More Essence Love

Last night our small Sangha talked about Essence Love again - it’s strange in a way that this apparently simple idea should be the cause of so much confusion. Several things struck me about everyone’s contributions - the preponderance of the idea that it is related to and influenced by a babies good or bad attachment to her or his mother, and the opposite, that it has no biological base, that it somehow sits at a lower or deeper level and is not affected or disturbed by conflicted emotional states. Let’s look at both of these.

Having made the association in my last blog with attachment theory I’m going to stick with this but just try to tease out the details a bit more. Someone in the group mentioned the nature nurture divide - how much do we come in with and then what’s added. I think it’s important to recognise this here. If Tsoknyi Rinpoche is correct, that essence love is a given that does not require external stimuli to be present, then this must mean it’s inherent or innate within our mammalian organism. It’s part of our nature. However, the fact that he talks about how important it is to restore and cultivate it implies that it is not something which is always there - like our elbows - but can be affected by all sorts of external conditions. So there is also a nurture element as well.

This balance of nature and nurture, a potentiality and how we actually are, is reflected in other areas that are concerned with being a healthy human being. Cranial osteopaths speak of the ‘long tide’, a subtle and profound rhythm within the body that ‘connects to a larger, universal “breath of life” aiding deep healing, stillness and wholeness’. Homeopathy similarly has the notion of an innate wellness that can fall out of balance but also be restored, as does acupuncture, which envisages a complex of channels and the energy that runs through them, and how through its treatment this subtle body may be returned to health. I think each of these, within their own healing metaphors, are saying much the same thing and interestingly, all of them are talking about the subtle energy of the body - which we know is at the back of Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s mind when he is talking about the condition of our essence love.

So where have we got to? Essence love is innate in so much as the body/mind has a healthy ‘bottom line’ or default position, and it can rest in this space like a healthy animal, not needing external stimuli to maintain it. But at the same time external circumstances can and do affect it. That’s why Tsoknyi Rinpoche goes on so much about stress. Stress separates us from the health of essence love. Seen this way the whole thing about attachment plainly works well: a baby has the propensity to make attachments, it’s a crucial element of essence love, but when the situation does not allow it for whatever reason, the mother’s distress or absence, then this is felt as a stress by the baby and its experience of essence love is lost. However, it can be restored in most cases.

Now the second idea, that essence love is situated at a ‘deeper level’ than conflicted emotions such as rage. This is the one that really interested me for several reasons. Firstly it implies - and forgive me if I have misunderstood here - that essence love and rage are in opposition. That rage cannot be part of essence love. If we return to what we know about how our mind/brain works then what is happening when we feel rage is that the emotional centre of our brain, the amygdala, has been triggered into a fight, freeze or flee reaction as a means of self-defence. Now, I would not consider that unhealthy in itself. This is what a healthy animal is supposed to do when feeling a threat. However, it does become unhealthy when this threat system is unable to either close down and rest, or the opposite, is closed down all the time and unable to react. Both conditions that are caused by persistent overwhelm and trauma. This way of understanding things enables rage to be part of essence love but at the same time acknowledges that it can, when stressed, also become a symptom that signals the basic health of essence love is out of kilter.

That’s the first idea. The second idea takes us down into a whole other way of viewing this. So far we have been viewing all of this from our normal dualistic way of seeing things but Tsoknyi Rinpoche is a teacher of the Great Perfection, Dzogchen, and this holds a non-dual perspective. I’m not going to tie myself up in knots trying to put this all into words right now but I just want to pull out that when we rest within intrinsic awareness, the non-dual state, then conflicted emotions are not something external to that state but are known as an energetic expression of awareness. Where essence love comes in here I’m not sure - logically it too must be an expression of awareness - but what is clear is that a stable mind, one of the attributes of essence love, is one of the conditions necessary for the possibility of glimpsing the nature of mind, our luminous buddha-nature. And a stressed mind obviously isn't.

Finally, one last delightful twist. Those of us who have been especially hurt and are isolated as children will sometimes have a connection to something like an invisible friend, an angelic presence, speaking animals or, without diminishing it, fairies at the end of the garden. These imaginal beings that maintain the sanity of the child could all easily be interpreted as essence love itself reaching out and trying to re-establish itself. It’s as if essence love is part of our psychological homeostasis in this way of seeing things. A way of returning to and maintaining a healthy emotional balance. Who knows if this is true - but its an idea that make me smile and that - why we believe an idea, what our investment in it is - could well be the theme of the next blog…

NW. 19 March 2026   And another huge thank you to everyone for your part in creating this blog.