it stagnates. If you let it flow, you begin to realize its inexhaustible nature.

Copyright © 2005 by Arthur Jeon. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Arthur Jeon leads weekly talks called Dharma Conversations and teaches yoga in Santa Monica, California. His newest book is Sex, Love, and Dharma.