Love or dependency walter riso pdf

Praise for Loveability

“Robert Holden is the ideal example of Loveability. He certainly knows how to love and be loved. He loves everyone he knows, and we all love

him in return. He knows and understands what stands in the way of loving ourselves and others. And most importantly he knows and teaches how to dissolve these blocks. How could we not love him?”

—Louise Hay, author of Love Yourself, Heal Your Life Workbook

“Robert Holden is a teacher of incredible wisdom, integrity, and compassion. This beautiful book is a joyous reminder of the transformative power of love in the world.

I heartily recommend Loveability to all.”

— Dr. Brian Weiss, author of Only Love Is Real

“Loveability is an inspiring book that gently encourages readers to reflect upon their relationship to the nature and the power of love itself. Nothing could be more timely or more transformational.”

— Caroline Myss, New York Times best-selling author of Defy Gravity and Archetypes: Who Are You?

“Loveability teaches you how to undo the blocks that prevent you from having more love in all your relationships. I

wholeheartedly recommend this book.”

— Marci Shimoff, New York Times best-selling author of Love for No Reason

“I am a devoted Robert Holden fan and have fallen madly, deeply for his new book! It teaches us the most important thing we can do—give

and receive love. Robert will help you open your eyes so you can open your heart and create a life full of joy and love.

Everyone—and I do mean everyone—should read this life-uplifting book.”

— Kris Carr, New York Times best-selling author of Crazy Sexy Kitchen and Crazy Sexy Diet

“Robert Holden has written a beautiful treatise on love. Please give yourself this gift.”

—Cheryl Richardson, author of The Art of Extreme Self-Care

“It’s not easy to discuss love in a way that is not overly sentimental (or perceived as such). Robert Holden writes with a sense of humor, clarity,

and compassion about the depth of love we are all capable of, and in fact we all embody. This is a joyful, illuminating book to read.”

— Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness

“Robert Holden’s new book, Loveability, guides us to stop looking for love and accept our truth: that we are love. This book is a magnificent guide toward unlearning the fears that block us

from the presence of love within. I love this book!”

— Gabrielle Bernstein, author of Spirit Junkie and May Cause Miracles

“It is a pleasure to endorse your book. Congratulations! This is a great book; real love makes a difference in life.”

— Miguel Angel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements

“Loveability teaches you to listen to the voice of love in your heart. It helps you to forgive the past, to live in the

present, and to make love more important than fear.”

— Gerald Jampolsky, author of Love is Letting Go of Fear

“Loveability should be placed in every soul’s backpack before we come to this planet to help us remember what we have forgotten.”

— Chuck Spezzano, author of If It Hurts, It isn’t Love

“I am in awe of Robert Holden’s ability to translate the wisdom of love in such simple and relatable terms. Loveability

is a masterpiece of the heart and a must read for anyone seeking to be inspired to live a love-based life.”

— Mastin Kipp, CEO and founder of TheDailyLove.com

“Loveability beautifully escorts the reader into the very heart of what we seek most, which is to be loved. Poetic, grounding, honest, and raw, it lifts the veil of dark confusion and fear to reveal that we

can never be separated from the love we seek, because it is who we are. Its healing words will stay with you long after the last page.”

— Sonia Choquette, author of Traveling at the Speed of Love

“This book is a gem! It opened my heart wide, and it can profoundly transform your life as well. The author, Robert Holden, embodies Loveability; love pours out of every molecule of his body, and he has infused this book with the sweet energy of love. You can feel it radiate into your heart from every page. Highly recommended!”

— Denise Linn, author of The Soul Loves the Truth

“Robert Holden is one of the clearest, purest, and most poignant voices for love in our time. You will find no greater teaching than this book contains. If you are seeking love, you will find the key in these pages.

If you have found love, you will find more here. Drink these words, open, and discover the treasure offered to you, starting from within

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your own heart. Living this message will change your life.”

— Alan Cohen, author of Rising in Love

Also by Robert Holden, Ph.D.

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Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com® • Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au • Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.za • Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast: www.raincoast.com • Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

“Late Fragment” from A New Path to the Waterfall, copyright © 1989 by the Estate of Raymond Carver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

“The Sun Never Says,” from The Gift, © 1999. Used by permission of Daniel Ladinsky.

“It Happens All the Time in Heaven,” from The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz, © 1996. Used by permission of Daniel Ladinsky.

“I Know the Way You Can Get,” from I Heard God Laughing, © 1996. Used by permission of Daniel Ladinsky.

“Only Love Can Explain Love,” from Teachings of Rumi, by Andrew Harvey, © 1999. Used by permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holden, Robert Loveability* : *love-a-bil-it-y/’luv[?]biliti/noun learning how to love and be loved / Robert Holden, Ph.D. — 1st edition.

pages cm On the title page “[?]” appears as the phonetic schwa (upside-down e) symbol. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4019-4162-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Love. 2. Interpersonal relations. I. Title. BF575.L8H644 2013 152.4’1—dc23

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2012043248 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4019-4162-8 Digital ISBN: 978-1-4019-4164-2

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1st edition, March 2013 Printed in the United States of America

To Hollie, to Bo, to Christopher, and to everyone

“If you achieve the faintest glimmering of what love means today,

you have advanced in distance without measure and in time beyond the count of years

to your release.”

A Course in Miracles

Contents

Foreword by Marianne Williamson Introduction

PART I: LOVE IS YOUR DESTINY Chapter 1: Love Is Not a Word Chapter 2: Your Eternal Loveliness Chapter 3: Our Shared Purpose Chapter 4: Ground of Love Chapter 5: Live Your Love

PART II: LOVE IS WHO YOU ARE Chapter 6: Self-Love Monologue Chapter 7: Mirror Exercise Chapter 8: Childhood Messages Chapter 9: Your Love Story

PART III: LOVE HAS NO CONDITIONS Chapter 10: Is This Love? Chapter 11: I Love You Chapter 12: Show Your Love

PART IV: LOVE KNOWS NO FEAR Chapter 13: The Mirror Principle Chapter 14: Love and Fear Chapter 15: Love Does Not Hurt

PART V: LOVE IS THE ANSWER Chapter 16: Only Love Is Real Chapter 17: A Call for Love Chapter 18: The Presence of Love

Loveability Library Acknowledgments Endnotes About the Author The Loveability Program

Foreword

Of all the things there are to learn—philosophy and mathematics, poetry and law, all the arts and all the sciences—what could be more important than that we learn how to love? If humanity knew how to love more deeply, more fundamentally and universally, how different might our world be? Would there still be war? Would there still be violence? Would there still be such unnecessary suffering within and around us?

As sophisticated as we are in our understanding of some things, we’re often remedial in our ability to love. In a world where fear has a grip on human consciousness, it takes a conscious effort to take a stand against it. We yearn for love desperately, yet resist it fiercely.

Loveability is a guide to unlearning the ways of fear and choosing love instead. The task sounds simple, but it is rarely easy. Each of us has to face a lion’s den of fears that lurk in the cave of our own subconscious minds, whenever we make the effort to love. And that is why we read books like this one: to have something powerful to lean on, sentences and chapters to teach us, as we make our way past our own fears to the light of love on the other side.

Robert Holden has a way with words, and, more important, he has a way with people. You feel loved in his presence; he has clearly done the inner work of moving past his own defenses, making space in his heart for someone else’s love to enter. And when he does that—when any of us do that—miracles happen. Breakthroughs occur. Insights emerge. Fears dissolve. And that is the purpose and gift of this book: like a soft and gentle massage of the heart, it breaks through barriers to our ability to love and makes room for new life to enter. That’s how you’ll feel when you’ve completed Loveability. Much lighter . . . more loving . . . and happier, for sure.

Marianne Williamson

Introduction

Imagine this. One day, our children will learn about love at school. They will take classes in love and self-esteem,

explore the meaning of “I love you,” learn to listen to their hearts, and be encouraged to follow their joy. It will be normal for parents to help their children learn how to love and be loved. Adults won’t be content just to read romantic novels or watch rom-com movies; they will seek out friends and lovers who are interested in real love and who want to become more loving men and women.

One day, every society on our planet will honor and celebrate the importance of love. Politics without love will be a thing of the past. Leaders who demonstrate love-based values, like service and compassion, will be elected for their vision, their courage, and their strength of character. Economists will teach the world that money does not work without love. They will offer us love-based economic policies that eradicate poverty and hunger and help us to experience real abundance and freedom.

