Falling Out Of Loving

I was talking with a young friend with regard to some issues he was encountering in his life – issues that I understood to a degree, and issues that resonated with me in that I too had previously encountered those self same issues.

One of the biggest loves of my life is music. Now my relationship with music is not just as a listener, but also as a musician. I had no formal musical education - it was all out of having a really good ear for the resonance of sounds. It helped that I could sing as well and, in the ‘do-your-own-thing’ climate of the 60’s I taught myself the guitar. People showed me shapes, and I learned basic tab, and from there I could accompany myself.
As a listener I cultured and developed what I thought was “the only” way we, as human beings, listened to music. I’ve discovered over the years that my way of listening was, like everyone else’s, quite unique!
And part of this particular pathway I’m wandering down reaches out from just the musical and sonic experience, into many other areas of life where we tend – until we know – to think that there is only one way to go and this is the way we all do it.

So to cut a long story short – I’m talking here about love and loving, and what it means, how it is, the notion of falling, and how we can bounce back!

Music as the food of Love

Music is a resonance - and the music we like, what attracts us to it, is that resonance and where it impacts upon our experience. We might describe it as “it just sounds nice” without really being able to describe it any more than that. Rather in the same way that we might describe someone we resonate with (and I’ll describe that as ‘vibrate’ at the same frequency) – as “nice”. At the time, knowing why doesn’t seem half as important as that “niceness” that we are feeling. We might go a little further and use words such as “attractive”, “adorable”, and “lovely” and others in a similar synonymous context.
When there’s enough “niceness” and other internal descriptions about something, or indeed someone, we move into the next level of feeling. There’s a deepening here, where the resonance is not just on the surface but reaches down into the very depths of our being. We then venture to label it in terms of “love”.

Now music, for me, is a constant. I love it all. I have preferences of taste at certain times, and in certain contexts, but in essence I love it all – because it IS a constant, because it all has a resonance, and because it is a deep and meaningful language beyond words. It has been my companion for most of my years, and I’ve always loved it.

Except – for the time when it let me down. Or at least when I convinced myself it had let me down. This was the time I used to describe as “when I fell out of love with music”.

Now we all have things we love and for some of us, when we abandon those things – for whatever reason – we describe it as “I fell out of love,” or “I stopped loving”. There’s an ambiguity here, a contra-diction so to speak and it’s this – we actually fall out of loving. We fall out of the act of loving, and the falling out is our action.

Put it this way - if it’s the experience of resonance in the music that I love, then, when “the love goes” the music hasn’t changed – I have changed my perception of the feeling that resonance gives me. That’s what lies behind the “falling out of loving”.

Now you might say this all semantics. There is some linguistic trickery going here! Love, loving, falling into, falling out of – they’re only words; and words are all I have to take your heart away. **
Love is a noun and a verb; loving is an adjective that we also use in a non-adjectival way. We describe love in a metaphorical sense, as some container, receptacle, we fall into and out of. Yet loving is an act we can engage in (in a variety of ways) without necessarily being in the receptacle, the thing, called ‘love’.

In truth, love and loving are a lot more than just usage and semantics. They are one of those eternal mysteries that our Minds endeavour to solve for us.

Programmes we run

When I fell out of love with music, I had nothing to do with it for about six to nine months. The music went out of my life, and I barred myself from engaging with it at any level. What had happened to those deep resonances in me? I denied the depths, numbed and nullified the feelings and almost entranced myself into a total shallowness of experience.

The love “went wrong” when my business, that involved music, became unsuccessful – and the mental programmes and strategies that I’d been running before and through this particular period made me put my relationship with music in an inappropriate place.

With reference to the logical levels in NLP, I had always placed some things at the level of Identity that I’ve since discovered would have been best left at their own particular level. They drive me towards seeing the world and reacting in a less than useful way.
Now to be fair, we all do this in some way, shape or form, and part of helping to rationalise our understanding and therefore interaction with other people and things, is to get to know about the logical levels, and what we all, individually, ascribe to each of our levels.

