Love's passion is a powerful force that has both inspired and destroyed countless lovers through the ages. One moment it can feel like divine grace; the next moment it can sweep us away in a torrent of hopes and fears that blind us, bend us out of shape, and leave us hurt and disillusioned. As a student of mine once remarked, "No experience has ever made me feel so intensely alive, yet so confused and out of touch at the same time." We have no idea where this intensity of feeling comes from, why it drives us as it does, or where it will lead. No wonder so many people are either addicted to falling in love or scared to death of it, or both at the same time. In societies where arranged marriages are the norm, falling in love is rare and of little consequence. When it does appear, it is dismissed as a temporary form of madness, a youthful folly. In our society, we accord it greater importance, since it gives birth to the romantic feelings that often lead to marriage. Yet its sudden eruption has also torn many marriages and lives apart. So our culture is tremendously ambivalent toward passion, alternately glorifying it as a stairway to heaven-that will lift us above the pain of the world-and denouncing it as a pathway to hell-that will drag us down into the mire of animal lust. Some writers regard falling in love as a rare moment of clearly perceiving another person's deepest essence. Others see it as a hormonal frenzy, or in Scott Peck's words, "a trick our genes pull on [us] to hoodwink us into marriage."  How can falling in love stir up such different reactions and lead to such opposite conclusions? Must passion inevitably breed illusion, causing us to lose our seat and act in ways we later regret? Or can it help us bridge the two sides of our nature and thus connect with life more wholeheartedly? Can a couple continue to draw on it for energy and inspiration, even after many years of being together? Since passion provides powerful fuel propelling a couple's journey forward, it is important to distinguish what is real in this experience from what is delusional. Relating to passion in a sane and healthy way is the first and one of the greatest challenges in a relationship.  

THE SPARK OF PASSION 

Passion is the spark of excitement we feel when we stand on the edge of the unknown. It arises at the boundary where two different worlds rub up against each other-male and female, self and other, inner and outer, familiar patterns and uncharted possibilities.

As D. H. Lawrence put it, "What is the beloved? She is that which I am not." In one of his poems Lawrence conveys this impassioned sense of wonder:  I put out my hand in the night, one night, and my handtouched that which was verily not me... it was the unknown...The other, she has strange green eyes!And land that beats with a pulse!Also she...has strange-mounded breasts and strange sheer slopes, and white levels...I touched her flank and knew I was carried... over to the new world...  When we fall in love, a new world opens up. Leaping across the boundary of self and other, the spark of passion "lights up the night," providing sudden glimpses of mystery and depth. Passion is an intense quality of energized presence that puts us in touch with the fullness and richness of being alive. We can fall in love in little ways at any moment. Suddenly something or someone takes our breath away. We feel an expansive or fluttery sensation in our chest.

And we taste what it is like to be fully present, if only for a fleeting instant. This can happen upon waking to a fine spring morning, with the sunlight filtering through the new greenery, upon suddenly catching a glimpse of the open sea after long travelling, or when the ripe, pungent earth fills our senses on a crisp autumn afternoon. I have found, at times of heightened perception, such as on meditation re- treats or in groups of people who are communicating deeply, that it is not hard to fall in love several times a day; that is, to keep finding myself deeply moved not only by the people there, but also by the landscape, the sounds of the forest, the moon at night, or the changing patterns of wind, light, clouds, and rain. Although this vividness of perception may seem special, it is also quite ordinary .If it be magic, it is ordinary magic, because it is only a keener awareness of what is already there. Though we cannot hold on to such moments, they leave us with a sense of what life could be like if we could live more often at this thresh- old of vivid presence.  

PASSION: CONDITIONAL AND UNCONDITIONAL

Passion's essential nature is spontaneous and unconditional because it is unfabricated. Since our very being is open to begin with, it naturally resonates and wants to connect with what is greater than ourselves-the vastness of life itself. Passion is the feeling of life wanting to connect with life; life inside us connecting with life outside.1 To fall in love is to feel the basic openness of our being. The swelling of passion, which makes us feel so full and rich, makes our usual state of distraction and disconnectedness seem pale and impoverished by contrast. Yet here is where we also start to fall into delusion, for we usually imagine the object of our passion to be the source of this newfound fullness. This makes us try to grasp and hold on to the one who sparks such an intense feeling of aliveness inside us.  The inexhaustible richness of life is, in Buddhist terms, a "wish-fulfilling gem" because it provides us with everything we need. Yet when we fall in love, we usually imagine the beloved, rather than life itself, to be the wish-fulfilling gem who could make all our dreams come true.