One day, all the great professions will include love in their training syllabi and core values. Medical doctors will treat their patients with love, and psychologists will teach their patients about love. Physicists will teach us that separation is an “optical delusion” and that oneness is reality. Biologists will teach us that the survival of the species depends on cooperation, not competition. Architects and lawyers will help us to build a society on love. And ecologists will show us how to love our planet more.

One day, the major religions will recognize a God of unconditional love, and they will stop teaching people to fear God. Never again will we go to war in the name of God. Theologians and philosophers, humanists and atheists, will set aside their differences for the sake of love, and they will teach us that love is stronger than fear, that only love is real, and that, ultimately, love is the key to our enlightenment and evolution. And all the while, the artists of the day will serenade us and entertain us with their plays of love.

Imagine that. That day is not here yet, I know. I believe it will come, though. Our world must evolve in the direction of

love if it is to have a future. Each of us is called to do something, in the name of love, to make sure that humanity comes to understand itself and is able to choose love over fear.

The word loveability might be new to you. You can’t find a definition for it in any standard dictionary. Not yet, anyway. Language is always evolving, as are we, and so one day you will find a dictionary that carries a definition for loveability. And if I am asked to help wordsmith the entry for loveability, I will recommend something simple like “the ability to love and be loved.”

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”

Eden Ahbez

This book, Loveability, is a meditation on love. It addresses the most important thing you will ever learn. All the happiness, health, and abundance you experience in life comes directly from your ability to love and be loved. This ability is innate, not acquired. It does not need to be taught afresh, in the way you might learn some new algebra theory or memorize lines from Romeo and Juliet. It is a natural ability that is encoded in the essence of who you are. Any learning feels more like remembering something you have always known about.

Loveability is written in five parts. In Part I, Love Is Your Destiny, I encourage you to explore your relationship to love and what love means to

you. I ask you to consider that the goal of your life is not just to find love; it is to be love. Love is the real work of your life. It is your spiritual path. It is the key to your growth and evolution. I also assert that your destiny is not just to love one person; it is to love everyone. This is the real meaning of love. I think this is what John Lennon meant when he said:

It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.

In Part II, Love Is Who You Are, I help you explore the basic drama within yourself that you play out in all your relationships. This basic drama is between your Unconditioned Self (the original you) and your learned self (your self-image). The basic truth is “I am loveable” and the basic fear is “I am not loveable.” Self-love is about knowing who you are. It is about identifying with love. Self-love is also about self-acceptance and giving up resistance to love. The bottom line is that real self-love is good for you, good for your family, good for your friends, and good for the planet.

“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.”

David Viscott

In Part III, Love Has No Conditions, I share some exercises I teach in my three-day public program called Loveability. Some people think of love only as “loving others,” whereas others are mostly concerned with “being loved.” How about you? Of course, the art of loving must include being able to love and be loved. It is only when you allow yourself to give and receive love freely that you realize that love is not a trade; it is a way of being.

If love is so wonderful, why does it hurt so much? And if love is meant to be so natural, why is it so difficult? And if love is meant to be so powerful, why does it not last? In Part IV, Love Knows No Fear, I focus on some of the common blocks to love, such as expectations and rules, independence and sacrifice, and trying to change or control each other. I also introduce you to the True Love Checklist, which will help you to recognize love and also to cultivate more loving relationships in your life.

In Part V, Love Is the Answer, I propose that without forgiveness, you would not be able to realize your ability to love and be loved. Forgiveness is that aspect of love that enables you to make a basic choice between love or fear, love or pain, love or guilt, and so on. Here, I also assert that love is intelligent, and that love is our true power, and that if we apply enough love to any challenge, personal or collective, we will arrive at a positive solution. The greatest influence you can have in any situation is to be the presence of love.

To write Loveability, I have drawn on a lifetime of experiences and conversations with my parents, my brother, my friends, my wife, and, more recently, my two young children. Over the years, I have engaged in dialogues on love with philosophers, biologists, priests, business leaders, physicists, and mystics. I have also been most fortunate to have had personal mentors and teachers like Tom Carpenter, Chuck Spezzano, Russ Hudson, Louise Hay, and Marianne Williamson, to name a few.

As you read Loveability you will notice two other big sources of inspiration. First is my work with the Loveability three-day public program. I’ve been teaching this program for a few years now, as well as other courses like Love and the Enneagram and also Love and Fear (based on the teachings of A Course in Miracles). Second, I have included several stories and conversations from my private practice with individuals and couples (names have been changed throughout to respect confidentiality).

Most of all, writing Loveability was inspired by what I can best describe as a process of inner listening. Each time I sat at my desk to write, I’d begin with a few moments of stillness and then ask love to teach me about love. I did this with the full awareness that I wasn’t “talking” to something outside myself. This was an inner attunement. I share this so as to emphasize that loveability isn’t really learned from books, public programs, or counseling sessions (as helpful as that is); it’s learned by letting the love that is your true nature teach you how to love and be loved.

Robert Holden London

October 2012

PART I

Love Is Your Destiny

“I’m looking for love,” said Evelyne, as she moved around in her chair, trying to get comfortable. “How is it going?” I asked. “Not great,” she said. “How long have you been looking?” I asked. “About four years now,” she said, trying to smile. “But it feels like a lot longer than that.” “How much longer?” “Too long,” she sighed, her eyes flitting around my office. “That’s a long time to be searching for love.” “Yes.” “Evelyne, have you ever considered giving up the search?” “Oh, plenty of times,” she laughed. Conversations with Evelyne were full of jousting and play. She had a stoic sense of humor, which I enjoyed

very much, but I chose not to laugh with her this time. What we were talking about was too precious to run away from. So I fixed my eyes on Evelyne’s eyes and very deliberately asked her again, “Evelyne, have you ever thought about giving up the search?”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “The way I see it,” I said, “looking for love is blocking you from finding love.” “Say that again,” she said. “Looking for love is stopping you from finding love.” “So what do you suggest?” “Stop looking for love.” Evelyne normally had a fast answer for everything but not this time. She didn’t say a word. She went deep

inside herself. I waited for her. Waves of emotion began to break across the surface of her face. I could see her frustration, her anger, and, beneath that, a submerged sadness.

“Aren’t you tired of looking for love?” I asked. “Yes, of course,” said Evelyne, reaching for a tissue. “My invitation to you is to stop looking.” “What, and find a proper job?” she retorted, doing her best to inject some humor. “Just stop,” I said. “But then what?” This was only our second meeting, but I sensed in Evelyne a readiness to look at things in a new way. So I

told Evelyne that the way I saw it, her “looking for love” was an attempt to strike a deal with God. I said, “It’s like your ego has given God an ultimatum, which is ‘I’ll only start to live again once I find love,’ or, rather, ‘once YOU (God) find me love.’ And while this might sound reasonable to your ego, it isn’t how God works, and it isn’t how life works either. Looking for love isn’t how you find love.”

“So how do you find love?” asked Evelyne. “Well, first you have to recognize that you are what you’re looking for,” I said. Evelyne didn’t say anything, which was her way of saying, “Keep speaking.” “You are still looking for love because you don’t feel loveable,” I went on. “You’ve forgotten how loveable

you are, and it’s this forgetting that’s causing you to search for love and not find it.” “I don’t find me loveable,” said Evelyne softly. “Loveability starts with looking at yourself and finding love there,” I told her. Evelyne was sitting perfectly still in her chair. I could tell that she was testing what I had said against her

own logic. A verdict was imminent. In a few moments I would know if we could proceed or not. I could feel her resistance, but I could also see that her face had softened and that she looked younger, brighter, and clearer. Evelyne soon appeared from inside herself, flinging the doors of her mind wide open.

“All right, I’m going to stop looking for love,” she said, pausing ever so slightly. “But I still want to find love. So how do I do that?”

“Well, first you have to accept that you are made of love,” I explained. “This is important because like attracts like, and if you know that you are love, you’ll feel comfortable about attracting love into your life.”

