From Twilight to Light: The Sunlit Path, Talk 5: ‘From Falling in Love to Rising in Love’, by Divyanshi
Full session video-recording is available here.
AuroYouth has been conducting a series of talks to help youth discuss and discover issues prevalent in recent times. This series of online interactions titled “From Twilight to light – The Sunlit Path” aims to help youth navigate through issues related to mental & emotional health. In the fifth talk of the series, we had Divyanshi Chugh, a practitioner of Integral Yoga Psychology and an active volunteer in conducting the "Swadharma" & "Svadhyaya" programs at Auroville, interacting with about 155 youngsters on the topic “From Falling in Love to Rising in Love” on July 19, 2020.
Divyanshi started the session by laying emphasis on the power of love, and how it can make one touch the deeper delight. She interacted with the audience with regular poll questions which gave all of them an opportunity to introspect on their beliefs about what love, relationship and marriage are.
The most important practice in the concept of love is learning how to love, which can be described in different stages as follows:
1. Transactional: When one can love only after getting an assurance that they will be loved back.
2. Need for Reciprocity: When one loves another person but wants to be loved too.
3. Need for Acknowledgement: When one loves another person even if the other one doesn’t love back, but one wants one’s love to be accepted.
4. Simply love: To love purely without any need other than the joy of loving.
While moving from one stage to another, we need to ensure that we still assimilate all the previous stages for our continuous progress towards attainment of true love.
Moving forward, Divyanshi asked the youth about what they look for in a relationship. The most common answer was emotional intimacy, followed by alignment in ideals. Then, she threw light on an evolutionary perspective about relationships.
Just like love, relationships can also be divided into stages as :
1. Sexual intercourse: Nature’s process of reproduction
2. Love as Sensuality: Attraction to personality
3. Love as Power: Possess, dominate, control, show off, status, etc.
4. Emotional Love: Care, commitment, closeness and company
5. Love as Ideological Union: Alignment of ideas and ideals
6. Love as Creative Partnership: Belongs to the Divine
She wonderfully quoted that ‘Stages are often mixed, and thus, each stage needs to be purified, before evolving to the next stage.’ Hence, we should refine emotional love before aiming for higher stages. Relationship with oneself is of utmost importance because it paves the way for all other relationships and the most wonderful pursuit in our lives should be to aim at finding our inner soul.
Divyanshi introduced the concept of marriage by asking a simple question on what the reasons are/were for getting married. Almost 70% of the people said that they fell in love.
She defined marriage as an important part in our lives where we should aim at finding love and sacred companionship together. Also, marriage should be looked upon as a lifelong process and not just an event in one’s life which wedding is. She talked about the Mother’s ideal about marriage and wanted each one of us to think about our own ideal of marriage, thus letting us introspect.
This wonderful discussion helped us widen our spectrum about love, relationships and marriage and led to throwing the table open for deep questions that the participants had. Divyanshi, with her ever inspiring words, answered each question beautifully.
Full session recording is available here.
Click for details of The Sunlit Path Talk 4, Talk 3, Talk 2 and Talk 1.
