Loving and living
April 2013
Readers share what love means to them
Love: The infinite source
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Love is in essence an intense feeling of the super-soul (GOD).
Saints and yogis like Mira, Vivekananda, Yogananda, Jesus, and Saibaba attained the highest level of spirituality because of the love for guru and God. Shri Ramakrishna Paramahansa’s love for Kali Maa caused him to talk, eat and dance with her.
Love has infinite power. It can change the impossible to possible. Without love success, peace, and happiness cannot happen as we are not in harmony with natural vital forces. The ultimate aim of life is to get moksha (liberation from birth and death), which is possible through love only.
Gopal Shukla via email
Poles apart but loving it
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The word bipolar refers to the two poles of energetic extremes. For the past 31 years I have been living with my love. Of course our sex is opposite but the story of opposites does not end here.
His day begins with the newspaper and mine with yoga and meditation. Though we have all our meals together, he cannot eat without watching TV whereas I sit with my back to it. His expertise is in earning, saving and multiplying money and I love splurging on beautiful ethnic crafts. For him vacationing means eating, drinking and dancing in Goa, Pattaya or Vegas, whereas I love going to the Parmarth Ashram for the yoga festival or to the Life Positive Expo. His adventures have left most of his joints replaced with steel and titanium, while I can proudly say that I was admitted in the hospital only twice in my life during our sons’ deliveries. With so much diversity between us, we are madly in love with each other. Why? Because we love and accept each other the way we are. This is what true love means to me. Love is living in oneness with the bug of bipolarism.
Chitra Vashistha, Greater Noida
Love flows
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Love should come from within. You do not have to prove your love to anyone because it itself reverberates. All you have to do is feel, be passionate and make it contagious more than any disease. The cure to everything is only love. When we are enveloped by love, the vibrations itself are positive. We consequently care.
Love teaches you to live life from a higher perspective. When you are in love you have deep understanding and your mental capabilities increase. Love gives you immense bliss and you don’t have the audacity to be disloyal or wrongful when in true love. Love evolves in various forms, whether romantic, familial or for nature. But you should never miss out on loving yourself because loving yourself is the purest and highest form of love. The Divine has sent each of us for a cause and to follow our path. And to accomplish our tasks we have to make love our routine.
Love is all around us, we just have to comprehend and escalate it.
Jayant Uppal via email
To love is to forgive
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Love is a very deep feeling. Though I married for love I was not aware of its power. In the first few years of my marriage I felt our love would last forever. Alas, love needs constant nurturing and understanding. As a couple we had our share of ups and downs in the relationship. Only then did we understand that love had to be manifested in myriad forms such as caring, sharing, trusting, patience and last and most importantly in forgiveness. I feel today that the ultimate form of love is forgiveness. Only when you give forgiveness can you get it. With the advent of spirituality in my life, gratitude to God is seeping into me. Today I love myself. I no longer feel negative or judgmental towards others. It is a new journey of love for me.
Nandita Bajpai via email
It’s all love
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Love is always in the air. It is a beautiful and overwhelming feeling of being engulfed in a serene and secure compartment. It is an unimaginable massive reservoir of deep affection felt not only from the heart but from every whit of your body. Love nurtures you and equips you for any responsibility and makes you happy. Love is humble. Love has been kind to me, not just from my man but also from my loved ones, my pets, nature; and even my surroundings. I love people who do not even know my existence…the poor and needy, scrounging for a square meal. My heart goes out to them. The beautiful birds and animals are a source of joy and so are the trees and colourful flowers. The clouds and the lovely droplets of rain water are a feast to the eyes. Basking in the glory of nature is the love which the Almighty has showered upon us.
We are blessed with so much love. We only need to recognise and feel its abundance.
Neelam Uppal via email
Love is expressed in separation
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Love is the elixir of life. It takes its glorious native expression when the loved ones are separated. Even animals display strong emotions when they are being separated from their loved ones. I had a milch cow at home. When a swami blessed my home, as a mark of respect I donated her to his ashram. When the ashram people came to pick her up, she protested against being led out of her shed. She became violent. In order to pacify her, I touched and rubbed her head, neck and body, took her head in my hand and kissed her on her forehead. Tears rolled down her eyes and she began to lick my naked torso profusely. I was so moved that I began to weep myself. Finally, I decided not to donate the cow and gave some money to the ashram instead. Similarly, while writing my recently published autobiography, I wanted to include the story of a sweet classfellow during my college life. In order to seek her permission, I took her number from her relative and called her. She instantly recognised my voice even though we had been separated for 50 years. She choked on the phone with emotion. Such is the power of love. Love is a divine nectar and panacea to all the ills of the present times.
P N Krishna Pillai, Thiruvananthapuram
Love is not selective
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“I do not know what love is” – used to be my pet answer to any question related to love. My father used to say –“Love is like a lighted candle – it radiates light to everyone equally, all round, without expecting anything in return.” Though it sounded great, I could not understand it. I always thought and believed that I really lacked something.
After years of spiritual practice, once I regressed to a time of my life where my subconscious had blocked this emotion of love to shield me from further pain, I suppose.
Recently, I attended a seminar of Dr. Brian Weiss, M.D. in Fort Lauderdale. During the seminar, while I was giving a reading to a participant I suddenly felt such an overwhelming feeling of love that I wanted to give her a big hug, even though we had never met before. Yes, the river had broken the years-old dam. Believe it or not, this emotion of love has left me feeling empathy and loving kindness towards all, including plants and the ‘inanimate’ objects of the universe. I feel miserable when I have to pluck even a few curry leaves for special South Indian dishes! As Rupert Spira says – Love is not selective; only thinking is.
Sumila Bahadur, New Delhi