Love

What is the essence of love?

Love is energy. Love is what keeps us all alive, not just humans but the entire universe. It’s divine love that causes flower petals to open when the sun shines upon them, that causes trees to grow, as they are nourished by the soil, the sun and the rain. Love is what enables us to grow as well. In fact, there is a medical condition called ‘Failure to Thrive’ ¹ in which children receive proper food, medicine, clothing and shelter but still don’t grow. Over much study spanning many years, researchers finally discovered that it was an absence of touch, absence of love, that thwarted these children’s growth. If children are not held and loved enough, they don’t grow. Love is the energy that literally holds it all together.

When we love, on the deepest level, we tap into a source. It’s not just that I’m in love with you, but through loving you, you become the medium through which I tap into the love that exists within me.

When someone is showering us with love, appreciation, support and nurturing, it’s very easy to love them. You become like the flower opening its petals, the tree growing in nourishing soil. Yet, if you’ve ever spent time in the forest, you’ll know that even though most trees grow straight upwards, if there isn’t light right above them, the trees learn to grow sideways. Receiving that light is critical, so the trees grow in whichever direction is necessary to access light.

If we aren’t showered with the love we need to survive, just as the tree needs the sun, how can we tap into that source of love? As the tree must find light, we must find love. But that doesn’t mean we grow sideways! We have the opportunity to find love wherever we go, if we are willing and courageous enough to open ourselves to it. Love does not have to mean romantic love or the love of a parent for a child. Love is something we can connect to even in the eyes of a stranger or even in hugging a tree. If we can connect to the Divine, the essence, the spirit, we can tap into the source of love within ourselves. When you look at someone, try to connect with content instead of form. Instead of seeing the outward appearance of a woman or man of a certain skin colour, age, height and weight, wearing certain types of clothes, can you see their true content, can you see the Divine in them? If you can, you will find yourself connecting to the true Source, to the source of love within yourself.

How do we love unconditionally? How can we avoid being hurt?

The only way not to get hurt is to stop living. There is a beautiful saying in Hindi. It works much better in the original language, but I’ll give you the translation: ‘That which bends is that which has life in it; that which is rigid is a corpse.’ When we are alive, we bend. We bend in humility, surrender, to the winds and waves of life that hit us so hard that we find ourselves flat on our face, literally or emotionally. And this is a hallmark of being alive. The only thing that doesn’t bend is a corpse. If you want to stop being hurt, you have to shut yourself off from life. When we care, when we love, and what we care about or who we love doesn’t act or speak or treat us in the way we want or do as we wish, it hurts us. Therefore, either we stop caring, we stop loving, or we accept that we’re going to get hurt.

But that’s just the first stage. There is a way to keep loving without getting hurt, but we can’t just snap our fingers and make it happen. It requires us to practise truly unconditional love.

We think we love unconditionally. Ask people to describe how they feel about their children or spouse, and frequently you will hear, ‘I love him unconditionally, but oh my God, he is such a slob. If he would only pick up his stuff, I’d really love him!’ That doesn’t sound unconditional. I may say I love someone unconditionally, but I keep getting hurt. If it were really unconditional love, I wouldn’t be so attached to what they do or say, and therefore, I wouldn’t be hurt.

Now, there’s an important difference between unconditional love and apathy. Lack of attachment is not lack of caring, nor is it indifference. It just means that my sense of well-being and happiness, my inner self, is not hooked to what you do or say. I may love you, but if I need you to talk to me in a certain way or to live your life in a certain way in order for me to feel happy, that’s a recipe for disaster. I’m going to get hurt. We don’t have control over what anybody else does. We only have control over ourselves. And the only way, ultimately, not to get hurt is to stop having that expectation.

That doesn’t mean we stop loving and caring, or let our hearts turn into stone. It means we work with ourselves to allow the love to be its own reward. Because when my love is not unconditional, it means that the things I need you to do are wholly for me.

If we look carefully at what hurts us, it always has to do with an expectation we had of how someone was going to behave. Sometimes it’s a small thing, such as remembering a birthday; sometimes it’s a big thing, such as not being left alone or betrayed. For love to be a path to spiritual awakening and true peace, we have to recognize that the love we experience is its own reward. Love comes with no guarantees. Just because I love you, it isn’t guaranteed that you’ll love me back, bring me flowers or make choices in your life that I want you to make. If the focus of my love is making you dance to my tune, today or tomorrow I’m going to get hurt. Or, alternatively, you’ll just become my slave and I’ll squeeze the life out of you. Many of us do that unconsciously—we pressure and nag the people around us in such a way that they just give up.

