How We Learned About Love
In this video from the August 2020 "Love, Sex, Yoga: Spiritual Intimacy for the Modern World" Online Immersion, John describes the process by which our bodies take the shape of the lessons and programming we learned as children, and how our relationships become defined by them.
You’ll learn:
We come to understand most of what we know about love by the time we are 6 or 7, including what behaviors would reward love and what behaviors would have love taken away
As children, losing love equates being discarded, and even death, because we haven’t passed the evolutionary threshold to think otherwise, so we learn at a very young age how to navigate not losing love in order to remain safe in the world
These things that we learn as young children as ways to navigate not losing love show up in our bodies as “limitations,” and our bodies take the shape of these limitations—For example, if a mother tells her daughter, “Stop crying. You’re ugly when you cry,” the child’s body will take the shape of the limitations of the shame, tension, armoring etc. that moment creates
Our bodies start soft and wide open as love, until we start getting these messages, and learn to armor and protect ourselves
Protection is antithetical to the yoga of openness, and because we aren’t taught the yoga of openness, let alone the yoga of masculine depth, or the yoga of feminine love, energy and expression, those protections become the habitual expressions of our bodies
We do embodiment work to unwind the programming of our childhood, which shows up in our relationships, how we respond to people, how we choose partners, and the habits & limitations of our bodies