Honesty, Rejection and Failure

I’ve written elsewhere about my personal view of honesty and that I place honesty at the level of my Identity. Until recently I assumed this for everyone else too.
Now honesty for most people is a value and is placed at the level of Values & Beliefs. A burglar probably has no strong value where honesty is concerned. For him honesty may mean something else, which gives him no negative feelings associated with the Behaviour of burglary. Yet when he performs the Behaviour of burglary, his ‘victims’ will not see burglary as mere behaviour – to them it will be judged by their values, and in some cases they will take the burglary behaviour as an attack on their Identity.

Given this, when my music business failed I didn’t just view it at the level of Skills and Capabilities. Its failure was my failure; I was a failure, it was me, at the level of Identity. In the cupboard of my Identity there was a shelf and on that shelf was this failure. Plus, I also put everything else on that shelf that was associated with it – and this included music. Because my business was all about music and it was my love of music that was the reason for the business – then the failure was all bound up with my love of music.
 If the business had been selling something mundane, something I didn’t love, then I may well have viewed the failure in a more logical way. You could describe it, in common terms, as my taking it personally.

Likewise had my view of my business success resided just at the Capabilities level, then my love of music would have been unsullied by my disappointment of not making a commercial venture viable.

Rejection and how it impacts upon us can take a variety of guises and interpretations – rather like burglary! In my relationship of love with music I felt let down and rejected.
It may sound a ludicrous notion - being ‘rejected’ by something that created the joy of a deeply felt resonance. And indeed, yes, that’s what it is - ludicrous!
But at the time, no one explained that to me and I didn’t know myself either. I just lumped everything together in one big, dark bag and dumped it in the middle of my Identity cupboard.

How do you handle failure and rejection?

In many ways, how we cope, our resilience, our “bounce-back-ability”, is really down to where we hold failure and rejection in terms of our logical levels. If we “take things to heart” then it’s most likely that it’s our way of describing “things” as being at our Identity level.
You will find that putting things in a different cupboard will increase your resilience on a vast scale.

Putting it back together

I got back to re-engaging with my love of music thanks to a period of time. I then got to viewing my failure, and – more to the point – my positive experiences from what were good things about the business, in a much more clear and grounded way. In more recent times, mainly through certain understandings within NLP, I have found out how and why I had perceived things the way I had.

“Re-finding the love” is something we all have to do from time to time in terms of our many relationships. These relationships can be the ones with ourselves; our partners, families and loved ones; mankind and people in general; our faith; and – as in the case of my music – the things we love doing and being engaged with.

There’s the “time is a great healer way” – which I adopted with music – and there are other ways. It all depends what we are missing from our deepest experience and resonances.

I’d say it starts with an examination of what’s important to us about the relationship, and where – within ourselves – we experience that most important thing. Identifying what it is and where we feel it is, orients us to a place of familiarity in memory.

Some of this may be emotionally painful, and avoiding the pain is to perpetuate our lack of understanding of what the pain is trying to tell us. That pain is evidenced by the level of emotion you are allocating to the procedure. When the pain diminishes you can be sure you are gaining a fuller understanding of the meaning, and a better facility to receive the intuitive messages.

From here there are two routes you might want to go down as there will be discoveries on both paths.
You can associate with and interrogate the pain to learn more about the message within. You can also dissociate yourself into being a witness, observing your part and the other part of this relationship. Within each of these journeys there will be things that emerge that will be of use to you.

Store in a calm, clear place

Through the years of the forming of our personas we are given some powerful agents, strong emotions, as we build our lives with regards to our blueprints, our plans, our maps of the world. These powerful agents and strong emotions come with a warning. They’re vital to us, important that we have them, but we need to read the labels and store them in the right way. That way they will serve us well when we want them. We shouldn’t be casual about them either.

From explosives and poisons to bleach and aerosols, they all have their uses – but if we store them in the wrong place at any time, before or after use, there will be consequences we’d rather not experience.
If we put values and behaviours on shelves in a different cupboard such as Identity then they won’t be in their ‘calm and clear place’. Sometimes they’ll explode in our faces.
And if we don’t know what are the correct places and temperatures to store certain things, then we’ll keep running into issues with our views of the world – AND occasionally with the things we love as well.

**  The Bee Gees