Synopsis: Here you are consciously introduced to a
calmly flowing form of love you probably experienced very early in life
and likely would do well to experience a great deal more--Serene Love.
A Love You Know and Can Know Better
You have heard of Passionate Love, Compassionate Love and maybe even
Adamant Love
but what do you consciously know about Serene Love?
Healthy, real love
flows into its serene dynamic when it becomes calmly happy, safely and
joyfully tranquil with emotional warmth and a sense of sanctified
harmony. You might have (or hopefully have) experienced Serene Love as
an infant in the protective arms of a loving parent, perhaps gently
rocking you into a sense of deep, secure, love-filled, connected
contentment.
Or possibly you might have felt something like Serene Love in utero
in the later stages of development when your mother lovingly stroked her
tummy and talked softly to you. Those and similar experiences probably
planted Serene Love deep in your subconscious. It also helped save you
from dying of the infant killer – marasmus and other failure to thrive
syndromes. Now, with conscious knowledge of Serene Love, you may be
able to add many enrichments to your personal and relational health and
well-being.
What Is Serene Love?
Serene Love is what its name implies, love with serenity. And it is
much more than that. Healthy, real love takes on its serene form when
it is flowing calmly, peacefully yet powerfully all-around and all
through us. Serene Love puts us into a state of feeling encompassed by
very nurturing love while at the same time feeling very serene, fully
content and profoundly tranquil. It includes a sense of being safe and
secure with peaceful joy. When shared with a loved one (s), it often
can come with an intense sense of being joined together and united with
that loved one (s) in Serene Love . It is sometimes described as
blessedly spiritual, intimately inspiring and providing a sense of total
well-being and complete contentment.
How Serene Love Comes to Us
As an adult you may have experienced Serene Love when intimately
“spooning” as you went to sleep with someone you dearly loved and who
loved and cherished you. Or perhaps it was when being preciously
treated and gently held or tenderly cuddled. It may occur again when
feeling deeply and very personally understood, thoroughly accepted and
peacefully
core connected while wrapped in
heartfelt
unity. Often Serene Love immerses us in its warm, gentle, restorative
flow when we accept being cared for, consoled, comforted and especially
highly, intrinsically valued by someone very important to us.
Sometimes Serene Love arrives and helps us to thrive via sharing
tender precious intimacies, at other times with a soft sunny
lightheartedness and yet still at other times as we feel a deep awesome
spirituality. When people experience Serene Love they are apt to smile
and occasionally say awesome things like the following lovers quotes:
“today feels like God is in his heaven and all is right with our world”;
or with a loved one “right now with you I’m completely happily
saturated with what seems like a perfect moment of our togetherness” or
“it feels like we are soaring together as we flow into, around, through
and totally with each other as we ascend into the cosmos itself.”
Serene love can be experienced in shared, tranquil closeness with
another. It might happen walking hand-in-hand under the stars, being
jointly swept along with great music, holding each other as you look at
your children sleeping or just being quiet and entirely with who you
love and are loved by.Mindfulness and Serene Love
You may miss out on the greatness of Serene Love experiences if you
are not pausing to pay mindful attention to the possibility of their
gentle, flowing arrival. This is because Serene Love often is
experienced as a sort of quiet, subtle, placid drifting forward on a
stream of contentment and connectedness, easily rushed past in a busy
life. A full experience of Serene Love takes lingering in awareness of
the
existential now after turning off the troubling concerns of
the past, the future and the outside distractions of the present. Then
it is useful to start purposefully and appreciatively focusing on love
and whatever might be serenely enjoyed in that moment. Doing that can
bring you the rich, golden, healthy, halcyon happiness of Serene Love.
When it is shared with someone you love, it can come with extra fine
touches of tender, intimate, personal specialness.
Mild, Moderate and Intense Serene Love
Some experiences of Serene Love are only mild and momentary. They,
nevertheless, are precious and to be cherished. In love relationships, a
look of love, a few words of appreciation or affirmation, a certain
loving tone of voice, a just right hug, an act of extra kindness, an
intimate personal self-disclosure and thousands of other small showings
of love can produce both mild and moderate Serene Love experiences (see “
A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”.
However, it tends to work best, for those who will notice and linger a
bit, in mindful awareness of the possibility of Serene Love being
present.
Serene Love also can be experienced intensely, especially by those
who organize their lives to include time for this possibility.
For couples, romance can help. Savoring togetherness and not rushing on to
the next thing
is essential. It is important to make sure that romantic experiences
are fully enjoyed and shared as they transpire, and are not just
goal-oriented steps toward sexual satisfaction.
With children, parents, other family members or friends, having
carefree, real appreciation of each other can open one to the mild, the
moderate and occasionally even the more intense Serene Love experiences.
Being with yourself alone while being meditative sometimes can open
you up to joining with a sense of universal love and your purely
positive connection with the universe. That, in turn, can bring on
great experiences of intense, serene love even having a Nirvana-like
intensity.
Your Brain and Serene Love
Via the brain study sciences, we can point to Serene Love
facilitating a neurological, parasympathetic brain pattern sometimes
dubbed the deep relaxation response. That pattern sets off a group of
body wide reactions generating a general state of calm contentment.
Relationally, that state then tends to be followed by a greater
propensity to being cooperative, kind, appreciative and affectionate
toward others.
Experimentally, those understandings were arrived at after research
subjects, who were evaluated as being in healthful love relationships,
meditated on those they loved while brain activity and various other
neurological measurements were being made (see “
What Your Brain Does with Love”).
