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.