“Okay, I’ll work on that,” she said. “But can you give me something more practical to do in the meantime?” “Yes,” I said. “But only if you promise not to overlook what I just said.” “Okay, okay,” she replied, widening her eyes at me in an effort to move our conversation along. “The way to find love is to be a more loving person,” I said. “I am a loving person,” she protested. “I’m asking you to be a more loving person,” I replied. “How do I do that?” “Start by loving everyone more.” “Everyone!” she exclaimed. “Everyone.” “Are you sure?” “I’m not asking you to date everyone,” I said. “Good.” “Loving everyone is true love,” I explained. “It’s also the key to being able to love someone.” “So how do I start loving everyone?” Evelyne asked. “Step one is to offer a little willingness,” I said. “Okay, I can do that. And what is step two?” “Step two is being open to let LOVE show you how to love everyone. LOVE, which is what you are made

of, will show you the way, if you let it.” Looking for love is hell. Everyone’s been there. We’ve all done it. It’s a mind-set you identify with when you

forget who you are and what love is. It’s what you do when you experience the fall from grace and you fear that love has abandoned you. In this hell, you search for love outside of yourself. The searching leads you to believe that you exist outside of love. You act as if you and love are two separate things. You think the purpose of the world is to find love, and then, once you find it, not to lose it again.

Looking for love is frightening. That’s because it’s a strategy used to conceal a most terrible fear you would rather not look at: the fear that “I am not loveable.” I refer to this fear as the basic fear because we all experience it and also because it gives rise to every other fear. This fear is not real but you don’t know that if you’re too scared to look at it. So, you decide to leave yourself alone, and you start looking for someone who will find you loveable. This is just as scary, though. Where will you find this person? Are they still available? What if they are gay—or not gay? Do they even exist? Okay, maybe they do exist, but what are the chances of them loving you if you don’t love you?

Looking for love is painful. You are looking for love because you have judged yourself to be unloveable. Until you change your mind about yourself, your only hope is to find someone who will overturn this judgment. So you try to create a pleasing image that hides the pain of feeling unloveable. This image knows how to be seductive, to attract attention, and to win admiration, but because it is not the real you, it does not attract real love. Therefore, you keep on looking, but because you won’t change your mind about yourself, all you find is your own lovelessness.

It’s difficult to believe in love when you are looking for love. The more you keep looking, the more

unloveable you feel. Because you don’t believe you are loveable, you can’t believe it’s possible for someone to love you. Eventually, you begin to doubt if love even exists. This is the worst pain of all. To believe that and to keep on living is impossible. Now you are just a shadow of yourself. You have reached a dead end. Looking for love hasn’t worked. So now it’s time to try something else. And that’s a good thing.

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness,

and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love,

and they never have to seek for it. D. H. Lawrence1

The way out of hell is not to seek for love but to see how you are blocking love. You begin by examining what is causing you to seek for love in the first place. First, you must cast off all the loveless images of yourself that you have made. Looking for love, in its truest sense, isn’t about finding someone else; it’s about finding yourself again. You also have to be willing to drop your theories about love, to empty your mind of learned ideas, to let go of old stories, and—as William Blake put it—to “cleanse the doors of perception” so as to let love appear as it really is.2

“To find the beloved, you must become the beloved.”

Rumi

Love is an inner journey home. The way to get there is to start here, right where you are now. The goal of this journey is not to find love; it is to know love. This knowledge exists in you already. I call this knowledge loveability.

Chapter 1

Love Is Not a Word

“I want to learn how to write,” said Bo, my four-year-old daughter, as she burst into my office at the top of our house, waving a crumpled bit of paper and a pink crayon over her head.

“Wonderful,” I said. “I want to learn now,” she pleaded. “Okay, then,” I said, turning away from my computer so as to give her my full attention. “How shall we start?” she asked, crayon at the ready, hovering over the paper, which already had a drawing

of a rainbow on it. “Well, what’s the first word you would like to write?” “Love,” said Bo, most emphatically. “Let’s begin,” I said. I guided Bo’s hand across the paper as we made an L and an O and a V and an E. Once finished, we took a

moment to admire our work. “That’s love,” I said. “Really?” asked Bo, who was now on her feet. “Yes,” I said. “I just wrote my first word!” shouted Bo as she jumped up and down. “Congratulations!” I shouted back. Bo carried on being super-excited for a few moments, and then she stopped to look again at the L, the O, the

V, and the E. “That’s not really love, is it, Daddy?” she asked, looking directly into my eyes. “Yes, it is,” I assured her. “No, Daddy, it’s not.” “Why not?” I asked. “Love is not a word,” she said.

There are 6,909 languages on planet Earth.1 I imagine that’s more than most people would guess. Very few countries have only one language. Papua New Guinea, for instance, has 832 languages. Some languages are more popular than others. Nearly one billion people speak Mandarin. Several languages are spoken by only a handful of people. Recently, the Bo language (not a reference to my daughter!) died out when an 85-year-old member of the Bo tribe in the Indian-owned Andaman islands died.2 All these languages have a word, a character, or a sound for love, and some have many. We all talk about love, and think about love, and yet to understand love we must remember that love is not a word.

As I write this book, my daughter Bo has just turned five years old, and my son Christopher is 16 months old, and they both love to play with words. Bo’s vocabulary is growing rapidly. I especially enjoy how she inserts words like actually and splendid into her speech. Christopher has just begun to speak his first words. Garden and spider are popular right now. His favorite word is boer. My wife, Hollie, and I have no idea what boer means. We aren’t even sure if boer is the correct spelling. If we had to guess, we’d say that boer is Christopher’s word for everything that isn’t a gar-den or a spi-der.

So what is a word? A word is nothing by itself. It’s just a symbol. That’s all. It doesn’t define love; it just tells us that we are speaking of love. Love is a name for something that is more than just a word. To be on proper

speaking terms with love, you must remember this. The problem with talking about “love” with words is that words reduce love to an it, a thing or an object; but real love is not a noun (to find, to have, or to keep). Words also create too much distance between love and you. They make it sound like love is one thing and you are another. No matter which language you speak, something is lost in translation when you rely on words to define love.

“What do you know of Love except the name?” asked Jelaluddin Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet.3 Rumi was a gifted wordsmith who wrote as many words on love as anyone who ever lived. Yet even Rumi realized that love couldn’t be fully explained with words. In his magnum opus, Mathnawi, which contains over 51,000 verses of poetry, Rumi told us: Whatever I say to explain or describe Love When I arrive at Love itself, I’m ashamed of my words. The commentary of words can make things clear— But Love without words has more clarity. My pen was rushing to write its thoughts down; When it came to Love, it broke in two. In speaking of Love, the intellect is impotent, Like a donkey trapped in a bog: Only Love itself can explain Love, Only Love can explain the destiny of lovers. The proof of the sun is the sun itself: If you want proof, don’t turn your face away.4

To know love, you must first accept that love cannot be defined. No amount of words can define love, because love is not just a name. The intellect can’t define love, because the intellect deals with ideas, and love is not just an idea. No one person holds the copyright on love, because love is bigger than all humanity. Religion cannot define love, because love is too spiritual for any one religion. Science cannot define love either, because the essence of love cannot be trapped in test tubes and split apart in particle accelerators.

But keep faith! Just because love cannot be defined, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to know love. It’s worth remembering that many of the most interesting things in life cannot be defined. Their indefinable quality is part of their wonder and majesty. Psychologists aren’t able to define the psyche, and yet we keep on exploring the mind. Priests who worship God accept that, in truth, there is no name for God. Physicists now recognize that the universe is made up of energy, but they can’t define what energy is. “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is,” said Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics.5

“Love wishes to be known, completely understood and shared. It has no secrets, nothing that it would keep apart and hide.”

A Course in Miracles

Some people have said that love cannot be defined because love is coy, and mysterious, and elusive, and it likes to play tricks with us. From these descriptions it is clear to me that love has been endowed with the qualities of a man or woman who is rejecting sexual and romantic advances. This is another case of projection closing the doors of perception. My personal experience is that love can be known, just not defined. Love is available to everyone, without exception. Love has already been given to us; now all we have to do is give ourselves to love.

I like to think of the word love as a door. If you only look at the door, all you get is an idea about what love is; but if you are willing to move closer to the door, to open it, and to walk on through, you get to have an experience of what love is. To be intimate with love, you have to move beyond words, leave behind self- concepts, empty your mind of learned ideas, stop being so religious, and let yourself dissolve into love. Now we are really getting somewhere. Now, at last, we can stop trying to define love, and we can let love define us.