So, to the extent that we do not feel deeply connected with the life moving inside us, we come to depend on something outside ourselves to enrich us.  In regarding the focus of our passion-the beloved-as a treasure to possess, we convert our unconditional passion into something conditional and grasping: "How alive I would feel, how beautiful life would be, if only this person belonged to me." Yet grasping at another person only magnifies our inner sense of poverty and leads to the torments of romantic addiction and obsession. Love becomes a drug, and the loved one becomes the addicted lover's "fix."  Unconditional passion has no agenda. It is like the freely radiating energy of the sun. Yet if l identify my beloved as the source of this powerful energy, then I must have her-and my passion turns into an obsessive, blinding, fatal attraction. No wonder the great love tales usually end in tragedy. Those who try to carry such a burden for others, such as Romeo and Juliet, or even Marilyn Monroe, die young.  Yet it is important to distinguish here between seeing an- other as the source of our passion-which always leads to distortion and addiction-and allowing another to be the focus of our passion-which is not in itself a problem.

Passion becomes problematic when we confuse focus with source, imagining that the one toward whom our passion flows is the cause of our feeling so alive. The natural activity of passion is to connect intensely-whether it be with the colour of the sky, our life's work, or the presence of our beloved. Of course, we do not feel equally passionate toward just anyone or anything that comes along-only certain forms or qualities awaken our energy and inspire it to flow toward them. Yet when we imagine that the conditional focus of our passion is the unconditional source of our aliveness, we throw ourselves into a state of inner impoverishment and confusion.

Peter Trachtenberg, in his book The Casanova Complex, describes this kind of tormented passion in this way:  When I met a woman who attracted me, my desire for her was immediate and crippling-a hammer blow to the heart. In the beginning there was just that longing, and the sense of myself as a starving orphan gazing through a window at a happy family sitting down to dinner… I had to see her again and again, to conquer her in different ways. It might take a few days to a few years a whole relationship based on hunger and frustration. Yet he eventually understood that nothing outside him could fill his inner sense of poverty, for he concludes: "For my part, I yearned for something no woman could ever give me."  

IDOLISING THE BELOVED

What is it, then, that the lover really yearns for? Consider the situation of Joanna, a woman in her early thirties who had been driven to despair by a series of brief affairs that led nowhere. She would repeatedly find herself building up intense feelings about men after a few dates, based on wild, unrealistic dreams of total fulfillment. At first she would inflate a lover to epic proportions, only to crash in disillusion within a few weeks or months. Then she would go through a period of cynical isolation until the next potential saviour came along. She came in for counselling out of a need to understand why her passion took such strange turns, firing her up with inflated hopes one moment and then just as suddenly dashing her on the ground. She no longer trusted that she could feel passionate without becoming swept away by tides of uncontrollable fantasies and emotions. How could such an otherwise intelligent and perceptive woman repeatedly endow her lovers with an almost godlike status? What was she really looking for?  Idolizing someone we fall in love with is an example of a strange trick we play on ourselves what psychologists call projection.

Simply stated, this means heightened sensitivity to certain qualities in another person that we fail to acknowledge in ourselves. The classic example is the person who does not acknowledge his own aggression, but imagines that other people are out to get him.  When romantically idolizing someone, we project not our own unacknowledged negative feelings, but all the power, beauty, and richness of our being, which we usually fail to recognise inside us. Human nature is vast. Our being actually reflects and contains the whole range of peaceful and wrathful energies of heaven and earth, fire and water, sun and stars. But we usually inhabit only a small portion of our being. We live on the island of our conditioned self, a complex of memories, notions, and images of ourselves that constitute our identity as we know it. Yet the larger expanse of our being-its vastness, intensity, and depths-we do not usually identify as intimately our own.

Even though this larger being is more truly who we are-since it is not an invention, like our self-images-we do not know it as our true nature.  Since we have a hard time perceiving our own vastness and beauty, we project it outward instead, where it is easier to see. Just as the individual who denies his anger finds it coming back at him from the world, so we discover the radiance of our own being in and through our beloved, who mirrors it back to us. We are dazzled by what we see. We want it, we must have it at any cost. Since we can't live without it-for it is, after all, our own being-we wind up not only addicted, but further alienated from ourselves as well. Certainly this was true for Joanna. She felt fully alive only when she was in a relationship with a man. Most psychoanalysts would explain this as a result of her early childhood, when she tried to win the favours of her father, whom she saw as larger than life. Indeed, our choice of intimate partners is always partly determined by old images based on unfulfilled childhood wishes and needs.

