How I Fell In Love With... A State

My story about losing balance, losing someone and finding something huge...

When I was fourteen, my school took us on a skiing trip for a week, in the Pirenees.

I was hopeless at it. I did not have much confidence, was frightened of skiing, and I didn't have great coordination. My balance was poor, I would tighten my jaw, hope for the best and spent most of each day sprawled in the snow while the others glided past. I don't think the tutor was too supportive with me and I would feel it was all my fault, so did not ask for help. Every morning began with me falling and every evening ended with sore muscles and a bruised ego.

By the last day I could at least stand, though my zigzag down the slop was still clumsy. Then came the final race with all the kids from the same group. I remember pushing off, gaining speed, and losing control almost instantly. There was no elegance, just panic and the planet doing its job. Somehow I managed to stay upright (barely) and, to everyone’s surprise, crossed the finish line first. I wasn’t awarded a medal. Apparently arriving in one piece wasn’t the same as winning. But I’ve never forgotten that feeling of being completely overwhelmed yet still moving forward.

Many years later, I met that feeling again. This time with no snow in sight. It came through grief, after a relationship I had to leave because of circumstances I couldn’t change myself. It was the kind of separation that rewires your sense of reality. The heartbreak came as an impact, one that I iniciated, though it was also reactive, born of a non sustainable situation. It was sudden and disorienting, and then descended slowly and heavily through confusion and pain.

My body slowed itself to a near standstill. I slept ten, sometimes eleven hours a day. This is a condition called hypersomnia, the brain's way of partly shut down to protect itself when emotional stress becomes too great. When I was awake I moved through the bare minimum required to keep life going. The days blurred together. A few friends very kindly visited me, but I rarely reached out. Inside that silence, the pain was alive and constant. There were moments of wishing for everything simply to stop. Yet, somewhere underneath the exhaustion, a faint current kept me upright: the same instinct that once kept me on my skis: ungraceful, terrified, but moving.

Looking back now, I understand that something extraordinary was happening inside the brain. When grief is total but the system doesn’t shut down, it can eventually rebuild itself in a new configuration. I’m aware that this is not what happens for everyone; the brain has many possible ways to survive loss. Some pathways may quiet emotion, others may amplify it, and some (like mine) seem to reorganise around connection itself. I don’t know how frequent this pattern is, but it feels important to describe it, because recognising that the brain can move toward love rather than away from it might expand what we consider possible in healing.

The chemistry that once bonded me to one person (oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin) reorganises. The attachment doesn’t die, it widens. Love stops being directed outward into one specific direction and begins radiating from within. A survival mechanism became an open system.

As I notice this new configuration being settled in me, it became a kind of baseline, not constant but always accesible. It isn’t just calm, it feels like love itself, tangible and physical, as if the whole body remembers how to glow. This warmth includes me as much as it includes the world around me. It doesn’t make me agreeable or without limits at all. The pleasure is steady, cellular, electric. And it’s contagious. People sense it and I can notice them soften, I can feel how people reacts to it and how the atmosphere changes.

I’ve read of people who, after deep suffering, seemed to reorganise toward connection, like Viktor Frankl, Edith Eger, or Nelson Mandela. They spoke of compassion and reconciliation, which might be the outward expression of something like this. I have not found descriptions of these emotional and physical sensations in them, but I found their stories revealing of how the human system can evolve toward integration rather than collapse, how love, in its broadest sense, can become a stabilising force after pain.

I call it 'A state of love' because it isn’t something I do but a place I inhabit. It’s calm, inclusive, strangely steady. I feel it clearly. I might at times forget it, and then recall it.

And crucially, it doesn’t require catastrophe or many years of meditation to touch it. It does not require seven years in the Tibet (although I'd love to visit). Those paths can open the door for some people in some circumstances; others reach it through intense meditative practice. I believe there are much gentler ways to get there than the way I did. I’m simply telling you how it was for me. I think grief transformed in that way because I was already primed as a meditator, and even though I could barely manage my own overwhelm, I had some capacity to observe what was happening inside me, and the courage to let grief move through instead of blocking it. That might be why the process completed its full cycle, until love became something I felt in an entirely different way.

But coming back to what matters, the possibility of decoding this process and finding ways to reach it gently matters a lot to me. I believe the State of Love can be reverse engineered, and that we don't need catharsis or high intensity emotions to reach it, also I would consider this unsafe to practice deliberately. It can be accesed through balanced, science informed methods that evoke the same chemistry the brain naturally produces in A State of Love.

Oxytocin helps us bond and feel safe. Serotonin stabilises mood and restores perspective. Dopamine and endorphins bring lightness and vitality. GABA settles the system, reducing fear. And when cortisol, the stress hormone, stays low and steady, the body feels safe enough to open. These are measurable pathways.

We do not need to break people open. We can warm them open, slowly, like a gentle fire that softens without burning. Practices like synchronized breathing, chanting, movement, touch (inclusing self-touch), social bonding with depth, emotional recall, body awareness and authentic attention can invite that chemistry for a few seconds at a time, long enough for the body to remember what openness feels like and begin to trust it again.

That is what interests me now, how to create warmth without pain, how to guide people safely to that same inner current that once kept me upright on a mountain and, many years later, through deep grief.

Sometimes arriving in one piece is the greatest victory of all.

A note:

This reflection is the beginning of a larger exploration. In a future piece I’ll write about what I now call the state of love, how it works in the body and the mind, and how it can be reached through gentler, safer practices without the need for crisis.