Zen Recovery Path Blog weekly theme :: NAMING

Author: Sifu Matthew CarverIn my heart and on my mind, love without condition is a truistic sensibility at the onset. It's when variables like definitions, expectations, control or naming adjust our sensibility. For this week's theme, I prefer to go to the proverbial source, David Whyte's book Consolations"Love too early is a beautiful but harrowing human difficulty. Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery. We can never know at the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation, before the revelation has flowered completely, we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief, may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereaved, we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointed preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.The act of loving itself, always becomes a path of humble apprenticeship, not only in following its difficult way and discovering its different forms of humility and beautiful abasement but strangely, through its fierce introduction to all its many astonishing and different forms, where we are asked continually and against our will to give in so many different ways, without knowing exactly, or in what way, when or how, the mysterious gift will be returned.We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of two narrow a calling. In many ways, love. has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult part of all, to love without naming at all."Call or contact Zen Recovery Path. Our community welcomes a fresh start. Recovery will be inspired by Clinical and Holistic Therapies such as; Art Projects, Kung Fu Classes, Tai Chi, Music group, EMDR and Movie with Meaning therapies.126 E. 16th St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627(800) 759-1930