This template of images that we carry from the past is what produces the particular distortions-the typical kinds of unrealistic fantasies and conflicting emotions-that we each go through when we fall in love. ... Nonetheless, something larger still wants to shine through this overlay from the past. How could we envision such radiance and beauty in others in the first place if we did not already have some sense of power and greatness inside us? At the root of Joanna's need to win her father's love was a deeper, more basic need to feel the goodness and fullness of her own being, and to know that it was indeed worth celebrating.  Abraham Maslow once wrote that "we are generally afraid to become that which we glimpse in our most perfect moments," no doubt because our larger being threatens us in many ways. If we were to open to it fully, perhaps it would disrupt our cosy little habits and throw our familiar, small identity into question. So just as early peoples worshiped as gods what they feared and did not understand, so we, who are primitives in regard to our larger being, tend to worship our greater powers at a safe distance, by letting others carry them for us. Thus we 'fall" for the beloved, whom we place above us, granting him or her power to uplift us from our 'fallen" state of hunger and unworthiness. Idolizing the beloved inflates us and makes us feel "high," as the lofty metaphors used to describe this state suggest.  

PASSION AND DEVOTION

In this way, our unconditional passion, which is a genuine longing to connect with the vastness of life, gets converted into an addictive obsession. Yet the belief that our wealth of feeling comes from the object of our passion, whom we must therefore possess, is not just a personal delusion. It is also widely promoted by our culture at large and is a common theme in countless plays, movies, books, and love songs. How many songs on the radio do we hear that are variations on the theme of "You are everything, I am nothing"? ("You're the better part of me," "You are my only sunshine," "I can't live, if living is without you," "I've got to have you, baby," etc.) Yet if this were just a Hollywood fabrication, it would not have such a deep hold at every level of our society. what makes it such a powerful cultural theme is that it represents a convergence of psychological, spiritual, and historical factors which together create a web of illusion from which it is hard to extricate ourselves.  

The fantasy that our beloved can save us is the distorted form of a powerful idea from the courtly love tradition, from which all our notions of romantic love derive. The troubadour poetry of twelfth-century France taught that the romantic feeling between man and woman was a vehicle for connecting with the divine. The deep human urge to connect with something greater than ourselves which had been the exclusive province of religion now took a secular form. The troubadour songs were influenced by the poetry of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, which expressed intense devotional longing for the divine or the spiritual master, addressed as "the Beloved." The troubadour imported this fervent devotional sentiment into his poetry, directing it toward his Lady, rather than to God.  

Yet although courtly love took place between man and woman, rather than between humanity and God, it still retained a spiritual orientation. In its purest form, a knight would fall in love with a woman who was already married, but would forego sexual consummation with her. This was an ingenious device that allowed a lover to use the power of his passion for his own transformation. With sexual conquest ruled out, the trials he had to undergo in the service of his lady became a path of character development and spiritual purification. The refining quality of such a love helped him develop new sensitivities and realise that era's new ideal-to become a "gentle man."  By falling in love with someone he could not expect to attain, the courtly lover could experience the two sides of passion simultaneously. While focusing his desire on the finite form of his Lady (conditional passion), he also had to let go of possessing her, which threw him back into the pure intensity of his feeling, to the source of unconditional passion inside himself. This combination of intensely focusing his passion, while having to let go of grasping, put him on the razor's edge, and this allowed him to open up in new ways.  

When we sit on the razor's edge, consciously directing our love toward an object we know we can never possess, passion can ripen into something deeper-devotion. Wholehearted devotion, whether it be to a loved one, a spiritual master, or ultimate truth, is a powerful, transformative energy that can work magic on the human soul. Recognising this, many religious traditions have developed devotional practices that harness this energy for spiritual purposes. Since the devotee cannot possess the object of devotion God or the spiritual master-devotional practice requires him to relinquish fixation, so that he may discover the fullness of his love as the treasure of his own heart.