If all you wanted was someone who will do your bidding, there was no point seeking a relationship in the first place. You don’t want to live with a servile person either. That’s not how you want your love to be. Love has to be alive. And if love is alive, then you have free will. So your focus needs to be on love as its own reward, and not on how you can manipulate or convince or badger your beloved to do what you want. The love itself is what feeds you.

Yes, you will get hurt sometimes, but you must keep going back to allow yourself to have that experience of love. That’s what life is about. I don’t just mean romantic love. Love your friends, the trees, humanity, pets, God. But we’ve got to love, and being hurt is part of it until we can pull the hooks of our own heart out of other people’s actions. That’s the real secret to loving and not getting hurt. The only other option is to turn your heart into a stone, devoid of life, which is no solution at all.

How do we practise giving and receiving unconditional love?

We’re taught from early childhood that giving is more important than receiving. But here’s what’s interesting: this teaching holds true for everything except love, because I cannot give love unconditionally until I’m able to experience it in myself. My intention may be very pure, I may want to love you unconditionally, but so long as I’m not able to love myself, I’m actually not able to love you. I may need you or lust after you, I may be attached to you. But I’m not able to actually deeply love you until and unless I know how to love myself. Love has to be something where, no matter how selfless or spiritual we want to be, we have to start with ourselves.

When we talk about loving ourselves unconditionally, it’s important to recognize that we are loving the capital-S Self. It’s the core of who we are. It’s our soul, spirit, essence, consciousness, and it is love. You don’t have to love the fact that you’re addicted to smoking or that you beat your children. You shouldn’t love any of those things. The practice of unconditional love holds that all these things that you do stem out of the inability to see yourself, to understand yourself and love yourself.

When I don’t love myself and feel empty, I may drink alcohol or use drugs or eat an entire chocolate cake at one go or max out my credit cards at the store. I’m trying to fill myself, numbing myself, escaping. When I feel empty, I need others to act in a certain way for me to feel OK. When they do, I feel great. When they don’t, I’m furious. That, therefore, is where my anger comes from.

I have to understand that all these things I do are not right and should be changed. They stem not from my being a bad or evil person, but from the fact that I haven’t yet seen the Truth of my own fullness and divinity. They arise because I’m living behind a veil.

When I’m really able to see myself first, what I see is consciousness, Divinity and love. Yes, this body, this vehicle, has been through a lot. It’s faced a lot of challenges, a lot of things have happened to it, which have created patterns of ignorance in my own mind. When I allow these patterns to run my show, I feel about myself in a way that’s not true and I act in ways that I later regret. When we are young, we establish these patterns in our mind, in which we blame ourselves for everything.

There’s an aspect of child development called magical thinking, wherein children think they have power over everything. If they cry, their mom picks them up and everything is better. In this phase of magical thinking, we think everything happens because of us, even if it is not something directly related to us. If a sibling or parent passes away, parents get divorced or the house burns down, in the child’s mind, she or he is to blame. We move through this world with such patterns that prevent us from loving ourselves, because even though we may have grown up to be a CEO or have founded an NGO that feeds five million people in Africa every day, on the inside, we still don’t feel worthy. These patterns are so deep and unconscious. They have nothing to do with what we’re actually doing today, and yet they are the cause of our subconscious thought and behaviour.

When we speak about receiving love, first we must understand that we are Divine, and all of the rest of the chatter in our mind is ignorance. It is this ignorance and the ego that says, ‘I am this body, I am what’s happened to it’, that have absorbed all the messages of our culture, our marketing, our parents, of everything that’s happened to us. The sum total of these messages is that you’re not worthy, you’re not good enough. ‘Why can’t you be like your brother? Why can’t you be like your sister? When I was your age, I . . .’ We all have a different way in which such messages got through to us, but the end result is the same: we’re not good enough and we’re not worthy. And that perception is what needs to be broken first.

When I’m able to actually love myself, I’m experiencing love. Something that I always thought I needed someone else to give me, something I was always looking for outside. But now here I am, sitting alone and experiencing it. What that teaches me directly, instinctively, experientially and automatically, is that I don’t need you to behave in a certain way, or speak in a certain way, or do something in a certain way so that I can be OK. The minute I let that expectation go, I’m able to love you unconditionally.