When I began my inquiry into love, I thought I had to define it before I could think about it! But my attempts to define love came to nothing. No arrangement of words or ideas could capture the whole truth. When I couldn’t define love, I was tempted to stop my inquiry. There’s no point studying something you can’t define, I thought. Despite my frustration, I stuck with my inquiry because I understood somehow that, even though love can’t be defined, the heart knows what love is. Love cannot be defined, but it can be recognized. And so I’d say to myself, “I want to know about love,” and then I’d pay attention. And keep on paying attention. That’s all that any of us have to do. And when we do this, we make a joyful discovery, which is that love will teach us what love is.

“Let your teacher be Love itself.”

Rumi6

Chapter 2

Your Eternal Loveliness

Why are babies so loveable? And what does this teach us about love and our own true nature? Babies hold our attention like nothing else. We gaze into their eyes, we watch their every move, we snap

countless photos, and we study them while they sleep. When I first met my daughter, Bo, I held her in my arms, and we peered into each other’s eyes for what felt like forever. When I welcomed my son, Christopher, into the world, I was transfixed by his presence, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I’ve always found babies, not just my own, to be wondrous and fascinating, and I know I’m not alone in this. So what is it we are seeing when we look at a baby?

Babies are generally short, chubby, and toothless, without much hair, and they leak a lot at both ends. Every baby looks perfect, even ones with missing stomachs, chromosomal abnormalities, and crippled limbs. Is this because their nostrils are often heart-shaped? When you really pay attention to babies, you notice that their bodies are still in soft focus. They are barely physical. The soul dances lightly across the body. They are pure energy. They are a vibration of love. They are a lively flame that is not weary, or tired, or confounded.1

When you pay attention to a baby, you notice how naked he or she is. Babies haven’t put anything on themselves yet. They have no masks, no personas, no armor, and no dark glasses. They are still wearing what Zen Buddhists call the Original Face.2 They aren’t putting on a face for the world to see. What you are witnessing is their true nature. They aren’t trying to be someone, to be nice, to look good, or to be interesting. There are no pretenses. There is no deceit. There is no attempt to create a pleasing image. They aren’t trying to be loveable; they just are.

Babies are still close to the Unconditioned Self, which is the name I give for our true self. They haven’t yet learned to identify with gender. They don’t know if they are American or Chinese. They don’t care if they are black or white. They aren’t interested in what religion their parents follow. They haven’t had time yet to make up a story to tell about how elusive love is, or how difficult love is, or how worthy or unworthy they are of love. They don’t judge themselves. They carry no grievances. They are not cynical yet. Have you ever met a cynical baby?

Babies embody the basic truth about us, which is that we are all loveable. When you look at a baby, you can see what St. Francis of Assisi called our eternal loveliness. You see this eternal loveliness because you are looking with your heart, not just your physical eyes. At the same time, babies mirror your own eternal loveliness back to you. They show you your original face. Their eternal loveliness is a reflection of your Unconditioned Self. St. Francis of Assisi taught us that everyone is an expression of God’s eternal loveliness. Moreover, he recognized that every animal, every plant, and every form of life is an expression of love.

God extended himself in love, and we are all expressions of this love. This is the Original Blessing we share with each other.3 There are no exceptions to this. None. The basic truth about you is “I am loveable.” Everybody’s basic truth is “I am loveable.” This is true whether you remember or forget it. It is also true whether you believe it or not. Our Unconditioned Self is a consciousness of love that extends from the heart of God into the body of all creation. The word love and the word God are both pointing toward the same thing. They are both pointing at each of us.

The Original Blessing cannot be undone. Your eternal loveliness has no end. “You were created to be completely loved and completely loveable for your whole life,” says Deepak Chopra in The Path to Love.4 This is all true. However, as the baby grows and takes on the conditioning of this world, it is possible to forget about

love. A learned self takes the place of the Unconditioned Self. This learned self is just a shadow; it is not real. However, when you identify with this learned self, you forget the basic truth “I am loveable.” In this forgetting, the basic fear “I am not loveable” takes hold. And so, as Galway Kinnell wrote in his poem Saint Francis and the Sow, “sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”5

“Love is our highest word and the synonym for God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You are made of love, and this is the key to knowing how to love and be loved. Your purpose is to be an instrument of this love. It is to extend this love through all your relationships with parents, siblings, friends, lovers, children, strangers, enemies, and the world over. How do you do this? You start by identifying with love. Love is your original energy. It is the heart of who you are. It is the natural expression of your Unconditioned Self and your eternal loveliness. When you remember this, you realize that, in truth, you already know how to love and be loved.

Identify with love, and you are safe. Identify with love, and you are home. Identify with love, and find your Self.

A Course in Miracles6

Chapter 3

Our Shared Purpose

Growing up, I learned to believe that my destiny was to find one special person to love so that we could both live happily ever after. I lived in a little village in the south of England. It was very little. It was called Littleton. Hardly anyone lived there. I didn’t like any of the girls in Littleton enough to fall in love with. There was one girl, called Claire, but she didn’t like me. She liked every other boy but not me. Beverley, who was in my class, told everyone I was her boyfriend, but we never even kissed. The girl I really liked was Marie Osmond, the one who sang “Paper Roses.” It didn’t work out with Marie, though, largely because we never met.

At school, there never was a class about love. Our curriculum was full of supposedly more important things like algebra and economics. My teenage years were full of longing for love and angst about love. Thinking about love made me feel happy, lonely, and desperate. I loved school dances. We all danced like crazy to Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and the Bee Gees. It was so much fun learning the new moves and making each other laugh. At the end of the evening the slow songs started, usually with “I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner. Suddenly we were serious and neurotic. Who should I dance with? Where should I put my hands? Where are they putting their hands? Are we going to kiss? Do we have to kiss?

My first conscious inquiry into love had nothing to do with girls, though. When I was 15 years old, my mum, my brother, and I learned that my dad was drinking heavily. Though Dad promised to stop drinking many times, he and my mum eventually separated. “I love your father, but we can’t live together,” she told us. We all loved my dad. And Dad loved my mum. And Dad loved (adored and worshipped, more like) his sons. But Dad was not well. He wouldn’t let himself be helped. Our family was broken. Dad continued to drink. Over the next ten years, he lived homeless for long periods of time, dying gradually, in slow motion, due to some kind of lovelessness.

My dad’s drinking and my mother’s depression, which is another story, catapulted me into an inquiry that I didn’t feel ready for. I danced clumsily with the big questions like “What is life for?” and “What is real?” I was just a kid. How was I meant to answer these questions? My teachers at school weren’t any help. One day, our head teacher announced that we were going to have a career-counseling class. He said it had something to do with the rest of our life. A teacher we hadn’t met before led the class. She introduced herself to us and told us that it was important for us to start thinking about a career.

“What’s your name?” she asked, pointing at me. “Robert Holden,” I said. “What sort of a career do you want, Robert?” I had no idea what to say. I hadn’t thought about it. She kept looking at me. I couldn’t find any words to say.

She kept on looking at me. I prayed that she’d move on to someone else, but she didn’t. “Robert, what sort of a career do you want?” she asked again. “Oh, that’s very kind,” I said finally, “but I don’t want one, thanks.” “You have to have a career, Robert,” she said. “Really?” I asked. “Yes,” she assured me. “Please don’t worry about me,” I said. “Honestly, I’ll be fine.” I had too much going on in my life to think about a career. My dad had a career, and look what happened to

him. The teacher left me alone while she interrogated the rest of my friends. “Who here wants to be a teacher?”

she asked. No one raised a hand. None of us wanted to be teachers. That would mean coming back to school. “Who here wants to work in a bank?” she asked. My friend sitting next to me raised his hand. I was shocked. We’d never talked about banking before. I found out later that his father worked in a bank. “Who here wants to work with their hands?” she asked. One by one, all my friends raised their hands for something or other. Clearly, this wasn’t just a conversation we were having; this was decision time.

“So, Robert Holden, you’ve had some time to think,” she said when everyone else had answered. “Yes, it’s been very thought provoking,” I said. “Well?” “Well what?” “Your career,” she said. “My career,” I said. “Robert, we haven’t got all day.” This was a truly surreal moment. I was the last item on her list. If she could get me, she had done her job. I’d

had more than 50 minutes to work out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to help her out. I really did.

