Love feels...

For better or worse.

I look forward to my pilates/exercise class. I participate in group sessions and there are a mix of regulars, many quite a few years older than me and I enjoy their different perspectives on life.

On Friday we were all either tired or feeling a bit off centre, so to make the workout easier we started joking around in a light-hearted spirit and rewarding ourselves when we finished a set. As we laughed, our teacher shared that she’d recently heard a report about ageing and the consensus was that women get happier and men get grumpier. She asked what we thought of that.

As I continued my leg presses on the reformer bed, I suggested that it may be because we as women have three phases of life. Due to our cyclical nature we kind of get to start again refreshed after menopause, whereas men have a linear cycle that has more of a natural downwards sliding slope.

A man in his 70s considered this as he raised some weights before saying he thinks it’s because women are love.

‘Ah, but…’ I replied, ‘being love isn’t always easy. Sometimes it hurts.’

My pilates teacher smiled, shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Yes, because love feels.’

Mmm, I stopped my leg presses and just sunk into the reformer bed.

Love feels.

That kind of sums it all up.

Love is the thing we all desire, but to know it, we must feel.

And feel it all. Sadness. Anger. Fear. Joy. Despair. Grief. Pleasure. Pain….

It’s like a package deal. To love is to live in a human body and our humanness requires feeling.

When he said women are love, I know he was really referring to the polarity meaning of feminine and masculine. Being that the feminine is love and the masculine is consciousness. But in essence, both men and women, as humans, have the same feminine capacity of love.

During the week I read a piece on male suicide. It sent cold shivers through me. The way a growing number of men are opting out. There are so many reasons for this that I don’t have the expertise to addresss. But I pondered on the feeling aspect of it as the piece did too. Is opting out an easier option than feeling? Or is it still because feeling is seen as feminine and therefore can’t even be experienced safely?

Feeling is such a loaded thing yet it’s an integral part of living. We feel our way around. We touch all day. We experience sensation in each moment.

Yet we also override a lot of it. We create larger sensations or better sensations so as to not experience the more subtle ones we may not enjoy or like.

It breaks me how none of us are really encouraged to feel the full spectrum of emotions and sensations. We are given permission for certain feelings and then the others go into an off-limits zone.

To this day, my mum still struggles when I cry. She doesn’t like seeing me upset and is always saying, ‘please don’t cry, just think of good things, happy things’. I know it’s well intentioned, but it can also imply that my sadness is not a good thing. Something I need to hurry up and be done with. Essentially what she is saying is that seeing me cry hurts her, so she doesn’t want to hurt, not does she want me to hurt. It’s this hurt we often struggle with, so try our best to avoid.

Although feeling comes easier to us as women, due to our hormonal and chemical make-up, it doesn’t mean we always embrace it. Sometimes the feelings are just too raw, too big, too all-consuming.

I know I’ve hidden from feelings, I still can.

And it’s why we always talk about being versus doing. The doing often enables us to not feel.

Actually, through the excess doing we can even go beyond feelings to exhaustion. And although you can technically call exhaustion a feeling, it’s not the one we initially were experiencing and ran away from.

I dare say that exhaustion is easier to feel than grief and sadness, or even anger and fear.

Exhaustion a heavy weight that kind of numbs us too.

A clip I was listening to the other week with a grief specialist named David Kessler, talked about the differences between buffalo and humans in a storm. The buffaloes go right into the storm knowing that it will pass quicker. Humans try their best to avoid it, stay around the edges, finding a way to bypass it, inevitably making the storm last a whole lot longer.

I have a lot of air/mental energy in me so getting into my body and feeling didn’t and doesn’t come naturally. I’ve learnt to develop it over the years, but I still can see when I leave my body for my mind or some mental distraction.

But I do know, like the buffalo, when I actually enter the feeling space and embrace it, the storm does pass. And I’m happier.

Back to the research study and happiness. I guess happiness may have a lot to do with love.

Is happiness when we can be with all of who we are, all of what we experience and all of what we feel — with kindness. compassion and tenderness?

Is happiness a result of not fighting ourselves, not resisting ourselves, not going against what is?

And, are we as women a little more versed in this because our bodies test us more with flux during our lifetime. We are well traveled in the nuances of change and cycles. And so when we get on in age, we get happier because we are more experienced lovers… of life?