The Biology of Love

Love and touch effect our bodies. We are healed by the connection we feel though a connection with another living being especially through touch. In many cultures touching is considered something only to be used for the intention of having sexual relation and often there isn’t love in that touch or to comfort somebody. Touch is incredibly healing. People need to be touched just as importantly as the need for drinking water, eat food, and exercise. We need to ouch others and be touched as a healing practice and as a spiritual connection to life force that helps our cells to regenerate and our souls to feel lighter, more at ease in our bodies. So as I have been talking bout your connection to your own body, in terms of how you feel about your body, to you connect with your breath, how you relate to your body image, how you speak to yourself about your body, where you put your body, who you share your body with, how you touch your own body, what your feelings are around touching your own body, what your feelings are around sharing your body with another, what your feelings are around taking care of your own body, whether you do or don’t listen to you body. This is all very important in spiritual connection to your life force and to Tantra practice and to a grounded sense of overall healthy living.

The emotion of love involves our brain. All feelings, sensations, be they associated with sex spirituality or love are processed in our brains . Our brains are part of our bodies. It is in our bides that we physically experience all feelings and sensations. It is what happens in our bodies that brings on a spiritual or trance like state. Meditative or trance like states involve chain in the electrical activity of the brain. Sexual orgasm is recognized as an altered state of consciousness, including changes in sense of time, space, identity, strong emotional and great changes in motor output. Orgasm has been greatly used to induce mystical states. Mystics have often described their experiences in the language of sex. A common theme in the midst of both sexual passion and spiritual illumination is “love.” This common theme of love being both spiritual and sexual is not coincidental. It reflects an underlying link that prehistoric civilizations intuited and modern science is now beginning to rediscover. We have been taught that human sexuality which is in essence a striving for connection or oneness with and through another to a greater life force, and the emotion of love which again is us striving for connection or oneness, with another and then to a greater life force, and a spiritual striving for a spiritual union or oneness with what we call the divine in worship – wherever you go to worship or however you worship- the striving for union or oneness with the divine is spiritual. We have been taught that these experiences are all completely different from one another. That sexual love, emotional love and spiritual divinity love are all different from one another but they are all striving for the same thing : a connection, a union. So in reality they all stem from the deeply rooted human need, which is our powerful yearning for connection.

This goes back billions of years to the symbiotic union of single cells, to form the first multi-celled organism. The first life forms on our planet. While this striving for connection is not unique to our species, it is most highly developed in humans. Throughout time living things have nurtured this union through the grouping of the herding instinct. Through physical connection through touch. Particularly in mammals, touching is essential for the survival of offspring who would die without adult protection and care. We have the capacity for higher consciousness and complex feelings and behaviors, in the realm of both spirituality and sexuality, which we call love. Humans have that capacity. . .

The evolution in humans of our highly developed potential for the conscious and caring connectivity we call love, offers us the basis for a more balanced and fulfilling way of relating to one another and our planet. A way that recognizes our essential interconnection with one another and the rest of nature. It is because our species has a longer period of infant mother relations, year round sexual activity for the female and multi orgasmic abilities for the female that male and female communication has lengthened and thus translated into the needs for language. Cerebrally, we are adept at being able to create and memorize language. Our instincts have a need for this. We have the instinct to make love year round because females are active sexually year round, we have the cerebral ability and the need then to create language because we have a longer period of relations with our infants that then grow into adults. We need to be able to communicate emotions. We also need to be able to communicate through language as our ability to connect as bodies in love making is lengthened because of the females ability for multi orgasmic capacity. Then we have this need for language in order to be able to create that circumstance and also be able to understand each others’ needs within that circumstance. No other life or living form has these capabilities that humans do.

Without love, without the physical caring of being fed and sheltered, without the physical caring of touch, we will die. It is from loving touch that we derive our most intense physical and emotional feelings. Its from loving touch that we obtain not only pleasure but also comfort when we are in pain .

So think about what touch can do. We can gain pleasure from touch. We can gain comfort from touch. We can become emotionally attached to another because of being touched in certain ways. We can gain pain from being touched. We can gain hope when we are in despair, and we gain that indispensable sense that we are not alone in the world; we are connected with others of our kind by being touched. As humans we depend on love. We get sick when it is denied us at any point in our lives. The biology of love is the basis for any human society and a dynamic which is embedded in the history of evolution.

The basic need to connect is so prehistoric we can take it back down to that symbiotic union of single cells to the first multi celled organism. SO this need for touch is embedded in the history of evolution, in the very basic place.

Lets talk about the evolution of pleasure. Our bodies receive chemical rewards when we are loved and are loving others. Chemicals like endorphins , andogynous morphines- primarily these are opiates that mask a pain from a wound and provide additional energy for flight from a predator. SO if you are in pain from some kind of a wound, if you are simply longing for touch, or if you’ve been touched in a way that you’ve been able to create these endorphins in your body, you will be able to heal or get the energy that you need to feel inspired, alive . These pleasure inducing chemicals serve to promote the bonding involved in care taking, or beyond caring touch required or our survival. This also explains the state of euphoric bliss. . .