“Robert, you have to choose something,” she said. “I know.” “So, what do you choose?” “It’s a close call,” I said, stalling for a bit more time. “Say something, Robert,” she urged me. “Philosophy,” I shouted out. My friends started laughing, which wasn’t the response I had expected. She wasn’t laughing, however. “Philosophy!” she said, like the words came out of her nose. “Yes, philosophy,” I repeated, and I noticed I liked the sound of what I had just said. “What sort of philosophy?” she asked. “Greek!” I said, this time playing for a laugh, which I got from my friends, but not from her. Anyone can be a philosopher, I suppose. You don’t need any formal qualifications. No one can tell you that

you’re not a philosopher. To be a philosopher, all you need is a sense of wonder, some curiosity, and an open mind. You also must like asking questions. I was certainly asking a lot of questions at that time in my life. Most children do. Young children in particular ask questions all day long and out loud. The other day, my daughter, Bo, asked me, “Why does love feel so nice, Daddy?” In the same conversation, she asked me, “Why do we have skin?” and also “Does wind come from the sneeze of a cloud?” As children get older, they still have questions, just like I did, but they carry the questions more privately. Hopefully, we never stop asking questions.

My mum would tell you that I was a thoughtful child. I kept my bedroom tidy and took off my shoes at the door, but that’s not the sort of thoughtfulness I mean. As a child, I was full of thinking. My sense of wonder stayed with me. I wanted to know about life. Real life. Not just what happened in 1066 and at the Battle of Hastings. Real life. This curiosity was heightened by my dad’s drinking, my mother’s depression, and that ridiculous career-counseling class. I thought a lot about happiness, and success, and God, and careers, and girls, and everything else. Everything I thought about pointed me back to one thing, which was love.

“Love is the life of man.”

Emanuel Swedenborg

The more I thought about love, the more I had to admit to myself how important love was. I could see that the urge to love and be loved is our primary desire. Love is as important to us as air, water, and food. A life without love isn’t a life. The more you love and also let yourself be loved, the more alive you feel. This primary desire is something we share with each other: we all want to experience love, to know we are loveable, and to be loving people. Love feeds all our basic desires, including our desire to be connected, to be known, to be safe, to be happy, to be successful, and to be free. Love is the stuff of life. Even I could see that, and I was only 16 years old.

I understood that love was important, but what I couldn’t understand was why people didn’t talk more about love. The Beatles were singing about love. So too were Stevie Wonder, and Bob Dylan, and Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell. There’s no such thing as too many love songs. At the same time, our favorite authors and poets send more love stories and love notes into the world. Love is all around us, but we don’t talk about love that much. Politicians don’t. Newscasters don’t. Schoolteachers don’t. My friends didn’t. We talked about girls but not love. Conversations about love—real love—are thin on the ground, especially when you consider that every day we buy a million love songs and read a million love stories.

My mum and dad always told my brother and me how much they loved us. But we didn’t talk about love. My first conversation about love with my mum happened soon after my dad left home. We talked about Dad, how much we loved him, and how we wished he could love himself. We talked about Mum’s depression and what it was like for her when she felt unloveable. We talked about her childhood and also Dad’s childhood. She told me stories about Dad and his service in the navy in World War II. I didn’t even know my dad had fought in the war. She told me stories about battleships, torpedoes, a sea on fire, his friends’ mortal wounds, and the other acts of war he witnessed. Dad loved us, but he also had a history that didn’t love him.

The more I paid attention to love, the more I realized how necessary love is. Love is an essential growth ingredient in your life. From conception, love is helping to birth you into the world. The study of evolutionary psychology recognizes that love is a basic growth medium of cells. Love matters, because when children are loved it influences the central dogma of their DNA, develops their nervous systems, and helps to build their brains.1 Love helps us to grow, and not just in the early stages of our life, but in every stage thereafter. Scientists tell us that this is true not just for humans but for other animals too.2

When you remember the basic truth “I am loveable,” this helps you to evolve in the direction of love. When you choose love, you prosper. Conversely, when you believe the basic fear “I am not loveable,” you stop growing in the direction of love. My dad had forgotten about his eternal loveliness. He was trying to love us, but he didn’t love himself or his history. His drinking was his way of trying to drown the basic fear.

“In love lies the seed of our growth.”

Paulo Coelho

When your dad lives homeless, you’re never sure when you’ll meet up next or where. He always kept in touch, though, and we usually met up once a fortnight or so. We talked about a lot of things, including love. “All that matters is love,” I told him. And he said, “All that matters to me is that you know I love you.”

My view of love was expanding. Love wasn’t just about girlfriends, romance, and sex anymore. Love wasn’t just an emotion. Love wasn’t just about family or the people you like. I began to see that love is about everything —that it’s about our whole life. When you make love your purpose, you are fulfilling your destiny. You didn’t come here to make yourself into somebody; you came here to be what you already are, which is the presence of love. That’s what’s meant to happen, but then we take the detour into fear and get distracted and lost. Now we have to turn to love again, so as to be saved and so that we can keep on loving and being loved.

Life is all about love, and even when it isn’t, it still is, really. Love is what you are busy with, even when it may look like you are busy with something else. We all get busy, chasing our careers, paying the mortgage, doing the school run. It’s hard not to get distracted in the daily blur of our lives. Life can be a full-time preoccupation. But when we come to our senses, which we inevitably do, we know that love is our purpose, love is our delight, and love is our salvation. Nothing else matters quite so much. Love comes first; everything else is secondary.

Thinking about love, and talking about love, helped me to get clearer about some of the other big questions in life. What I came to see back then, and know for sure now, is that the simple mathematics of love is: the more you love, the more you grow; the more you love, the healthier you are; the more you love, the happier you feel; the more you love, the more successful you are. Conversely, not loving enough and feeling unloved are the root causes of every problem and conflict in your life and on our planet. In sum, your life works when you love, and it doesn’t when you don’t.

The real work of your life is to know how to love and be loved. This is our shared purpose. It is the purpose of your life and the purpose of humanity. Despite what you have been taught, the purpose of existence is not solely to grow more dollars, more yen, and more Euros. Your real employment is not to acquire job titles, conquer the market, and kill the opposition. The goal of your life is not to inflate yourself into an ego that is bigger, smarter, or more powerful than another ego. None of this is real. These are all trivial pursuits. How would it really profit you if you gained the whole world and you forgot about love along the way?

Chapter 4

Ground of Love

There were no lectures on love when I studied psychology. Things are changing now, but love is still the road less traveled in universities and colleges in the Western world.1 My classes were interesting but not enlightening. We studied a self with no soul and a mind with no heart, and the body of our work was full of disease and anxiety. There was no joy. Love was absent. A lecture on something called Interpersonal Attraction Theory flirted with love, but only a little. No one addressed love directly, not even Carl Jung, who wrote about everything. It was as if we had forgotten that love existed, or maybe we were avoiding it.

Mostly we studied Sigmund Freud. Freud stated that “the communal life of human beings” (his own term) had a twofold foundation, which was love and work.2 “Love and work is all there is,” he wrote. Reading what Freud had to say about love was hard work, certainly. Here again, I found that love was not addressed directly. Even his book Psychology of Love is mostly taken up with commentary about ego and libido, Narcissus and Oedipus, and eroticism and neurosis. “One is very crazy when in love,” wrote Freud, echoing the thoughts of Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche and others.3 However, Freud also wrote this about love:

A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.4

Freud taught that separation is the root cause of suffering. All our fears, our unworthiness, our aloneness— the entire A to Z of misery—is caused by our sense of anxious apartness. This separation happens in the mind. It’s like a lucid dream. In the dream, we make a separate ego-self. I refer to this self in my work as the learned self, which is what we identify with when we forget about the Unconditioned Self. This ego-self is governed by a superego, which is a self-made god that reigns high in clouds of conscience. The ego-self is not sure what it is. Feelings of anxious apartness give rise to questions like “Am I real?” and “Is there a God?” and “Does love even exist?” What the ego-self really wants to know is “Am I loveable?”

Freud taught that the anxious apartness causes you to feel split off from your true self and alienated from others.5 A loss of intimacy with yourself makes empathy with others impossible. Genuine contact with others is lost in a world full of egos, personas, and masks. Freud used the word object a lot in his work.6 One of the terrifying effects of separation is that the ego-self, which is the central object of our dreams, turns everything else into separate objects too, including mothers, fathers, lovers, God, and also love. Even your heart is turned into an object, like a small stone, which you can think about, but not feel.

