All you need is love

When you fall in love, the world takes on a warm and delicious glow. Everything feels right and other people’s behavior doesn’t matter. You feel invincible. No one can mar the lightness of your being. There isn’t anything you can’t do as long as you have love. But what is love, really?

Being in love isn’t a gift you get from another person. It belongs to you. It’s a state of being you’ve achieved. Its power and grace comes from within. This is what spirituality is all about. Every religion in the world teaches us about finding the love and goodness within ourselves. Our task is to learn how to harvest our love and goodness without relying on a person, a substance, or a circumstance to create it for us.

When we are born, our parents are our gods. The experience of love we feel with our parents becomes the blueprint for love in our lifetimes. Being humans, not gods, our parents’ love can be distorted by their own experiences of love, the stresses in their lives, and their perceptions of how they should love.

If you’ve been in more than one major relationship in your life, you may have noticed repeating patterns. You may find yourself drawn to self-centered women over and over again, not recognizing that they’re each like your mother. Or you may pick the same domineering man, who is just like your father, even though he looks different each time.

If we’re lucky, at some point we realize that our perception of love has its own blind spots and quirks. Sometimes we find this out when our hearts are broken. The grief of a breakup can inspire us to seek a higher truth and explore who we are, through therapy, religion, or study. For some of us, the pain is so great that it causes us to shut down our feelings. We might spend years recovering from a broken heart, repeat the same mistakes, or become so bitter that we never dare to love again.

I believe there‘s something deeper and more profound than the love we learn. There is something within us that remembers unconditional love. Perhaps it’s programmed into our DNA before our birth. Whatever that memory is, our conscious minds forget it after we are born, but it remains a powerful unconscious drive within us all. There is a conflict between our deep inner knowledge of unconditional love, and the often-lesser love the world teaches us. This conflict drives us to seek love our whole lives. We are hunters looking to fill that empty space inside.

A spiritual master once said that if we took just 5 percent of the energy we spend on relationships, and spent it seeking god, we would achieve true happiness. When your heart is broken, or when love seems unattainable, rather than shutting down, imagine that your heart was meant to grow. Focus your love on yourself, and a seed of new love will be born within you.

The Beatles sang it perfectly … “all you need is love.”