Love has many meanings and references. It’s both biology and poetry, ethereal and grounded.
But it’s important to understand that embodied love isn’t just plucked out of the sky. It’s learned, cultivated, and passed along, from one body-mind and heart to another. It’s biological, poetic, and especially, grounded and embodied.
Jungian psychologist Dave Richo encapsulates this transmission of embodied love via The 5 As of attention, appreciation, affection, allowance, and acceptance. I like to add attunement, which is an amalgamation of them all.
Notice, these are all heartfelt, body-centered aptitudes, representing the best of our humanity—not ethereal, mystical ideas. These are tougher aptitudes and qualities to cultivate, whereas mystical love is easier, yet often empty of human-to-human nourishment, which is what we are wired to need and receive.
Embodied love embraces the dark because the body itself pertains to our shadow, to our wounds, which are kept in the dark until emancipated by our care and attention. Until our wounds are given the alchemical catalyst to spill their jewels. In the process, we build more of the 5 As, our human richness, which I call I call our “finer jewels of being human.”
Because our wounds birth the rest of our brilliance, and because we effect this healing somatically, embodied love is both dark and light. Emotional shadow work to become more compassionate and loving contrasts with superficial, new-age love, which we know is paper-thin and evaporates when the going gets even a little tougher.
When we let go of magical, supernatural beliefs about love, we are less likely to blame, shame, and gaslight others for not being able to turn on the love switch, especially if they are clinically depressed or anxious. We might instead show up for them with the 5 As, with our hard-won humane jewels, and help love them back into being.