This was the first time I had read about the theory of separation and anxious apartness. Revelation is a big word, and I am reluctant to use it, but I must, because this was revelatory for me. Freud was showing me that all my pain was caused by this one basic problem, the problem of separation. Not just my pain, but also my dad’s pain, my mum’s pain, and everyone else’s pain is caused by this anxious apartness. Freud helped me to take the first step in undoing the hypnosis of separation. In the future, I would read more about the illusion of separation and its dreadful effects in spiritual literature, in medical journals, in books on physics, and elsewhere, and I would also learn more about how to undo the illusion.

Freud gave me a lot to think about. He shone a light into the dark places of the mind where we hide so many blocks to love. I am in awe of his courage and determination to keep on exposing the blocks to love’s awareness. It clearly took a huge personal toll on him to do so. Freud gave us a psychology of the ego, and in

doing so he showed us how we make it so difficult to love and be loved. However, there was something missing in Freud’s work and that was love itself.

Freud’s psychology didn’t have much psyche, or soul, in it. He didn’t study love directly. His view of love was limited and distorted by his focus on sex. Could it really be true that the love I felt for my parents was just a cover for my wish to sexually possess my mother and to kill my father? My story was that I fancied Marie Osmond not my mum. I imagine Freud would have interpreted my story as a classic case of repression or displacement. Sex can be an expression of love (or not), but love is more than just sex. Freud carried the torch so far, so that it could be passed on to people like Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl, Erich Fromm, and others.

What I understand now—and what I teach in Loveability—is that love can wake you up from the hypnosis of separation. Love offers you the total release of all your mistaken ideas about yourself. It empties your mind of every victim, villain, and hero that was lost in a dream. It frees you from the anxious apartness that is the ego- consciousness. Love brings you back to the Unconditioned Self. Love helps you take your place again in the heart of creation. In truth, you’d never left. It was all just a dream. The ego was asleep, but your heart (the essence of who you are) was awake and watching over you. Love reveals that you exist in love, always.

Love is a joyful dance that cultivates intimacy with yourself and empathy with another. As you connect consciously with your Unconditioned Self, every persona, mask, and self-concept falls away and you experience intimacy with your true nature. This intimacy in you extends itself and is translated into empathy with your family, your friends, your lover, your children, your colleagues, and everyone else. Intimacy and empathy are non-ego states. They are expressions of our oneness. They are the basis for real openness, honest communication, and true friendship. They also reveal that we exist in what Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk, called “that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.”7

Love arises when you realize we are all part of the same creation, a shared consciousness, and a universal heart. You and I exist together in love. Just because you may read a different Bible than I read does not mean we can tear up the oneness of the universe. We exist in each other. The Unconditioned Self that I think is mine is also yours. The ego that you think is yours doesn’t belong to anyone, not even you. There is no separation in love. We are made of the same love and we are free to express this love in our own unique way. This is how love dances with itself.

“One love, one heart, one destiny.”

Often attributed to Bob Marley

Love is the hidden ground upon which we are all dancing. This love is the essence and expression of what oneness is. This love can only be appreciated when we stop trying to divide it up into different designations, different types, and different levels. All love comes from one heart. Love has many expressions, but it is always the same love. What makes love so powerful and beautiful is that it includes us all, wholly, and without any exception. In A Course in Miracles there is a passage that sums this up very well:

Perhaps you think that different kinds of love are possible. Perhaps you think there is a kind of love for this, a kind for that; a way of loving one, another way of loving still another. Love is one. It has no separate parts and no degrees; no kinds nor levels, no divergences and no distinctions. It is like itself, unchanged throughout. It never alters with a person or a circumstance. It is the Heart of God, and also of His Son.8

My inquiry into separation showed me that, when you look into separation, it’s impossible to find it. It’s not really there. It really is just a trick of perception. I also discovered that in the mind of love there are no pronouns. What “I” do to “you” is no different from what “I” do to “me.” Because of our oneness, “I” experience the effects of everything “I” do to “you.” That’s why kindness is a blessing that blesses us to the power of three: “me,” “you,” and “all of us.” Conversely, that’s why violence is not smart. Like the sting of a bee, the poison is released inside and out. Attacking another is a form of self-harm. You can’t attack someone and know who you really are.

Love is also grounded in an attitude of compassion. Compassion is necessary for our survival and our evolution. Compassion is an attitude that upholds the memory of wholeness for people when they are lost in separation, pain, and conflict. Compassion is love’s holding environment. It is how love whispers to us, “I will remember the truth of who you are even when you cannot remember this for yourself.” This compassion sees through what Einstein called the “optical delusion” of separation. Einstein taught us that we can free ourselves from identifying with this ego-consciousness by “widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”9

To love and be loved is the true joy of every human heart. There is no higher happiness than this. Alas, in any human drama there are also wounds and disappointments, mistakes and betrayals, pain and heartache. Even so, love comes to our rescue. Love offers us a solution, which is a process called forgiveness. Forgiveness is an angel that comes to us when we sleep and wakes us from the hypnosis. It is the ground of love that supports you when you are falling, breaking apart, and coming undone. Forgiveness undoes the blocks to love’s awareness. It shows you that a universe of love doesn’t ever stop, even when all you can see is pain. Love always loves you, even when you can’t or won’t love yourself.

Chapter 5

Live Your Love

I met my first spiritual teacher when I was taking a course called Communications at university in Birmingham.1 His name was Avanti Kumar, and he was in the same course as me. He was different from the rest of us. We were all regular students and he was what the lecturers called “a mature student.” We were 18 years old, and he was 24. That made him very mature in our eyes. Ancient, even. Avanti always sat at the back of the class. He was always the last to arrive and the first to leave. We knew nothing about him, but there was definitely something about him, and that made him the most interesting person in the class.

My first conversation with Avanti happened about six weeks into the first term. It went a bit like this: “Hi, my name is Robert,” I said. “Yes, I know,” said Avanti. “So, how are you enjoying the class?” I asked. “Quite so,” he replied. “What made you choose this class?” “I came to meet you,” he said. “Great,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “Thanks,” I said. And that was that. But after that, we began a series of conversations that would change the course of my life.

Avanti was a student of yoga. Not the sort of yoga that is full of forward bends and salutations to the sun. His yoga was a spiritual philosophy called Advaita Vedanta. Advaita means “nonduality.” The first precept of this path is that oneness is our reality and separation is an illusion. Avanti was conversant with many schools of philosophy, metaphysics, and religion, so talking with him was always thrilling. He was the first person in my life with whom I could properly explore the big questions—the questions like “Who am I?” and “What is real?” and, of course, “What is love?”

The first book Avanti gave me to read was The Bhagavad Gita. The version he gave me was the translation by Juan Mascaró, whose introduction is every bit as compelling as the main text.2 Thirty years later, I still have the copy Avanti gave me, and it is very well thumbed. The Gita, for short, is a poem about Creation and the nature of reality. For the first time in my life I was reading direct references to love. I was learning that love is not just an emotion, or a feeling, or some pleasant chemistry in the brain, but that love is intelligent, and wise, and the essential energy of creation. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said, “When I read the Bhagavad- Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.” The Gita blew my mind, too.

Avanti also introduced me to Bhakti Yoga, which is a spiritual philosophy based entirely on love. According to Bhakti Yoga, which I first read about in the Gita, love is recognized as a spiritual path that leads to self- realization and real happiness. Love is the mind of God. Love is what you experience when you join your mind with the mind of God. Love is how you think with God. Therefore, and this is a very big therefore, love is your real mind. When you really let yourself feel love and you let all other thoughts drop away, you have contacted the consciousness that is the mind of your Unconditioned Self.

Avanti gave me many more books to read, including Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. This memoir tells the story of Paramahansa’s childhood in Uttar Pradesh, his encounters with saints and gurus

across India, and also his journey to America, where he taught meditation and yoga until his death in 1952. Paramahansa’s beautiful storytelling touched me deeply. He taught that the purpose of life is to experience a divine romance with God and with each other. The only reason for being on “this little patch of the Milky Way,” as he put it, is to understand the holy science of love.3

“Love is the door,” said Paramahansa Yogananda, “both to the mind of God and to the heart of who you are.”4 He taught his students to meditate on love so as to realize the oneness that exists between God, self, and one another. His encouragement to everyone was to make love a daily practice and to live your love. To many people, Paramahansa Yogananda was the embodiment of Bhakti Yoga, the spiritual path of love. He described love as our greatest joy—the key to our happiness—and also as the spiritual solution to every psychological and social problem in this world.

