Love Meditation: Merging Hearts and Minds

The following is a love meditation that you can do with a partner, and it is also an excellent meditation for extending healing love to a loved one who may be far away.

Begin by sitting across from someone for whom you feel a deep caring and with whom you have a deep bond of love and trust. As you sit here together in a sense the form, denseness, and solidity of your own body. Now see your partner as an embodied being like yourself, who also has a sensitive, material body that has mass, form, and density. If you like, reach out, hold or touch each other's hands. As you do, feel how the substance of your body meets, greets, and communicates with the substance of your partner's body. As you sit here together, notice how your bodies rest upon and are supported by the forms and structures of the world.

After a while, shift your attention to a more subtle level. Sense that within these dense and solid bodies are more subtle bodies composed of movement, vibration, light, or energy. The vibrancy of these bodies of energy and light pervades your entire physical body and radiates out beyond your skin as warmth, smell, and luminosity into the space around you.

As you continue this love meditation, sense or imagine this natural radiance and let any tension dissolve. Allow your energy to find a natural balance and equilibrium that brings both you and your partner into a peaceful state of natural ease. As you do this, let your awareness reach out and sense your partner as a similarly vibrant and luminous being. Sense or imagine how the natural radiance of your energies reach out, flowing, dancing, and merging together into a larger field.

Sense the measurable electromagnetic ripples of your pulsing hearts resounding out through the space that joins you like the circles of two stones dropped side by side into a pool of still water.

The next step in this love meditation is to shift your awareness to an even subtler level of perception: Within you is an open spaciousness that is deep and clear like a boundless inner sky. Within this inner space all your thoughts, feelings, and energies are free to come and flow. Sense that this inner open space is continuous with the space surrounding you and with the deep inner knowing space of your partner. Let yourself feel the deep, inner quiet and balance of touching this inner spaciousness. Keep in mind that these are actual dimensions of your being. They may already be familiar and known to you, or they may be waiting to be discovered and lifted to the level of consciousawareness.

Resting here in balance and harmony together, sense and imagine the many ways your physical bodies can touch and connect. Notice how the fields and flows of energy and vibration allow you to communicate the energy of love and the resonance and dissonance of emotions. Discover how, in the dimension of your openness, you are of one essence, interpenetrating and sharing an open space of mind.

Now within this matrix of form, energy, and space, establish a nucleus or center of deep love and radiant positive regard. Reach out from this center with a gentle touch or physical caress. At the level of vibration, reach out with a kind word and a warm, luminous wave of love and caring. Sense or imagine a deep and intimate connection as energy flows within and between you. Sense or imagine that in a deep and loving way, the spheres of your energy and awareness can actually merge and inter-penetrate, even though your physical bodies occupy distinct and separate spaces.

Allow your fields to become completely shared -- open to the flow of unspoken yet profoundly intimate communication springing from the depths of your hearts and minds. From your hearts, fill each other with love and radiate this love to and through each other and to the world. Heart opening to heart opening—marvel at the many dimensions of life you share.

After a while, let your breath gradually bring you back to focus your awareness within the matrix of form-energy-space that is uniquely yourself. Resting here in balance, wonder, and joy, rejoice in the deep, intimate experience of unity and wholeness you have shared.

As you practice love meditation, you will learn to intimately sense and integrate these deeper dimensions of aliveness within you, and this inner wisdom will transform the quality of your relationships at their core.

[Adapted from the book "Luminous Mind" by Joel & Michelle Levey]