If you ask 10 different people what love is you will get 10 completely different answers.  Considering how much of our lives are spent trying to get or give love, you would think we would have figured it out by now.  Everyone assumes they know what it is because of how they feel when they find it, or at least when they are in hope of finding it.  But that is kind of like saying; I can find water just because I know what it feels like when I take a drink.

There are zillions of self-help books on how to find love.  Why would we need more than one such book?  The answer is because no one seems to know exactly what he or she is searching for, but they are sure they will know it when they find it.  There are many books because of the many stories people have about love and what it will look like when they find it.  So they try to create or find the story in the belief that the love must out there somewhere.  It reminds me of the old story of the optimistic little girl who spent weeks cleaning a mountain of horse poop out of a barn on the certain belief that with all this poop, there must be a horse in there somewhere.

Love comes in many forms and all of them are so different from each other.  For example, the love a parent has for their child compared for the love the child has for their parent.  These two sets of feelings are very different from each other.  Young romantic teen love as compared to the love a committed older couple has for one another are two very different feelings.  The love shared between best friends as compared to the love expressed when we are of service helping to feed the poor.  The merchant who loves his customers and the nurse who loves her patients - all these are love.  So what is love?

I would submit that there is a common element to all of these feelings and that is what I would call love.  All of these contain willingness and desire to participate with another human being.  I believe that this willingness to participate is the essence of love.

When love ends and people part ways, what has stopped?  The willingness and desire to participate has stopped.  When we are feeling unloved, what is it we feel?  We feel lonely.  No one wants to play with us.  When we are angry and push people away, are we feeling loving?  No, pushing people away is the opposite of loving.

Why is this important?  Because we invent so many stories about how people should be or act to make us feel loved.  We are certain they don't love us if they won't be the way we want.  We want control over who they are inside and how they behave so we can guarantee we feel loved.  There are interesting reasons why we feel and want this, but none of those reasons have anything to do with love.  In fact wanting others to be different than they are is the measure of how much we are not loving them.  We are saying we are not willing or desirous of participating with who they are.  We don't respect their right to be who they are.  We want them to be who and what we want.

The true measure of their love for us is nothing more than 'do they want to participate with us?'  It is really that simple.  If we can open up to how really simple it is, then we can see how much and how often we are in fact loved.  We don't need to feel alone in the world.  We belong.  We have connection to all sorts of people.  All these connections form our circle of love.

So why is it we tend to feel alone so much of the time?  What is the story we are looking for that we believe will make us all ok and feel truly loved?  I have a few thoughts on that subject.

When was the most profoundly ok feeling time in your life?  When did you feel the least afraid, the most protected, and the most taken care of?  Most everyone will have the same answer even though they don't remember it.  It is the very first experience you ever had and it is burned into your subconscious brain and labeled "This is right!  I am ok!"  It is the time you are carried in your mother's womb.  For those nine months you are absolutely cared for.  The profound feeling is one of oneness.  You are literally and figuratively one with your mother.  You are the same entity.  Your nervous system, hormone system, blood stream, everything is an extension of your mother's physiology.  If she dies, you die.  If she feels bad, you feel bad.  When her hormones swing, your hormones swing.  You are the same.  You have no perception of separation or difference.

Then you are born and everything is different.  You are now separate.  You get hungry, hot, and cold; your insides feel funny and often hurt.  This difference feels bad.  You long to return to the womb where all the okness was.  This experience is hardwired into everybody's soul.  It is the first and most central truth you have: Oneness is right and good.  Sameness is right and good.  We spend the rest of our lives trying to recreate these feelings.  We invent endless stories about what we think will bring us back to those first feelings of oneness and okness.  If only _________, then I would feel ok.

If this were all we had we would quickly go insane with grief for what we had lost.  But another force within us opens once we are born: The drive to find and manifest our genetic potential; the drive to become whom we are meant to be.  This becomes our other half.  Our first half wants to reconnect with that perfect place of feeling oneness and our second half wants to unfold and manifest our potential to become our unique self.  Both become our mission and pursuing both our primary balance.  Any time we pursue one and neglect the other we feel out of balance. We are out of balance.  It is the human condition.  We constantly seek self-creation and we seek connection and participation with others.  We want self and we want oneness.

These drives inherently create a tension within us because we want that sameness and oneness we felt in the womb, yet the more we grow; the more we become different than that oneness in the womb.  As we differentiate, we feel more and more separate from our goal of oneness.  This dynamic tension creates one of the prime lies we invent that mess up our life.  Since our progressive growth and differentiation pulls us away from being able to return to the oneness of the womb, we decide that the world needs to keep up with us and change along with us so we can regain our connection to sameness and oneness.  The struggle of power is born.  We demand those around us reflect sameness with us.  We deny their inherent difference and demand sameness so we can maintain the hope of regaining our feeling of connected oneness.

This brings us back to love.  For most people love is that hopeful feeling of regaining that oneness, sameness, okness.  To "fall in love" is to deny the differences in another person and project ourselves onto them.  We see and feel them as the same as us, as special.  We feel oneness with our fantasy projection and it feels wonderful for the length of time we are able to keep up the fantasy.  This is not just the game of young lovers.  Parents project themselves onto their kids and kids onto their parents.  We will project onto friends, teammates, co-workers, and even complete strangers a belief in sameness.  Our projection creates a willingness and desire to participate with them.  We confuse our lie of sameness as the measure of "love" or connection we have with others.

Growing up is the process of learning to respect the differences in all other people and still want to participate with them.  We grow out of the belief that connection requires sameness and learn to appreciate the myriad of ways that people can participate with us and support our uniqueness with their own uniqueness.  Yes, sameness feels good, but so can difference when there is the desire and willingness to participate.  The reason we wanted sameness was because it was associated with the feeling of being totally supported in the womb.  But the truth is that that sameness only existed because we had not started to express our difference yet.  We were blank slates reflecting our mother's feelings.  We were never in truth the same.  Our genes are completely different.  We just had not started to express those genes yet.  So our belief in sameness was a lie all along.  We actually had oneness even though we were different.

Maturity is learning to solve this riddle: How do I be me in all my difference and uniqueness and still regain oneness with the rest of life?  It begins with the desire and willingness to connect and participate with all the differences around us.  It begins and ends with love.

Take care,

David

Our office has kept our prices unchanged for the last 7 years.  In that time inflation has increased 19.2%.  Our dollars just are not stretching far enough any more, so we will be raising prices in two steps to compensate for inflation.  June 1st we will be increasing our fees by 10% and then next year another 10% to bring us up to current prices.  We are keeping Medicare prices the same right now.

Tuesdays and Fridays

Take care,

David            

How mindfulness can improve self-knowledge

A major block to knowing ourselves is our desire to see ourselves in a positive light.  This causes us to make faulty decisions in our lives.  Good choices require accurate information to work with.  Learning to pay attention to our present moment experience from a non-judgmental stance can overcome our self bias and help us know ourselves better.  This enables us to make more successful decisions in our daily life.     

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Green Tea Extracts Help Metabolic Syndrome  
 

~Blaise Pascal  

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Homemade Chicken Soup

 "We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end. "

~ Benjamin Disraeli 

About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Dr David DeLapp DC
Chiropractor

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