The Look of Love: Seeing Through The Spiritual Veil

“If the Beloved is everywhere, the lover is a veil,
But when living itself becomes the friend, lovers disappear.”
by Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th Century Sufi Mystic and Poet.
In this eloquent comment Rumi seems to capture the essence of how to live one’s life in a field of loving-kindness.

We are generally very attracted to people with a loving demeanour and particularly to those who have the look of love.

I first saw the look of love in the face of a very kind staff member when I was three years old and being admitted to the Home for Little Wanderers Orphanage in Boston. I saw it in the face of my late wife and Soul-mate, Helen, when she gazed at me in her last days on earth. We can all see it in the face of Nelson Mandela.

It is such a powerful Light that it makes one’s whole life feel worthwhile. It creates an unforgettable and Eternal bond.

When we have the look of love ourselves, we attract loving Souls. Generally, we attract whatever energy we give off.

The challenge is to emanate love and the look of love in order to create, generate and sustain loving relationships.

When parenting young children it is especially crucial to have lots of “face time” with them and to share with them as much as possible the look of love. These special moments become indelible in the child’s psyche and he or she will be much more capable of reflecting this loving energy on to future generations.

Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, in his books, “The Masks of God” and “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, seems to be alluding to the same archetype that Rumi calls the Beloved.

He maintains that, when you “follow your bliss”, you will have a fully enriching life experience. Hippocrates called it Psyche. C.G. Jung called it the fully individuated Self. I call it “mask-less living”, or, in everyday language, “What you see is what you get.” By not donning any masks, we can display who we are in each nano-second. This is the hero’s path. The heroic Soul has then mustered the courage to walk through life without any masks.

I have recently worked closely with a very loving Soul who continually reflects this look of love. She is a teacher and trainer at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Dorothy Charles teaches and models for children and adults the essence of living a fully conscious and loving life. One of her most healing techniques is to simply ask the question, “What do you need right now?”, if a person is afraid, sad, lost, overwhelmed, confused, angry, etc. She looks right at the person with the look of love when she asks this question. The healing that takes place cannot be overstated. The impact of this level of love on the receiver is profound! Try this loving approach yourself. Welcome to the world of healing……….

I will finish this article with a poem that I wrote in 1990 just after my late wife, Helen, passed into Spirit:

Fleeting moments…
still frame???
melding, melting, welding-yielding…
one cosmic tear-drop…
smile emblazoning…
legacy surviving???
shedding, shedding, shedding…
soft, subtle, sweet, infinitely vulnerable…
thankful, grateful, for-giving…
All dissolving–save Love…

This article was written in August of 2013 by:

Richard M. Haney, M.Ed., Ph.D. (Counselling and Mediation)
Richard has been practising Wholistic Counselling, Coaching, Hypnotherapy and Mediation for the past 25 years in Ottawa.
Richard by phone: (613) 234-5678. By e-mail: richard@magma.ca