Connecting to love is the heart of spirituality

Dean Van Leuven

July 17, 2010

I believe we can always be in love.

My spirituality is an aspect of my wholeness and does not exist separate from my wholeness. I believe that our purpose in life is to stay connected to our source, which is love. The concept of duality seems unreal to me because I believe that God, our source — our creator — is love, and that love is all there is.

My spirituality has been influenced by all of the great teachers I have read and spoken with, and this may even include you. A few of the most influential teachers in my life include: Jesus, Buddha, Krishnamurti, Pollyanna, Dag Hammarskjold, Emerson, Ernest Holmes, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and my wife, Pat, just to name a few of the more prominent ones.

To me, there is really only love. I believe we have been given the ability to love or stand outside of love and seek to return. With my background in psychology and experience in law and in my own relationships, I became aware of how we make life difficult for ourselves just because of the way we react to events. I began a search for the knowledge of how we could remove this negativity from our lives.

We can share love or not, because we have been given the ability to experience pleasure and pain. I believe pleasure and pain are the signals that tell us when we are connected to our source — love — and when we are not. I believe the experience of “badness” in the world is simply the feeling we have when we are disconnected from what is real. The experience of “badness” as reality makes it impossible to stay connected to our source.

This awareness brought great joy to my life. Once I understood this, my emotions became the guide for my life and allowed me to stay connected to love. I find that a life connected to love is the only life I want to live. When I serve a purpose connected to love, my life becomes more joyous, regardless of my success in reaching the goals that guide me.

My passion is to teach others so that they learn how to more effectively stay connected to love in their life experience. When I felt that I had learned enough to help others, I began teaching others the emotional skills necessary to stay connected to love, and how to use these skills to change their own life view and experience.

Presently my greatest passion is to create the tools and awareness so that emotional skills training can become a part of the normal educational process.

I pursue this goal by writing and conducting classes and workshops. I am experiencing great joy working with Nepal and UNESCO as well as here. My dream is that every adult and child will learn the emotional skills necessary to find joy in their own life experience, so that they can always be in love.

Dean Van Leuven lives in Elmira and is a member of the Center for Spiritual Living in Eugene. This column is coordinated by Lane Interfaith Alliance to offer inspiration, share personal spiritual experiences and bring a deeper understanding of individual faith perspectives with the intention of blessing our community and the world. For more information, visit www.laneinterfaithalliance.org or call 541-344-0430.