The love hormone

At last the most wanted hormone in the world has been found — “the love hormone”. Its scientific name is oxytocin but now it has entered the vocabulary of the common man with this adorable name, the love hormone. It is found that whenever you feel pleasure it is nothing but your brain playing cupid and releasing this happy hormone into the bloodstream.
They say, how long a new relationship will last can be accurately predicted by measuring the amount of oxytocin that two lovers have in their bloodstream. This hormone can be released during a friendly physical touch or someone hugging you. Interestingly, it can also be released during working on the social networking site. Work for 10 minutes on Twitter or Facebook and you will feel an orgasmic joy.
And now, some scientists have invented an oxytocin spray which can induce a woman or a man to like you.
It means that the immortal love stories of lovers like Romeo and Juliet were nothing but a dance of oxytocins released by their brains. Science is indeed a spoilsport! It reduces romance and poetry to mere hormones.
If love could be sprayed like a perfume, things would be so much easier in this world. Imagine the Presidents of two warring nations spraying the love potion on each other and both the countries living peacefully ever after.
Undoubtedly, the happy hormone is released when people are in love but assuming that people will start loving if the hormone is injected is a logical fallacy. It’s putting the horse before the cart.
One thing is certain though. The human heart is thirsty for love and nobody knows how to quench this thirst. It is a strange dichotomy — love is one of the rare commodities in today’s world.
The Osho insight is that this happens because love is misunderstood. The basic mistake is that everybody is asking for love, nobody wants to give it, because nobody knows how to give it. Love is an overflow of the heart energy. It is not an emotion, it is a positive energy that springs from the bottom of the heart.
The second misunderstanding is that people seek love out of loneliness. When both the lovers are lonely and go to each other with a begging bowl, the loneliness is not reduced it multiplies. Loneliness creates possessiveness, jealousy and insecurity, which are the enemies of love. All this can be avoided if lovers are also meditators.
“First meditate, first feel your own being, first grow into love. Love is a sharing of two individuals. And I call a person ‘individual’ when he is happy with his aloneness,” says Osho.

Amrit Sadhana is in the management team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune. She facilitates meditation workshops around the country and abroad.