Each day, we witness or experience love in countless ways. Love is demonstrated through small favors, gifts, and kisses and hugs. We express or hear “I love you” as we drop our kids off at school, end a phone call, start or finish our day. It’s said that we each have a love language, and if that’s true, then we are indeed wired to give and receive love.
Love appears to be in no short supply, but with the world in a state of conflict, love seems to be sorely lacking. We know the joy and harmony love brings, but we’ve also felt the pain that comes in its perceived absence. We’ve heard the many definitions of love born out of disappointment and heartbreak; that love has its limits, that it comes and goes, that it wasn’t enough.
Yes, love reigns supreme, and it is desperately needed in this world. To open to love is a choice, but when we become disheartened, the phrase “choose love” can feel simplistic, even irrelevant. Is “choose love” merely something nice to say during difficult times? It can remain a slogan, but many of us know that choosing love can also be a radical act.
If we want to sincerely and authentically “choose love,” meaning Love with a capital “L,” how do we start?
During the darkest hours, we can find our ground by reminding ourselves what love is. It’s a practice in itself to reorient to love through contemplating what Ram Dass and other wisdom keepers have said about it.
Reminding ourselves what real love is, is a first essential step in choosing it.
The consensus reality is that love is transactional; we give it, we take it. Loving kindness teacher Sharon Salzberg shares that love is always ours, always present, if we recognize love as an ability.
“If I think of [love] as an ability, it’s a capacity in me that other people certainly might awaken or inspire… but ultimately, it’s mine. It’s mine to tender, it’s my responsibility. If I want love in a conversation, I have to be the one bringing it into the conversation… it’s actually very empowering, rather than waiting for someone to deliver it.”
Love calls forth love. Even if love is met with resistance, love still touches a place where it is deeply needed. Love replenishes the source from which love springs. Spiritual master Meher Baba spoke in depth about the self-communicative nature of love.
“[Love] can be awakened through love itself. Essentially, love is self-communicative: Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it, for one cannot absorb love without making a response. Regardless of the barnacles which may cover the surface, the response is stamped by the nature of love. True Love is unconquerable and irresistible, and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually, it transforms everyone who touches it.”
Love is not only the salve, but the solution for anger. We do not bypass anger through love, but rather embrace it. Here, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh speaks with Ram Dass about holding anger with love, the way a mother holds a baby.
While love in its many expressions is beautiful, true love goes beyond everyday exchanges. Ram Dass spoke many times about the unconditional love that was revealed through his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (aka Maharaji); it was through this transmission that Ram Dass knew unconditional love exists in each of us.
“If you don’t think you’re worthy of love, think again… You’ve got to get into the experience of being in the ‘bath of love.’ When you can be in that bath of love, you are in your soul. Our egos produce fear and anxiety, but our souls produce love. When you say to somebody ‘I love you,’ you have gone down into your soul and brought the clear water of love. Usually, ‘I love you’ becomes ego-y: ‘I love you, you better love me.’ But it’s still not ego. It’s just filtered through the ego.”
“[Maharaji] was resting in that place within, and when I looked at him, he mirrored that place within me. He showed me the first view of unconditional love. Somebody that loves you no matter what. His heart turned on my heart, and then I found I could turn on other people’s hearts.”
Ram Dass’ guru brother KK Sah wrote that love is the power “that pervades the entire universe.” KK’s tender and moving words serve as a complete discourse on real love, with love itself pervading the message. We can read them as a means of connecting with that super power that is love.
“Love does not wait for logic and is the easiest path of all. The first test of love is that it knows no bargaining. True love cannot exist in an arrangement by two parties. Love is always the giver, not the taker. Love can conquer everything. It’s the best medicine. It can take you to God because love is God. It’s all-powerful, It knows no fear. It is the highest ideal. Love is higher than work, than yoga, than knowledge, although the highest forms of love and wisdom are in reality One. Duty is seldom sweet. It becomes sweet only through love, which shines only in freedom. Every motion is a circle, therefore do not hate anyone, because that hatred, which comes out of you, must in the long run come back to you. When you send love, it will naturally come back to you, completing the circle. Love attracts human beings to each other. It attracts animals to animals, and all of creation in an endless embrace. Love manifests from the lowest atom to the highest being. It is omnipotent and all-pervading. Love is the one mode of power that pervades the entire universe, unattached, yet shining in everything and without which the whole universe would fall to pieces in a moment.”
In contemplating these lovingly offered words and lessons from these compassionate teachers, we’re taking a dip in the bath of Love described by Ram Dass above.
We open to the possibility that even in these challenging times, Love is as real and as available as ever, to everyone.
"Love is more powerful than electricity"
This piece was written and curated by Lindsay Bond
Very nice
beautiful ❤️
Thank you so much for this beautiful essay on love. You can feel the essence as you read these words. What a beautiful way to start my day.
Thank you for this beautiful and much needed lesson! It helped shift my perspective which has been very negative about certain aspects of today’s world.
The warmth that comes from within me, spreading out from my heart/mind as I read these words that resonates deeply as the kind of reminder I can never get enough of. The warmth I can feel as light touching every atom and living cell that is bound together in form with my layer of skin. I feel the smile arise on my lips and feels like the natural shape that my mouth was divinely created to make. By the time I was ready to share my experience of this beautiful collection of moments that have outshined everything else in recent days, I had to close my eyes and mindfully embrace my, often unworthy conditioned mind, the connection that love is not just who I am but how I can overwrite decades of being used and abused and I can for a moment or if I’m lucky enough to experience the truth…. I am just as much included by the force of true love,as Ram Dass speaks about, as every single beautiful part of this universe that is also a part of the same love. Most of my life I have been in awe at the beauty that I can see in everything and everyone and everywhere I look at, except for what I see when I look into a mirror. I have chosen to live a more solitude life after the revelation that the people who I had called my friends were in fact only in my life to take advantage of my kindness. It was a painful lonely journey for many years but now I have learned that self love and self care is not a selfish pursuit, it’s a necessity. My health was so bad and my hope was lost with my thoughts were on how much longer until I finally die because I had no support and even my family who were witnessing my close calls to death as I withered away, I finally found myself with the only option left which was to surrender to my pain and suffering and to go back to my life long trust in the fact that the universe knows what it’s doing and as a human being I feel it would be arrogant of me to understand why things unfolded in the way they do every single moment. And I gained the insight that how was I ever supposed to be able to help others if I was so drained of life myself, I had nothing left to offer and I saw that to be able to be the best version of myself to help others who were in need, I had to take advocacy for my own personal healing, growth and peace and my lonely journey to heal began. It wasn’t long before my mindfulness meditation practice showed me that instead of searching my entire life for the best friend that I needed who was able to always make time for me to support me and show interest in me… it was an unlikely dream to come across yet I saw that by turning my ego into my servant instead of my master, I could be the best friend I have always wanted and as long as I’m alive in this form I can always count on that love and support from within me.