True love is rare. We often associate love with romance, relationships, affairs, broken hearts – many scenarios which can form the setting for emotional pain. This is not the pain of love, in spite of what people often say. It is the pain of attachment. True love is free. There is no attachment, there are no strings.

True love heals

True love is an incredible energy, present throughout the entire cosmos. It has the extraordinary capacity to heal at every level because it unites and makes things whole, just like glue. For us, love is limited only by our consciousness. The mind narrows with our beliefs, fears, prejudices and emotional pain. Fortunately, even these are healed or resolved if we allow ourselves to open to this wonderful and mysterious force.

Love is universal but its expression differs according to the conditions that exist. The love of a matriarchal elephant for the rest of the herd, protecting and nurturing, is likely to be very different in expression and experience from that of many human beings, for example. But nurturing and protecting are two aspects of love that we can easily understand and relate to.

True love is an expression of all-that-is

True love is an expression of totality – of everything in, throughout and beyond the universe, both manifest and transcendent. Love may then be understood as something more than an individual expression. Love becomes limitless and expressible at every level and, rather beautifully, must be intrinsic in absolutely everything.

If we can understand love as some extraordinary, amazing energy or force that permeates the whole universe and beyond, that holds together, brings together, heals, forms and builds, then inevitably we must begin to understand that it is far more than sentiment or emotion.

We can love more than we think we can

Love as we may experience it as human beings is only the most dilute expression of this cosmic energy. Love is inexhaustibly bigger than we are. However, we can develop our capacity to express it. It’s quite easy. We can start by being kind to everyone we come in contact with.

The cosmic proportion of love is less easy to comprehend or imagine. But we might grasp the fact that it cannot apply to some things and not others.  Love does not discriminate – it cannot. That should be our aim, too.

All that glitters…

Because we mistake some emotions for love, we often cause ourselves pain. There are few people, if any, who have not experienced them. These emotions look like love and feel like love but are fake, just like fool’s gold. They may glitter for a while but they are not the real stuff. The real stuff is simple, straight, and comes from the heart.

Adapted extract from Awakening Heart: The Blissful Path to Self-Realisation

Staffordshire: Limited space left on Advanced Meditation workshop