This awakens him from the poverty of depending on others to the richness of his deeper being, which he can then begin to share more fully with others.  The romantic devotional practice of courtly love was so powerful that it still shapes how we fall in love eight hundred years later. Yet we have lost touch with the original transformative purpose of this practice. Although our romantic ideas still echo the sentiments of the troubadours, we differ from them in expecting a real-Life relationship to fill what is essentially a spiritual longing. Lacking any sense of how passion could be a devotional path for tapping greater powers inside us, we imagine that we can find some kind of salvation through taking possession of an ideal "golden princess" or "knight in shining armour." So instead of being purified by love, we often wind up reduced to a state of addiction or dependency, feeling bitter when we fail to find our hoped-for salvation. Passion becomes a torment, and our devotional feelings become enslaving rather than liberating. In the words of the Sufi master, Hazrat Inayat Khan:  The sorrow of the lover is continual, in the presence and absence of the beloved: in the presence for fear of the absence, and in absence in longing for the presence. The pain of love becomes in time the life of the lover. 

ROMANTIC AGONY

The longing to devote ourselves to something we regard as greater than ourselves is a beautiful quality. But when we fail to recognize its essential nature-as a basic need to realize the fullness of our larger being-falling in love can leave us feeling helpless and tortured, like Joanna in her obsessions with men. Here we see the relation between the words passion and passive. In falling under the spell of her lovers, Joanna saw herself as a passive victim-a state of mind commonly portrayed in the classic love tales. Tristan feels driven toward Isolde not out of choice, but because he has accidentally swallowed a love potion. In the most famous of Sufi love tales, Majnun laments that his passion for Layla, which causes him to go mad and wander the countryside composing love songs, is completely beyond his control: 'I have not chosen the way, I have been cast upon it. I am manacled, and my fetters are made of iron. But it was not I who forged them; it was my Kismet that decided. I follow obediently my beloved, who owns my soul."  

Eventually this agony itself may become addicting, because its burning intensity makes us feel so alive. Thus is born the classic romantic melodrama: The lover's struggle to overcome the obstacles between himself and his beloved keeps the fire of his passion burning at a feverish pitch. Yet while struggling to win his beloved, the lover also unconsciously sabotages any genuine relationship with her, so that he can maintain the vivid intensity of his longing. If he actually gets to know his beloved- as an ordinary, imperfect person, with the same sorts of needs and failings as himself-he will no longer be able to sustain the illusion that makes him feel so high.  Thus we often unconsciously choose partners who are unattainable, because of marriage, age, geographical distance, or emotional incompatibility. Or else we may start fights that create distance just when we are getting too close. This keeps us stuck in the neurotic runaround that is the stuff of all soap operas: seeking fulfillment and denying it to ourselves at the same time. As Majnun proclaims to Layla:. You are my salve for a hundred thousand wounds, yet you are also my sickness."  

LOVE AND DEATH

Addictive passion is thus a no-win situation-in Majnun's words, a "riddle without a solution, a code which none can decipher. " The only solution for Layla and Majnun is the classic denouement of countless tragic romances: death. Thus, paradoxically, passion, which starts out making us feel so intensely alive, brings us to a consideration of death. What is the death of the lovers pointing to? As a symbol, it contains important clues about how we can overcome addictive passion, while still enjoying the larger unconditional passion at the root of the male/female connection.  At one level, the lovers' death suggests that addiction to anything we use to make ourselves feel high must eventually lead to destruction. The tale of Axel and Sara-a gem of nineteenth-century melancholy romanticism by Villiers de l'Isle- Adam-clearly illustrates this Axel, a lonely, brooding young count, meets Sara in the treasury of his castle", where they instantly fall in love. After feasting on delicious fantasies about how they could run away together, using his riches to travel the world and taste its infinite delights, Axel decides that they should instead commit suicide at the height of their passion. He knows that everyday life could never measure up to the dreams that have set their hearts ablaze:  To consent, after this, to live would be but sacrilege against ourselves. Live? Our servants will do that for us.  In choosing the heavenly illusion of addictive passion, they must sacrifice earthly reality. In Axel's words, "The quality of our hope no longer allows us the earth."