Avanti had set me on my path with a heart.5 My studies took me to many places, including India, where I visited Bodhgaya and sat under the Bodhi Tree where it is said that the Buddha received his enlightenment. By now I wasn’t just reading about love; I was also meditating on love. The more I tuned in directly to love, the more I could see that love is the light of our mind. It is a pristine state of consciousness that has zero mass. In other words, love is what you experience when you empty your mind of attachments to judgment, self-criticism, unworthiness, resentment, cynicism, and fear.

“Instead of trying to stop thought when you meditate, focus your attention on love.”

Ramana Maharshi

While I was in Bodhgaya, I made friends with a Burmese Buddhist monk. “Let me tell you a little secret about my friend the Buddha,” he said. “The Buddha is not my real teacher, you know. My real teacher is the loving kindness that is in my mind. This is what my friend the Buddha revealed to me.” I was so struck by what this monk had said to me that I asked him to say it again so I could write it down in my journal. And now, 20 years later, I get to share it with you. The Buddhist monk also shared this story with me:

The Buddha was sitting by a campfire beneath a canvas full of stars one night. Some friends joined him. They began to ask the Buddha questions like “What is life for?” and “What is the Self made of?” and “Is there a God?” and “How do we get to heaven?” The Buddha waited until every question was spoken. Then he answered, “If you practice loving kindness you will know the answer to every question there is. Enlightenment does not bring love; love is what brings enlightenment.”

One week after my first trip to India, I visited a mind/body/spirit festival at the Royal Horticultural Halls in London. I was exploring one of the many esoteric bookstalls there when I came across a big green book, some 1,400 pages long, called A Course in Miracles. I bought the book mainly because I liked the title. At the time, I had no idea that I had found what is, to me, the most beautiful book on love ever written. A Course in Miracles stayed on one of my bookshelves for a year or so before I got around to reading it. Even when I did pick it up, I put it down a few times, unable to get into it. Something in me made me persevere, and I am glad it did.

A Course in Miracles is a course on love. “This is a course on love, because it is about you,” it states in the text.6 A Course in Miracles is written in Christian language, and it is full of iambic pentameter, which is the meter that Shakespeare often used. I found that the poetry of this book had the effect of disengaging my intellect. Often, by the time I had reached the bottom of the page, I had completely forgotten what I had just read. Initially, I found it difficult to understand A Course in Miracles, and yet on every page there were gems like:

You are the work of God, and His work is wholly loveable

and wholly loving. This is how a man must

think of himself in his heart, because this is what he is.7

A Course in Miracles teaches that you have two selves, one real and one imagined. The real self is called the God-Self, or Christ, which is the one that God made. This Self is what I call your Unconditioned Self. It is your eternal loveliness. The imagined self is called the ego, which is self-made. A Course in Miracles explains that the mind of the God-Self is love and that the mind of separated ego is fear. “You have but two emotions [love and fear],” it states. “And one you made and one was given you. Each is a way of seeing, and different worlds arise from their different sights.”8 The goal of A Course in Miracles is to return us to the awareness of our real mind by choosing love over fear.

A Course in Miracles includes a workbook that has a spiritual lesson for each day of the year. These lessons have been part of my daily spiritual practice for the last 18 years. I think of A Course in Miracles as a love letter written by the soul to the ego. When I meditate on my daily lesson, I feel as if I am taking personal tuition from the mind of unconditional love. A Course in Miracles teaches that love is our true power and that when we place our faith in love it blesses our life and all of our relationships. It says:

Put all your faith in the love of God within you; eternal, changeless and forever unfailing. This is the answer to whatever confronts you today. Through the Love of God within you, you can resolve all seeming difficulties without effort and in sure confidence. Tell yourself this often today. It is a declaration of release from the belief in idols. It is your acknowledgement of the truth about yourself.9

The day after I completed a calendar year of daily lessons from A Course in Miracles, I received a cassette tape with a recording of a talk given by Tom Carpenter.10 Tom is a teacher of A Course in Miracles and the founder of The Forgiveness Network. His talk was about love, self-acceptance, and forgiveness. It was beautiful. I learned that Tom lived on Kauai, in Hawaii. I also learned that he was about to travel to New York to give a workshop. Quite uncharacteristically of me, I phoned Tom and invited him to extend his trip and visit England to give some talks and to stay at my home. He thanked me for my offer and told me he would think it over. I took that to mean “No.” At least I had tried. A day or two later, Tom called to say that he and his wife, Linda, would love to visit.

Tom Carpenter has been my friend and mentor ever since we first met. We have lived in each other’s homes for several weeks at a time. We have enjoyed countless dialogues on love. We have taught public courses together. We have dedicated books we have written to each other. We have made a DVD on A Dialogue on Forgiveness.11 Tom taught me, by his loving presence, that love is always present in our mind and that love will show you how to love. I learned from Tom that love is not just a technique you learn, a skill you acquire, or a secret you find on the last page of a book; it is a natural ability that flows effortlessly through you when you let it.

Tom often uses the phrase “Presence of Love” when he speaks and writes. I use it too, because of Tom. It’s a beautiful phrase that reminds us that love is always present. In truth, you don’t have to invoke love, as the old priests taught us. To invoke suggests that love has to come from somewhere else, but, in truth, love is already present. All you need to do is tune in to love. Love is here, because you are here. Love is a guide that guides you from within yourself. Love helps you to listen to the intelligence of your heart, to think the thoughts of God, and to be more present in your life.

“We can only learn to love by loving.”

Iris Murdoch

Loveability, which is about knowing how to love and be loved, begins with a conscious decision to be a truly loving presence in your life and everyone else’s life, too. Another way of saying this is: to know what love is, you have to be willing to live your love. Setting an intention to be a loving presence in this world is the first real step on love’s path. Now you are a student of love. Now love has permission to guide you. Now you are in touch with something bigger than your ego, wiser than your intellect, and powerful beyond measure. As Tom once said to me:

The decision to be the presence of love is the most powerful influence

you can have in any situation in your life and in this world.

PART II

Love Is Who You Are

My friend Adam Green got all the girls at school. It didn’t make sense. Adam had acne. His was the worst acne in our class. Adam’s hair was black and greasy. He wore thick-rimmed glasses. He carried a lot of weight. He wasn’t just big or fat; he was round. I’d say he was at least 15 kilos heavier than me. He perspired a lot, and sometimes his sweat was smelly. Adam wore red shoes, a lime-green sweater, and black jeans. He didn’t care what he wore. But Adam got all the girls. Even the pretty ones. It wasn’t fair.

Adam was half-Italian. His mother was very Italian. She was a dinner lady at our school. His father was English. He was a bus driver. I remember one time, Adam’s mum marched up to him in the playground and started shouting in her strong Italian accent, “Adam! Why you tell people your dad has only one leg? It’s not true. He still has two legs. Not just one.” Another time, at Adam’s home, Mrs. Green called Adam and me into the kitchen. She had just gotten off the phone. “Adam, why you tell people your dad ran you over with his bus?” she yelled. Then she looked at me and cried, “Robert, why is Adam like this? Why is he not a normal boy?”

Adam read The Financial Times, and he was only 14 years old. He liked punk music. We played in a band called Nervous. I didn’t like punk music, but I liked the guitar, and I liked hanging out with Adam. Adam went on marches for nuclear disarmament. He wrote a song for Nervous called “Whatcha Gonna Do if There’s a Nuclear War?” Adam was a member of Greenpeace, and he often reprimanded his mum for not doing enough to save the environment. “What is he saying, Robert?” she would ask. Adam was definitely not normal, nor was he trying to be. He wasn’t into looking good. He didn’t care about his image. He wasn’t trying to be somebody. He wasn’t trying to be cool. He was free of all that.

One time, when I was 15 years old, I contracted impetigo on my face. Impetigo is a contagious bacterial infection that causes sores and blisters on the skin. I ended up with a big sore on my right cheek that looked like one of those dark dried apricots. I was afraid I’d be scarred for life. I never expected to get a scar. Why did I have to get impetigo on my face, of all places? How was I ever going to get a girlfriend now? I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror. Most of my friends avoided me like the plague. Adam Green didn’t. “I like your impetigo,” he said. “It makes your face look interesting.” Adam assured me that it would be the making of me if I ended up with a scar.