Here, the evidence is tentatively interpreted as suggesting the
experimental subjects were experiencing at least a mild state of Serene
Love which induced, or triggered, the deep relaxation response in their
brains. That then resulted in increased relationally positive behavior
tendencies. Thus, we might postulate that Serene Love thoughts beget
more love feelings which, in turn, beget increased love actions. Or put
more simply, love begets love just like the ancients taught.
A wide range of fields at a variety of universities and research
institutions are involved in this type of brain/love research. At
those, a number of repetitions and variations of the above described
type of experimental procedures are ongoing, as are further analysis and
interpretation of the existing experimentally obtained data. The works
of Dr. Daniel G. Amen, Dr. Helen Fisher, Dr. Gerald Hüther, Dr.
Geoffrey Miller and quite a few others may be consulted for further
science-based knowledge on the subject.
The Many Wonderful Benefits of Serene Love
First of all, the evidence strongly suggests Serene Love is very good
for your physical health, for your loved ones and everybody else.
Stress-related illnesses and early deaths, according to some studies,
are rampant and increasing in many parts of the world. In those places,
they may account for, or be involved in, at least half the visits to
physicians, more than half the prescriptions written and a majority of
hospitalizations involving strokes and heart attacks.
Serene Love experiences are seen as both a very helpful preventive
measure and an assistive antidote for all that. Serene Love provides a
potent path toward achieving the therapeutic serenity viewed as
essential in the treatment of addictions. Being able to experience
periods of Serene Love is thought to positively influence just about
every biological process going on in your body. It has been surmised
that recovery and rehabilitation from all sorts of different wounds,
accidents and debilitating conditions can be assisted and enhanced by
Serene Love.
Second, the evidence also strongly suggests that Serene Love is very
good for your psychological health. Depression and anxiety in
particular, but virtually all other psychological maladies are thought
to at least somewhat, and often to a major degree, improve when patients
participate in periods of feeling Serene Love. This probably can be
done through self-love, couple love, family love, friendship love, pet
love, spiritual love or any other kind of healthy, real love. It is
surmised that recovery and rehabilitation from most types of
psychological and psychiatric difficulty can be therapeutically enhanced
by Serene Love.
Third, Serene Love is absolutely great for all sorts of different
forms of love relationships. Experiencing Serene Love together with a
love mate or spouse has been known to help cure the worst of lover and
marriage type, relationship problems, get couples through the worst of
relationship effecting difficulties and inspire the most positive and
wonderful of love mate interactions. Something of the same can be said
to be true for families, parents and offspring and friendship networks.
Fourth, for individuals and groups, spiritual, metaphysical, cosmic
connection, universality, beatific and deity focused Serene Love
experiences have been reported by many from all around the globe as
perhaps the most inspiring, meaningful, beautiful, healing and life
transforming of all love experiences.
In short, Serene Love provides all the healthful benefits of
experiencing real love coupled with and intertwined with experiencing
serenity.
Cultivating Serene Love
For a lot of people, having a Serene Love experience seems to come as
something of a surprise. It also seems true that having Serene Love
experiences are much sought after and hoped for but still rather
unexpected when they happen. That may be because Serene Love is not
broadly, well identified and, therefore, not given much conscious
thought, learned about, or understood as something which may be
cultivated.
To purposefully cultivate the possibility of having a Serene Love
experience, it helps to first be able to consciously identify Serene
Love and then know something about how it might come to be experienced.
Then it helps to put yourself into the situations or create the
conditions in which Serene Love is thought likely to occur and merge
into your conscious awareness.
Here are just a few potential Serene Love possibilities. You and a
loved one comfortably cuddling together in beautiful surroundings,
looking out at gorgeous scenery,
being and not
doing
anything else or needing to. Quietly lingering while looking in on your
safe and secure, sleeping child and gratefully marveling at the
miraculous wonderfulness of the love you have with that child. Coming
back to a very welcoming love-filled home after a long and arduous time
away. Lying together with your very special love mate in a sense of
complete awesome connection after superbly intimate tender lovemaking.
Gratefully, appreciatively and prayerfully meditating on the beautiful,
the incredible, the great, the grand and the never completely knowable
marvels of existence.
Absorbing the awesome beauty of a symphonic piece or an exquisite
painting and feeling deeply moved and thankful for the opportunity.
Savoring awareness and intense appreciation of the precious, the
intimate and the intangibly special wonders which help Serene Love sweep
over and through you. Being un-busy in thought, feelings and/or
actions also can
set the stage for experiencing Serene Love.
Staying appreciatively focused and concentrating on the positive and the
meaningful while not attending to distractions or the
should’s and
ought to’s of life can be quite assistive. Seeking to empathetically and intrinsically
know and
be known by someone you intimately
core connect with in love.
Critical to Serene Love are protective love actions. These are
essential elements so that the safety factor of Serene Love can be
established and maintained. Without a sense of safety and security, the
dynamic flow of serenity is hard to establish and not likely to be
sufficiently sustainable.
Hopefully these thoughts will at least get you started toward your
own river of love flowing more often in its highly beneficial, serene
dynamic. Perhaps also, it will help you help those you love and care
about to be more often tranquilly immersed in the river of Serene Love.
One More Thing
Might you find it an enrichment to talk these ideas over with
another, and while you are at it, let them know about this site’s
mini-love-lessons for better love relating and spreading needed love
knowledge?
As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
♥ Love Success Question: If you are going to do something about Serene Love today, or no later than tomorrow, what might it be?