“The Art of Falling and Rising in Love: A Sufi Perspective”

The winged heart stands as one symbol of Sufism, embodying the heart’s profound connection to a boundless source, enabling it to ascend to great heights. This source, far from isolated, permeates all that envelops us. Within the Arab tradition, the winged heart features a moon and a star, where the star symbolizes the creative force, and the moon, nestled alongside, represents the heart’s feminine facet — an embodiment of utter receptivity and wholehearted acceptance. When the heart yields to the omnipresent love with unwavering acceptance, it takes flight, soaring to new realms.

Sufis say that love is like the air, surrounding us, waiting to enter. Our task is to let it in, remove the barriers, and allow it to flood us to our core. The Sufi seeks to be filled, intoxicated with the presence and experience of love, which is found in awe of beauty. They seek beauty in every fleeting moment of being alive, in nature, existence, people, art, life, a flower, in everything.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Rumi.

The Sufi spirit seeks beauty, unity, and harmony; these three are their ideals. In coherence, they cultivate dance, poetry, music, or any means to experience these ideals. Life is often transformed into a continuous dance, a composition, a work of art. In connection with beauty, harmony, and unity, the heart expands and experiences divinity.

The Sufi seeks to love without choice, to let love show the way and not control the admiration felt for the beauty of everything in the world.

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” — Rumi.

This means falling in love with everything that one’s heart admires. However, this falling in love is careful. It’s not a vehement desire or wanting to possess but rather an appreciation with awe, humility, and beauty, acknowledging the delicate interdependence of beings that needs to be nurtured in pursuit of harmony.

Falling in love with life, people, things, projects, causes, and art needn’t always be overt or have a purpose beyond the moment itself. It’s not about attachment that leads to obsession or suffering. Instead, it’s a path to connect with one’s inner divinity, freeing oneself from the world’s reactions to one’s love.

After several conventional love and partner relationships, I finally experienced this when I fell in love with a woman, and something different happened. I felt like a teenager, absorbed in the beauty of another, and I wrote her a song confessing my fascination. She gently rejected me, and I didn't like to be rejected, however, I didn’t feel pain; on the contrary, I felt fascination throughout the process, which was incredible.

How was this possible? Finally, my heart was operating to its fullest because instead of seeing love as a transaction between two people, I understood that both she and I were vehicles and apprentices of an enormous universal creative force.

I ceased obsessing over the outcome of my infatuation with her. I learned not to center on her response, and instead, focused on enjoying the effects of love within me, on relishing my own fascination with my emotional state, the song, my creativity, and the force that was arising within me. It was so beautiful and powerful that I couldn’t help but be grateful for this woman’s existence and the encounter that triggered this awakening.
Falling in love with her, or more accurately, with the beauty I found in her, connected me with universal qualities. It brought illumination, and I didn’t diminish throughout this journey; instead, I grew by embracing the experience and discovering my enjoyment of it.

Humanity has often depicted falling in love as a state of “falling,” but in reality, we can turn the experience into “rising in love,” elevating ourselves through love.

This experience showed me that our transactional notion of romantic love can be transcended by seeking a deeper and multifaceted relationship with infatuation as an experience. Non-transactional love in partnership, the one that doesn’t expect anything in return, can be cultivated through three relationships:

1. Being Love: Being the creative force, feeling it within, sensing that the other person is also a vehicle of this force, recognizing that the force transcends us, and expressing it as the unique expression that is yourself, loving everything.
2. Being a Lover: Giving, surrendering to my love for myself, for the creative force, and for the loved one.
3. Being Loved: Receiving, allowing the sublime surrender to being loved by myself and the person who loves me and, collectively, by the creative force, by the mystery.

Ultimately, it was the beauty of creation and my own beauty that expressed itself in my fascination with her. It was so expressive and tangible that it was an act of self-discovery.

I enjoyed my own infatuation, loved my nervousness, adored my vulnerability, and was fascinated by the tenderness generated by my innocence and romanticism. I cherished the creativity that spontaneously emerged; it was raw, pure, and childlike in its attempt to touch another heart and show mine. It was like God playing with seeing and touching Himself with a more delicate instrument than skin. I remembered how, in previous moments of my life, my creativity when in love, had driven me to create exquisite works.

“I have no regret. The amount I love is the amount I don’t hold back.” — Rumi.

I learned that, in infatuation, we often make the mistake of subjecting our self-acceptance to the acceptance of others. This can be transformed to evolve. Falling in love with her became a vehicle for falling in love with my particular way of loving and with love itself.

Who should care more about being comfortable with my way of loving than myself?

If we are realistic, we know that we often fall in love with people and projects without really knowing them! This is why we understand that the beauty we see outside is actually within ourselves.

When others heard the song I created for her, they opened their hearts, and I received much love. This taught me that we can become expressive vehicles of a universal force that circulates, returns, recycles, reproduces among us, and expands in the collective if we allow it.

When love flows generously, it returns multiplied, showing us that it’s a good path to allow ourselves to love. There’s no need to cling or feel pain in the act of expressing love or allowing oneself to fall in love.

The Sufi falls in love comfortably with a tree, with chocolate, with an idea, with a book, with color, with a person, with a practice, but most importantly, they fall in love with love itself, with the connection to the source and the forms that love takes: generosity, friendship, loyalty, companionship, humor.

“There is a morning inside you waiting to burst open into light.” — Rumi.

The Sufi falls in love with the way love reproduces itself, seeking not to limit but to open, confirming that love nourishes, and moves the world,
And those who tap into this power have the ability to inspire, a capability akin to moving mountains. The Sufi opens their heart to fall in love with everything that exists because loving with an open heart and allowing it to grow wings nourishes the soul and gives strength to our lives.