The minute I’m not dependent on what you say or do is when I can love myself. I certainly hope you love me too, but I no longer need it. Imagine you go out to eat with friends. If you’re sitting at a table with others, isn’t it more fun to also have a bite of this and a bite of that, and to share dishes you think taste really good? If someone says they don’t want to taste something you ordered, or someone doesn’t want to share their items with you, you’re OK with that because you’ve got a plate of food in front of you! But if you were starving and your plate was empty and you needed someone’s food to live, you wouldn’t be able to take the ‘No, I don’t want to give you my food’ so easily. My plate has to be full first. Only then can I love you even when you refuse to give me your love.

How do we maintain harmony in relationships?

All that people we have relationships with can do is to help us experience the love that already exists within us.

Loving someone becomes the catalyst for our own internal love manufacturing plant to be switched on. That person may be the stimulus for us to start producing love, but the love is being produced within us. It is not dependent upon the other person.

We know this is true because when your beloved stands up and leaves the room, do you feel the love any less? Do you fall out of love every time they go to get a glass of water or when they go to the office or the grocery store? Of course not! So it’s not dependent on them.

If you’re standing near an AC, you feel cool. But the farther you walk away from the AC, the less cool you feel. The coolness is coming directly from the AC; you are not generating it inside yourself. But love doesn’t work that way. Love is actually within you, but through the relationship, the beloved has enabled you to experience the place within yourself that is love. That’s divine and beautiful. When we talk about a ‘soulmate’, this is what it means. The soulmate is the one in whose presence you are able to experience the Truth of your soul, which is love. It doesn’t matter if it’s a spouse, a friend, a sibling, a parent, a child, a Guru.

Unfortunately, we’ve filled up our relationships with a lot of baggage. When we move out of the experience of love into the everyday logistics of life—who is going to wash the dishes, go grocery shopping, change diapers, scrub the toilet—that is where we lose harmony and think we are falling out of love. What is actually happening is that you are no longer able to access that place of love within yourself, because your ego, busyness, numbness, distractions and expectations have taken precedence and jammed up your internal love manufacturing plant. Rather than realizing that, we blame the loved one for not giving us the love we think we need from outside. We now expect the beloved to act in certain ways that fill that lack of love we are feeling inside. This is the problem.

The solution is simple. The only way to have harmony in relationships is to stop expecting the other to behave in a certain way, speak in a certain way and be a certain way in order to fill our holes, and to be fully aware that the love that we feel is generated within us. The beloved is a divine vehicle, the one who has catalysed it, but if they start acting in a way that we don’t anticipate, it’s not their fault that we are no longer able to access that place of love within ourselves. It’s within us, which means it’s our responsibility to turn back inward and find that place within ourselves again. The beloved was just the one who showed it to us.

Harmony in relationships doesn’t come from two halves becoming one, or two beings coming together with pegs that fill each other’s holes. If I’ve got a square hole and you’ve got a square peg, we fit. Yet, over time, because I change, my square hole becomes a triangle. Your square peg, because you change, becomes round. Now you’ve got a round peg and I’ve got a triangular hole and the two no longer fit each other. This is when we start to fight and fall out of love. But we have to recognize that we are not those holes; we are not even full of holes. We are whole; the holes are just stains upon our psyche that we can clean. When we can be in relationships as a full, whole being, then it doesn’t matter what form our beloved is. We don’t need them to fill us.

My dad is an incredible man who is a divorce attorney; he has spent the last many decades of his life from morning to evening with couples who are getting divorced. He has also spent many decades married to my mother, a wonderful woman but not an easy woman, and he has found deep peace, which has been such a guiding force in my life. His teaching is: you can either be right or you can be married. It’s not just about our marriages, of course. It’s about all relationships. It is our commitment, our attachment to being right that keeps us from being happy. We can be right or we can be peaceful. We have to make that decision in our relationships. In every situation, when we run into conflict, we really have to ask ourselves: in this moment, is being right more important to me than maintaining peace? Am I prepared to relinquish my attachment to proving I’m right in exchange for peace? If we can do that, if we can let the other be right, so that we can both be peaceful, what we find is not only are our relationships peaceful, but we’re also peaceful inside.