We have another really good teaching from our Navajo Elder this week about love. He talks about the difference between what he hears from English society, how we view love, as compared to what he was taught in the Navajo traditional teachings.
We see love as an emotion. “I’m feeling that I love you.” We experience it as an emotion. It’s a wonderful emotion. It feels so good to love! We love to feel love.
Stand back and take a different look. Love feels really good. In fact, it’s almost like a drug. We want to have more and more and more of this feeling.
In the Navajo tradition love is not an emotion it’s an action. It’s things that you do. It’s the way you take care of your family. It’s your responsibilities. It is what you do as a human being, as a decent human adult. It’s the way you take care of people around you.
This is this is very different than love as a feeling.
This is also close to what non-duality teaches because non-duality teaches that emotions are fleeting: they come and they go, they come and they go. Although they are real (emotions do happen) they are not you. They don’t define you.
When you find the ground of being, the solidness that is you, then you are a fully functioning adult human being. When you find that quality, solid in yourself, then emotions can come and go without really swaying you. Then you get to choose.
You don’t really get to choose your emotions because emotions kind of just come up. Usually something triggers them. You do get to choose how you enhance them, and the actions that you take to create them. But the emotions themselves come and go.
This is similar in Nonduality and Navajo teachings. Navajo teachings say love is an action. It is the things you do. And then, if you do all these things that take care of your family what ends up happening, the end result, is the feeling of love.
You do something very loving for somebody, you do an action, and then the result is may be the feeling of love. It’s the result, not the thing itself. So I really like this idea of focusing on the action rather than the brief fleeting emotion.
Love is an action.