Love in All its Forms

Published: Fri, 06/12/15

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June 12, 2015

Love In All Its Forms

The month of June...the month of love. This post and the next will look at the mysteries of love, self and other.

The Greeks gave us six distinctions or forms of love and relating to others. I find it significant that these are not just feelings, they are activities, ways of actively relating to another. If we want to know ourselves, we must observe who we love and how we love them. We must look, too, at reciprocity: how do those we love love us.

If you spend some time with each form, contemplate it, seek it in your relationships, write about it and ask questions about it, you will find new awareness enriching all your relationships. Look at love as if you were in conversation with your inner Socrates and he was asking you questions.

The Six Forms of Loving Others

Eros is sexual love: physical, hungry, creative, and the desire to possess and be possessed. Who do you feel hunger for? Who hungers for you? Taken beyond the carnal drive, eros becomes the love that seeks to co-create something new, intimate and powerful. It is creative arousal stimulated by the presence of another. How many relationships do you have that light creative sparks and turn on your sense of possibility?

Philia is friendship and the sweetness of liking another and being liked. Who are your friends? Who loves having you as a friend? Do you experience them as your twin or your opposite?

Agape is sacrificial love. The love that offers to die for the other to live. Who are you willing to die for – to sacrifice some part of your aliveness? Who has loved you in a sacrificial way?

Pragma is the longterm love of companionship. Who has become an essential part of the acts of daily life? Who sees you as essential to their daily life?

Ludus is playful love. There is nothing like the intimacy of playfulness and shared smiles. Who do you love sharing your sandbox with? Who makes you giggle? Who delights in being silly with you?

Storge is parental love. Who do you feel responsible for? Who do you want to comfort and cultivate? Who provides you with loving guidance? Within our souls are always the paternal and maternal gestures, and always the child seeking parenting.

In any close relationship, these six different ways of relating are present in some combination. Think of the ways these loves appear in your relationships.

Use these questions to explore any relationship of importance that has gone beyond the delights of discovery.

Ask your partner or your best friend about how ambition, success and failure appear in each form and then reflect, share gratitude, and imagine new active intentions in the loves you share.

The Essential Love of Self

The Greeks define a seventh love that is the root of the health of all the other loves, philautia or self-love. To feel joy and fulfillment at being you is the experience of philautia. This is the fountain of all love, the water of life. Philautia is not the desire for self and the root of selfishness. It is self-possession. When we possess ourselves, we do not look to others for self-fulfillment and we love them and experience their love for us in freedom. How do you experience self-love?

Please share your thoughts, questions and experiences with others by leaving a comment on the blog. Click here.

A version of this post appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Lilipoh Magazine.

Challenges With Love?

Do you have challenges with any of these forms of love?

You may want to learn more about yourself and love.

Seek the understanding the patterns of love in your life through a series of conversations with me over the summer. Schedule a complimentary 20 minute conversation here.

and/or

Register for Inner Mother Inner Father

Inner Mother Inner Father

offers a training in self-love and the powerful rewards of the eight gestures of self-parenting. It begins with looking at the past and the your needs for self-parenting, centers on the gestures and the shadows of self-parenting, and closes with a process for practicing these gestures as your life unfolds and explores the presence and possibility of the inner adult.

You will find the maps, mirrors and methods for becoming your own inner mother and your own inner father.

Learn more about the gifts of Inner Mother Inner Father here.

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The Ways I Can Support Your Inner Work for 2015

Inner work is tough work and hitting the mysterious and labyrinthine trenches of your soul requires guides, tools, support, creativity, humor and perseverance.

Books, prayers, coaching, counseling, meditation, workshops, good friends...every kind of help is needed and available. But ultimately, only you can do the work of becoming you.

Below are the ways I can help you with your 2015 inner work of finding, knowing and becoming yourself… and making sense of it all.

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Conversations with Me

Is this the year to answer a question, solve a mystery, survive a crisis, take a leap, imagine a future, find self-compassion, balance inner extremes, connect with a spiritual mentor and friend??? Can I support you, coach you, mentor you, celebrate you as you take on this threshold experience consciously and creatively. I will bring a cosmic and spiritual context for understanding the challenges and realities of your life and make the cosmic and spiritual intimate and practical.

Why don’t you schedule a complimentary 20 minute conversation here...let’s talk about what you are seeking and how I can help.

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The Imagine Self Academy

All Imagine Self Academy courses are offered online through recorded presentations and loads of valuable materials. Some include live group conversations and Q & A with me. Everything is downloadable.

I just want to give you a brief rundown of the major courses available in 2015. I’ve included dates and costs so you can plan and budget. I will be sending out detailed descriptions for the courses closer to when each one will be opening registration.

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Core Imaginations

the Imagine Self Curriculum for Imagining the

Whole Core Reality of Yourself

Registration opens September 22.

...the most powerful, healing, liberating curriculum in the Imagine Self Academy. You will want to come back to these courses many times throughout your life.

Core Imaginations is a year long, life long, curriculum that teaches you how to do self-compassionate observation and guides you to a fully alive imagination of yourself in ten core expressions:

Your Image of Self in each of the Four Realms of Existence:

1. As a Physical Self in Dimensions of Space,

2. As a Living Self in the Flow of Time,

3. As a Conscious Self in the Possibilities of Relativity,

4. As a Divine Self in the Absolute

Your Image of Self in the Three Activities of Consciousness:

5. As a Thinking Self with a desire to know the heights of Truth

6. As a Feeling Self with a desire to seek the expanse of Beauty

7. As a Willing Self with a desire to act in the depths of Goodness

8. Your Image of Self as a Personality shaped by the Four Temperaments

9. Your Image of Self as a Perceiving Being experiencing yourself, the world, and others through the Twelve Senses

10. Your Image of Self as a Processing Being engaging with life through the Seven Life Processes

Cost is $477 for lifelong access to the entire curriculum (monthly payments available).

Click here for the description.

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Holy Imaginations & The New Festivals

I have found that the Christian Festivals (including the Marion festivals) offer extraordinary insights for individual inner work. I offer blogposts and courses inspired by the festivals. I approach these with an esoteric, non-religious, universal, 21^st Century understanding, not for belief or tradition, but for a brilliant yearly path for self-development. The blogposts including the Inner Christmas Messages are a gift (but again, donations are so very welcome.)

The New Festivals courses are for self-study with one or 2 live Conversations with Lynn. Cost is $47 each.

Inner Lent

5 lessons on facing the mysteries of temptation and overcoming all that challenges the well-being of your soul. The work of Inner Lent can serve your soul at any time of the year.

Learn more about Inner Lent here.

Inner Advent

begins November 25^th

4 lessons for recollecting, reviewing and releasing your year...preparing for Christmas and the Holy Nights

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Wisdom Imaginations

the Imagine Self Curriculum for inner love and inner freedom

Imagining Your Inner Misfit

available now

guides you into a new relationship with the difficult parts of yourself. $27

click here to register

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The Swan's Journey

A Yearlong Program for Women Seeking Outrageous Wholeness at the Key Turning Points in Their Lives

Info will be available soon.

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Here’s to your inner work and becoming new in 2015!

Blessings & Imaginations,

Lynn

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Lynn Jericho
www.imagineself.com