Photo Credit: Melissa Portan
Love is warm and it illuminates the darkest parts of the heart. When there is love, challenges and fears fade away, troubles melt away, and there is comfort, wholeness, light, and warmth. Love is the Sun of the Soul.
When it comes to spiritual practices and all the different paths that exist, love is the one thing they all have in common. Whether it is a monotheistic path where a single God is worshipped or a polytheistic path where there are multiple gods, like the Greek Gods, love is always at the center of the practice.
Love is always at the center of a spiritual practice; however, this does not mean that love is at the center of the practioner. And during difficult times when someone struggles with feeling alone, empty, unloved, spirituality seems distant and like a farce. Without love spirituality looks fake and empty and what someone takes out of it or gains from his or her spiritual practice is very little. What love does is expose, like the sun moves shadows and exposes, love lifts the shadows from the person’s heart and mind. Love and affection moves away the burden of knowledge, of finding his or her true self, and makes life weightless. This state of weightlessness is the true state of the soul. It is with love that we can reach and embody that high state of consciousness.
There are different ways to love and different intensities of love. How much love do you need? How much love do you need to find enlightenment? There really is no answer. I don’t exactly know and it depends from person to person. In a spiritual practice, at its core and at the most basic level, there needs to be compassion. There needs to be compassion towards the self and if not that then a desire to understand more and experience that self-love.
A spiritual path is not always clear and linear and love either for the self or the practice itself, helps steer you through the doubts and fears and obstacles. Because love is a high level of energy, when we are in love or when we feel love, everything seems better and brighter. The high energy of love allows you to see a new and different aspect of life and situations, even those that can be painful. And not only does the positivity of love change your perspective but it also protects you. When the heart is filled with love negativity has a hard time entering it and your energy is not so easily drained. Whether it is love for a partner, for your work, for your craft, it is like a protective bubble of positive energy. With this protection of love you can travel on your spiritual path without fear of getting lost or hurt. Fear is the greatest and strongest thing that keeps people from exploring spiritual ideas and trying different practices. Love diminishes that fear little by little and that is how new knowledge enters the soul, that is how you evolve and improve.
Love raises your energy and your aura becomes brighter, your kundalini stirs, your chakras spin freely. All this radiance can be perceived by others in your physical appearance. Suddenly you get compliments on your hair, your skin, perhaps you are just glowing, or you seem really cool to them. And what this does is it gives you a boost in confidence. This new confidence feeds the positivity you are creating and you create more. It is a circle of positivity. When you start to see the effects of your practice and how your love and compassion affects the world around you, your spiritual practice becomes grounded and real. It is like drawing down a bright beam of light from the heavens and having it cover you, following you wherever you go. And so, you touch someone else with your understanding or your love and you spread that light.
A spiritual practice has many focuses, depending on which one it is and how you practice it, but almost all paths have one goal: enlightenment, ascension. In order to be enlightened and eventually ascend, there needs to be love and that love needs to be self-sustaining, independent, and self-burning.
Namaste.
