Human beings need to love and be loved. Every person craves the warm, reassuring, nurturing love of someone who knows them well and loves them even when their faults are showing.
Human Beings Need Affection and Caring to Thrive.
The need to be loved is especially acute in babies. Even when babies are fed, clothed, and sheltered, they may still not flourish when deprived of a loving, nurturing person who spends time with them and establishes a relationship with them.
Children need affection and caring to thrive.
People of all ages need love. You can feel the flow of love; it is a joy to experience! Was there a friend, family member, coach, or teacher in your life, a special person who loved you in a way that gave you strength and confidence? Someone who made you feel good about yourself. If so, you probably felt their love flow into you when you were with them or when you thought about them. When one person supports another in difficult circumstances, love embraces them both, flowing back and forth.
Spiritual love is unselfish and supportive.
For a moment, recall the experience of being loved. Feel again the love you received and how it made you feel.
Human Beings Need to Give Love.
You can live without loving others, but you will miss a great blessing. You will not live a happy, fulfilled life. The desire to love someone else is essential to you. To fulfill your full potential, you need to give others help, appreciation, encouragement, kindness—love. All people need opportunities to love others. The need to love is planted deep in you. It is there in each human being. Receiving unselfish love expands your capacity to care about others. This kind of affection, support, and appreciation fills you up until you want to share the love that enriches your existence. Your
gift of unselfish love to others creates joy in your heart.
Spiritual Love Can Flow Among Group Members.
Spiritual love can flow even in groups of strangers. I vividly recall being in a group of about fifteen people whom I did not know personally before the meeting. Each one talked of his or her desires to be more loving with their children. As each one spoke, I began to love that person.
Why? Because I heard love expressed with honesty and sincerity. I could feel their love for their children. To my surprise, that flow of love caused me to know these strangers far better than I would have expected.
As the sharing continued around the circle, the atmosphere in the room seemed to glow with love. I realized that the whole room was filling to capacity and beyond with love. It was a special, magical experience.
The Flow of Love Can Be Initiated Intentionally.
You can intentionally initiate this flow of love in a group of people willing to open themselves to it.
On several occasions I have stood in a large circle of people, standing hand-in-hand, while someone guided us to draw spiritual love into our minds, bodies, and souls. We were led to send that love from our hearts down one arm into the hand of the person on our right and to receive the flow of love from the hand of the person on our left.
We could feel the flow of love moving around the circle with power again and again, stronger each time, lifting us all into a higher state of mind and heart.
Spiritual Love Transforms People.
A young woman who participated in one of these circles had grown up in an abusive household, lacking in spiritual love. As an adult, she was struggling simply to live in the world. In that circle, for the first time in her life, she felt spiritual love flow through her. That experience of unselfish, generous love became the beginning of a new and far better life for her.
When the need is great, receiving love can be transformative. And it is very possible that a group multiplies the effect when they connect in the experience of receiving and giving love.
The Quality of Spiritual Love Is Important.
The quality of your love for others makes a difference. The more unselfish your love, the more powerful it is. When you love those around you unselfishly and generously, there is an amazing expansion of love flowing in you, throughout you, and onward to those around you.
Your unselfish love
- Changes you into a better person.
- Creates joy for you and those around you.
- Blesses the person you are loving.
- Uplifts anyone who observes it.
- Encourages even those who simply hear about it.
Those Who Love Teach Unselfishness.
Human beings are not born with unselfishness and generosity. The behavior of babies and toddlers will make that clear. Human beings start life very self-centered. They are often demanding. The first few months of a baby’s life are exhausting for parents!
Children learn about unselfishness from the way their caregivers treat them.
Parents demonstrate unselfishness when they are dependable, patient, cheerful, and kind. Unselfish care speaks loudly in these early years. Someone must convince a child that she is worthy of being loved by unselfishly caring for her. She needs to feel loved.
Seek Spiritual Love Within Yourself.
Even though people learn to love by being unselfishly loved, that is not the ultimate source of spiritual love. Spiritual love originates in a reality that human beings can neither see nor touch. Even so, it is not out of reach. Your spiritual parent, the divine source of all love, has given you a direct connection with the spiritual world: Deep within you lives your inner spirit.
Your inner spirit calls you to love, not so much in words as in higher ideals and inner urges toward goodness.
- When you yearn to be like a wise and admirable friend, your inner spirit is nudging you toward being more loving.
- Any time you desire to be a better person, you are feeling the call of the inner spirit.
- When you feel the urge to do good to someone else, the spirit is behind that urge.
Follow the spirit’s call to be loving.
In those moments when you feel love filling you to the brim and overflowing into the lives of other people, the door is wide open to your personal connection with spiritual love—your spirit within. Allowing spiritual love to flow through you creates much joy.
