When Love is an active force, you experience a sensation welling up inside you; like the feeling of awe. This active love is felt by others as an energetic expanding warmth flowing from you: it is not demanding or exhausting. In fact, active love fills the one who loves with greater capacities to love.  You change yourself as you change your feelings towards others. Active Practical Love goes beyond the experience of being drawn to someone or something - we endeavour to learn  how to love anyone unreservedly.

 

When we change something quite basic in how we relate to others (adults or children), we give them, and ourselves, freedom. The mindfulness exercises within APLi courses lead to a way of relating that is both practical and of our own free will; to discovering how love becomes a practical force that changes our feelings towards and understanding of others: this is Active Practical Love.

 

​Trying to be ‘good’ or ‘loving’ does not bring about change; moreover it is draining! To love unconditionally is not to be good.  Rather, it is to give  the other freedom from inner painful constraints.

 

With the discovery that the capacity to love can be developed, we find that those we practice our love on change in ways we could not have imagined; they blossom into feeling free to be themselves which makes them so much more lovable!  The act of loving gives rise to a new, deeper, understanding and expands us making us more able to love. The act of loving includes forgiveness and compassion.  This is a force that heals.

 

When we meet indifference, cruelty or hate, it can be difficult to imagine that a deep longing to be recognised and loved causes such unloving behaviour. People trying to be good also hold an inextinguishable hope that someone may love them for the genuine in them, even though they may not have yet discovered what that is. It is this deeply buried hope that underlies destructive human behaviour. All unloving behaviours, including aggression, violence or abuse, are caused by the absence of love. 

​

Taking responsibility and having the intention to love makes us ready to begin practising APLi’s achievable exercises of self-regulation with others. One of the first exercises recommended in How to Love, is to make the effort not to criticise. This may lead to discoveries of something new and later even a new sense of pure, deep interest in people. 

 

Whilst practicing Active Practical Love you experience the effect on you, the giver, as well as on the receiver. You may find children’s behaviour makes more sense, or notice a newly-loved person has renewed energy to uncover who they really are. The same becomes possible for you!