Mother Love

We make it hard to love people, to love each other. We create these categories of people that we have to love or don’t have to love, in-groups and out-groups. And we set the standard for love so high so that in-groups and out-groups are absolutely necessary. I love the way we phrase it in philosophy. We say that the standard is “overly demanding.” Or some equivalent phrase that sounds technical and jargon-y.

But don’t we experience different kinds of love? Love lives with us in a spectrum of varieties that we English users have done a crap service to. We threw them all in a bucket. The LOVE bucket. Sometimes we get super fancy and use Greek words or borrow from some other language to describe the attitude or the experience. And there’s the other problem. We use that same overworked word to communicate experience, emotion, attitudes, whatever we’ve associated with it. How can we even talk to each other about it?

If I say I love you, am I talking about a feeling I have about you or a commitment to you, action, what am I saying? If you say you love me, how do I know you’ve differentiated what you’re experiencing enough to talk to me about it? What a mess we’ve made.

Discovering Mother Love

I was at a Siri Joti puja once. It was a ritual in the Sri Vidya tradition that I am not qualified to explain at all. But the woman leading spoke beautifully about a lot of things, and one of the points that stuck with me and changed my whole perspective on the world was about the love of Mother. She said we are not separate from the world or from others and once you realize this when you walk down the street, every person you see you will look at and think “ah, mother!” At first that is a bit jarring. One of the issues we have in the West that makes Eastern spirituality so difficult is our mother complex. So back that out.

Mother means nurturing, unconditional positive regard, safety, acceptance. Don’t think about actual particular mothers you know, think about Mother as an idea, like feminine, masculine, or an archetype.

So, when we stop experiencing ourselves as separate from the world around us, we can experience every person with love, the way an infant does with their mother, undifferentiated. And the reverse is true, we are mother to all within our experience. This perspective is what allowed me to start feeling love for everyone I meet, because they are Mother, and I am Mother. It means I cultivate an attitude of nurturing, unconditional positive regard, safety, acceptance toward everyone: strangers, friends, the lady who sells me burritos every Friday and my own children. It is just a baseline way to walk around experiencing the world.

Not everyone wants to experience that love, so I keep it to myself in most cases, and that’s fine. But I will tell you I have seen that people do notice it. When you have the baseline attitude of love your gratitude to the burrito lady is more heartfelt and she will appreciate being recognized for her hard work. When you apologize for bumping into people, they are more likely to see your innocent error for what it is when you are operating from the baseline of love. Life moves more smoothly when it’s lubricated with love (sorry, I had to).

Kindness and compassion for others flows so easily from this place. It is hard to force yourself to love someone out of your compassion for them, but easy to find compassion from a place of love.

My husband says this is too foofoo for him, he sticks to sending people goodwill, which works really well for him. And maybe it’s not for everyone to see the world this way. But before I heard this concept I never would have thought to try. So my gift to you this Mother’s Day is the knowledge that we are all Mother, and that this Mother love changed my world, and maybe it could change yours.