In everyday life, addiction to passion may lead to death in different sorts of ways. The jilted lover who kills his beloved because he "loves her so much" is one example. More commonly, couples who try to hold on to their passion by keeping it in a fixed mold often do real damage to their relationship. As one woman described the death occurred in her marriage:  I was afraid of losing my passion. I wanted to feel it on demand, even in the middle of my pregnancy when I was not naturally feeling sexual. I needed it to let me know that I was alive, and to prove that our relationship was still okay. When I didn't feel it, I blamed our relationship. By trying to hold on so hard to my passion, I killed it and the marriage too. Yet the death that intervenes in the classic love tales also has a deeper significance. It points to the necessity of letting go, which, though it may seem like a death, can also take us beyond the snares and dead ends of romantic illusion. What must die, when we let the deeper current of our passion flow freely, is our small, impoverished view of ourselves and, along with that, our attempt to grasp on to another person to save us.  

Some years ago I had a powerful realisation about the connection between love and death. One day, during a meditation retreat, as my ideas about who I was began to fall away, I started to feel more vividly alive and present. Soon, however, this liberating feeling turned to fear. Out of this fear arose an elaborate fantasy about marrying the man in my life. But then, just as the marriage ceremony ended and we were enjoying our new union, the thought struck like lightning: "What if he dies? What if I die?" Once again, nothing to hold on to. Suddenly, with a jolt, I found myself back in my room.  The next morning, waking up before dawn in a dreamlike state, I imagined I was dying. (I had been having trouble breathing at that altitude and felt constricted in my chest.) I considered how to prepare myself for death, but nothing felt quite right.

Finally it became clear that all I could do was to let love flow freely through me, without trying to stay in control. As I felt what that was like, I found that I could give in to dying. The constriction in my chest began to ease, the sun was coming up, and I looked out of my window to find another day beginning.  Reflecting on this, I saw the connection between my experiences of these two days. On the first day, when my sense of identity fell away and I had a glimpse of pure passionate presence to life, I had become afraid of that free egoless energy because it gave me nothing to hold on to. So I had converted my unconditional passion into a specific longing, directed toward the man I imagined marrying. My fantasy had been an attempt to save myself from the little death I was experiencing as my identity dissolved. Yet it too led to the same place: "What if we die?" And so I had to face death, coming to terms with it only by letting my love for life run through my body without restraint. So, just as love makes death all the more poignant, death makes loving all the more essential. Dying requires us to love and let go; love requires us to die and let go.  

PASSION AND SURRENDER

Thus if passion is a great stream of life energy surging through us, its natural course is to lead to surrender, like a river that must empty into the sea. Recently I met my twin flame in my very first moments of attraction to this man, I can sense a surrender that must follow if it was to move forward. In wanting to move toward him, I felt moved, in ways I could not control. In wanting to reach out and touch him, I feel touched, in my most sensitive spots. If I opened to my passion and let it move freely in me, which I did, it would force me to let go, give in, and feel how raw and vulnerable I truly am.   Although I would liked to possess the aliveness of passion without having to go through the death of surrendering, this is not possible. Passion and surrender are two halves of one whole cycle. The river must return to the sea that is its source so that its waters can keep on flowing.  The surrender that passion calls for involves letting go of holding on. To let go in this way can feel like a death, for it means giving up old ways of trying to make myself feel alive or secure. Yet what is most alive in me wants these old ways to die, so that it can expand and move more freely. No wonder falling in love makes us rejoice and tremble at the same time: It calls us toward the death of our old self. In one of his poems, Goethe calls our urge to die and be transformed a “holy longing," likening it to a moth, “insane for the light," drawn toward the flames of a candle:  I praise what is truly alive.what longs to be burned to death And his conclusion is simple and unequivocal:  And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,you are only a troubled gueston this dark earth. 

Making love is the literal embodiment of passion turning into surrender. The whole unfolding of passion-from approach, to pursuit, to courtship, and all the rest-builds toward a moment of orgasmic letting go, in which we feel full and empty at the same time-full of life and empty of self. As we move toward orgasm we can't hold on to our partner, we can't hold on to life, we can't even hold on to our sexual excitement. We have to let it all go. Orgasm carries us across the threshold of the great unknown, beyond the mind, beyond pleasure, beyond the beloved, beyond even relationship itself. It is, as the French say, “the little death (la petite ma!!)."  

So in following our passion all the way, we arrive at the boundary of life and death; here we feel the insignificance of our small self as we enter into the greater mystery from which we come and to which we must return. No wonder we cling so tightly to our passion: It is a way of fighting off the experience of death. Yet though we may try to hold on to it for dear life, passion's aim is much larger. As the agent of love's unquenchable thirst for wholeness, passion seeks to connect us with the whole of reality, with life and death altogether.  

