Love

We all want to be loved.

We all want to be held in loving arms, whether literal or figurative.

We want to be held in a comforting embrace that wipes away our worries and blocks out all the bad things of the world.

We want an embrace of total love, total acceptance, total spiritual penetration that envelops us and shields us from all hurt and danger.

And some deep part of us craves for this embrace to last forever, and never cease. We fantasize that this is how we will finally satisfy all the doubts, the anxieties and fears about our worth, our lovability, our mortality.

The longing for this love feels overwhelming at times, and we curse our fate as human beings, always wanting love, needing love, never feeling like we have enough love, and never feeling at peace with ourselves.    

But this desire, this longing itself is love! Nothing is excluded from love, not even the longing for it. Longing for love is a beautiful pointer back to what is real; longing for love is simply proof that you instinctively know this deep and total love already, as what exists in you – as you – as what the universe is made of. How could your longing be so perfectly formed if you were not already familiar, right now, with this infinite, eternal love?

But if this longing is included in love, why does it feel bad? Why does it hurt?

What hurts you – or hurts your ego, anyway – is one little mistake, which starts a whole landslide of mistakes. The mistake is that you take this longing and you make up a romantic story about it, a story that involves another person. The mistake is that you imagine the embrace of love that you crave will come to you physically, in the world, in the form of a body – an “other.”

And even though you know from painful past experience that asking another person to supply you with this pure and perfect love is sheer folly, and always leads to disappointment, heartbreak, and pain, you tend to try again and again, not realizing that at the root of all this futile effort is one simple misunderstanding: That love is lacking in you, and can be provided by someone else.

Love is not lacking in you, and it cannot be provided by someone else. Love can be neither provided by nor withheld by anyone. Love flows freely in the universe and you are the universe. Perfect love flows through you. Everything flows through you.

You already know perfect love, or you wouldn’t know to long for it. And if you already know it, it must be present already. So go ahead and long for love. Long for love with all your heart, in devotion to what is real and true. Devote your life to longing for love. But keep in mind that this love is simply your true nature already. Longing, devotion, love – it’s all the same thing. The love you crave is your very self.

The arms that wrap around you, soothing you, reassuring you, keeping you safe from all harm, these are not physical arms. There are no words your lover can say, no embrace he or she can give you, that come close to the freely flowing eternal love that is all the universe, never for a moment separate from you. This is who you already are. This embrace is never missing. Feel it now.