PASSION AS PATH 

Because romantic passion has led to countless broken lives and marriages, many people have turned against it and condemned it altogether. Writers such as Denis de Rougemont, Scott Peck, and Robert Johnson regard it as the antithesis of mature human love. As de Rougemont writes, “Passion-love is … an impoverishment of one's being… Passion wrecks the very notion of marriage.”   What these writers rightly criticise is the misguided attempt to make a relationship the main source of our spiritual fulfillment. Yet in trying to set things straight, they go to the other extreme-discounting any larger dimension of passion altogether. When Peck writes, "Love is not a feeling, [but] an act of will," he is arguing for all work, no play, for earth at the expense of heaven. In so doing, he fails to appreciate the unconditional nature of passion-as a deep resonance with life's great beauty-underneath all the distorted forms it may take. Devaluing passion or trying to exclude it from marriage only diminishes the vital spark between a man and a woman that propels their journey forward. This leaves us stuck with a hollow, stagnant form, along with an irresistible urge to break out of its constraints.  

So while indulging in addictive passion promotes delusion and death, denouncing passion altogether only maintains the crippling schism between heaven and earth-romantic inspiration and marital commitment-that has plagued love in the Western world for centuries. Neither inflating passion nor condemning it gives us a path.  The heavenly side of passion is an ecstatic urge to break out of our habitual patterns and realise a vaster sense of being. Yet unless we can ground this energy, by bringing it into an I-Thou relationship, it will take a distorted form. When we split off its heavenly side from earth, we "fall in love with love," becoming more enamored with our own excitement than with the reality of an ongoing partnership. Fearing that bringing passion down to earth will ruin our high, we are unwilling to bring it into one-pointed focus, to engage with a real person with any constancy or commitment, to take hold.  

At the other extreme, if we overemphasize passion's earthly side at the expense of heaven, we cannot let go, or relax our focus on a particular person, whom we must have and cannot live without. In the heavenly distortion, addiction to our own excitement prevents us from devoting ourselves to another person. In the earthly distortion, addiction to the other person prevents us from feeling the larger source of aliveness within ourselves.  When we can bring these two sides together, joining heaven and earth, true devotion-passion without fixation-becomes possible. The key to overcoming the torments of passion lies in realising that this energy arises from our larger being and can never be entirely satisfied by any finite person or thing. Its intrinsic nature is egoless and pure in that it is ultimately a desire to experience the fullness of life itself.

Whether it leads to devotion and surrender or else to fixation and addiction depends on what we do with it.  For passion to become path, we must learn to dance on the razor's edge of this energy-now taking hold, now letting go, now focusing our passion with single-pointed intensity, now releasing its focus and feeling its source in the life flowing deep within us. In this way, we can begin to ride the energy of desire instead of getting swept away by it. We can let it resonate through us and flow toward others without having to cling to them.  As we learn to keep our seat and ride our passion, we also become more open to the little flashes of falling in love that are always available: with a leaf falling through the air, the red sun rising behind a range of darkened hills, or a face that we glimpse on the street. These flashes do not have to mean anything terribly serious-we surely don't have to chase after everything that stirs our passion. By simply appreciating the pure quality of this energy as it arises in the moment, we can let ourselves fall in love lightly, without becoming obsessed.  

In an ongoing relationship, a couple's passion may express itself in many different ways. Sometimes it will roar like a mountain torrent. Sometimes it will lie still and contained, like a deep, quiet pool. And sometimes it will flow gently like a broad stream meandering across the plains, or carelessly like a river emptying into the sea. Changing like the weather and the seasons, a couple's passion could be romantic and sweet, sad and tender, or fierce and driving, depending on the circumstances. If they can let their passion move freely, it will keep finding new and different forms of expression-not just in making love, but also in cooking a meal, going for a walk, having a fight, or just sharing their thoughts and feelings. It will begin to suffuse every aspect of their relationship, becoming a magnetic bond that will hold them together through the most difficult of times.  When two people recognise the true nature of their passion-as a powerful, radiant heart energy that wants to shine forth, flow freely, and connect with life at large-they will not need to suppress this feeling or try to maintain a feverish intensity. This will keep their love fresh, and allow them to keep falling in love with the phenomenal world and with each other, again and again.    

Pennie Quaile