Word got out that Adam Green was dating Kate Tucker. Kate was gorgeous. I couldn’t believe it. Yet again, Adam was dating another potential girlfriend of mine. When I next saw him, I asked him, “Is it true you’re going out with Kate?”

“Yeah,” said Adam casually, as if nothing wonderful and amazing and super was happening in his life. “Kate Tucker?” I asked, double-checking the facts. “Yes, Kate Tucker.” “Adam, how do you do it?” “Do what?” “How is it that you get all the girls, and I don’t?” “Don’t you know?” “No,” I said. Our conversation was full of fun, but it turned serious when Adam said something that landed like a whack

on my head. Here’s how the conversation went: “I’ll tell you why I get the girls and you don’t,” said Adam.

“Great,” I said. “It’s easy.” “Tell me, then.” “I love myself.” “Is that it?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “And you don’t love yourself, Robert. Not yet, anyway.” This was the first time I’d heard someone say out loud, “I love myself.” I was stunned. Saying “I love

myself” wasn’t supposed to be a good thing; it was wrong, illegal, bad, and blasphemous. At school, the worst insult you could throw at anyone was, “You must really love yourself.” Self-love was, we assumed, full of conceit and false pride; and yet Adam wasn’t ashamed to say it. It was clear to me that when Adam said, “I love myself,” he wasn’t meaning to say, “I’m more loveable than you, Robert.” Adam simply loved himself. He was comfortable in his own skin. He enjoyed being Adam Green. Could this be why all the girls enjoyed being with him?

Adam had pointed out that I didn’t love myself. He wasn’t being unkind. He was making an observation. And he was right. I could never have said, “I love myself” and felt okay about it. My lack of self-love was my guilty secret. I tried to cover it up by being popular, being the best at sports, and playing guitar in a band. I worked hard to manage people’s perceptions of me. I tried to be a “good son” for my parents, a “polite child” for my teachers, and a “loyal friend” to my friends. I would flinch at the slightest hint of disapproval or rejection. I had no idea why I felt like this. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wasn’t a bad person. I just didn’t feel loveable.

Back then, if someone had asked me a question like “What do you love about yourself?”—which is what I ask people in my Loveability program—I wouldn’t have had an answer to give. What is self-love anyway? I envied my friends who appeared more confident than I felt. I was shocked when the prettiest girl in my class tried to kill herself with a drug overdose after her boyfriend finished with her. I wanted to like myself more, but I didn’t know how to do that by myself. Who was this “self” that I was trying to love? How can you love yourself—or even like yourself—if you don’t know who you are? I was too busy trying on faces to know myself yet.

My young teenage self had forgotten about the Unconditioned Self. He had lost sight of his eternal loveliness, the original blessing, and what Thomas Merton called our secret beauty. Merton described this secret beauty in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander as being “untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God . . . which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us . . . It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.”1 My teenage self was oblivious to any inner light. He was looking for light outside of himself.

Somehow I had learned to believe that self-love is possible only if or when or after something happens first. For example, “I’ll love myself if my parents love me.” Or “I’ll love myself when I’m more popular.” Or “I’ll love myself after I’m famous.” The list goes on. I related to self-love as an effect, not a cause. It had nothing to do with me, apparently. It was a consequence of other people’s opinions and actions. It was as if they were holding my heart in their hands. How I felt about me was determined by how they felt about me. I had no idea that loving myself could be self-determined. Nor did I realize that self-love is essentially unconditional, that is, it needs no special conditions to exist.

I wish I’d continued my conversation about self-love with Adam. I could have asked him, “What is self- love?” Or even, “How do you love yourself?” But I didn’t. I wasn’t ready to expose my guilty secret, even though he saw it. I didn’t know what self-love was, or how to do it, but I could see that it was important. Although my dad was diagnosed as an alcoholic, that wasn’t his illness. His alcoholism was a symptom of his lack of self-love. Similarly, my mum was diagnosed with depression, another symptom. Her depression began in early childhood, when she felt terribly alone. Her feelings of separation—and anxious apartness—caused her to feel unloveable. She had no one to remind her of her eternal loveliness, and instead she was given prescriptions of every kind to numb the pain.

The next time I consciously thought about self-love was when I took a class on narcissism at university. A

common misperception of narcissism is that narcissism is self-love, but, in truth, it’s a neurosis. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter who was vain and arrogant. He saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely an image. His self-love was only skin-deep, and it withered as his body grew old and frail. Narcissus’s name is thought to derive from the Greek word narke (like “narcotic”), which is a “numbness” that makes you unconscious, causes you to forget, and leaves you for dead.

Narcissus didn’t see the eternal loveliness of the Unconditioned Self. He was blind to the secret beauty we all share. Instead, he was fixated with his ego-self and with trying to make himself more loveable than the rest of us. The “love” he felt was only specialness,2 and it cut him off from the rest of creation. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is listed in a handbook psychologists use called Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. NPD is described as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood.”3 Narcissism may have the look of self-love, but really it is a compensation for the basic fear of not being loveable, and, as such, it is a cause of much suffering.

What if every problem is really a symptom of a lack of love? This is the question I asked myself after I’d been practicing psychotherapy for a couple of years. As part of my practice, I ran a group therapy clinic for the National Health Service. The clinic was called Stress Busters. It was a free service held in a health center owned by the West Birmingham Health Authority. The people who attended the clinic were referred by their doctors or self-referred. They came with their different diagnoses and difficulties, including depression, cancer, addictions, obesity, unemployment, divorce, debt, and other stresses.

Initially, I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems I was presented with. It looked as if each person’s problem had a separate cause and needed its own specialized treatment. That was true, of course, to an extent. However, the more we talked and got to know each other, the more we realized how much we had in common. Beneath the presenting problems was a loss of wholeness, a basic fear of not being loveable, and a wish to be happier. So we talked about being authentic, practicing self-acceptance, building self-compassion, following your joy, forgiving yourself and others, trusting yourself more, and listening to the wisdom of your heart.

I noticed how when we talked about love it made people feel better about themselves and also helped them handle their problems in a better way. Together, we helped each other recognize our blocks to love, cultivate a more loving attitude toward ourselves, and make more loving choices in our lives. Conversations about wellness and happiness had a similar effect. In one of my early books, called Stress Busters, I concluded, “Stress management begins with a lack of love and is complete only when there is a fullness of love.”4

“Love cures people, both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.”

Karl Menninger

Love is a healer because it undoes the basic problem of separation and also the basic fear of not being loveable. It restores our awareness of our Unconditioned Self and our true nature. Love is, I believe, the solution to every problem. I am not the only one who thinks this way. John Welwood, a clinical psychologist and author of Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships, writes, “The diagnostic manual for psychological afflictions known as the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] might as well begin, ‘Herein are described all the wretched ways people feel and behave when they do not know that they are loved.’”5

Gill Edwards, another clinical psychologist, makes a similar observation in her book Wild Love. She writes:

Our lack of Self-love—our disconnection from Love—is the core of almost all our problems. It is the root of all our neurosis. It is the root of our relationship problems. It is the root of settling for a life of bread-and-cheese rather than inviting ourselves to the banquet. It leads to mundane lives of “quiet desperation”, in the words of Thoreau—imprisoning ourselves in dull routines or stultifying relationship, or needing love (which means we won’t get it), or caring for others at our own expense, or limiting ourselves to what we feel we deserve, or what others will “allow” us.6

When I was 25 years old, I wrote an article that I consider my first proper thesis on psychology and spirituality. It is entitled Self-Psychology. The central idea is the Self Principle, which states that the quality of your relationship with yourself determines the quality of your relationship with everything else. For example, how you relate to yourself influences your physical well-being, your food choices, the exercise you get, and your relationship to money. It influences your emotional well-being, the pace you set for your life, the time you make for yourself, and how loveable you feel. It also influences your spiritual well-being, your relationship to God, your creativity, and how happy you are. The better you get on with yourself, the better your life gets. Why? Because separation is not real and therefore in any one relationship is every relationship.

When you know that your source of love is not outside you, you don’t stalk people, put them on pedestals, or turn them into idols. You treat people as equals. You don’t put on a show. You express yourself without trying to win approval. You don’t give love to get love. You love unconditionally, without attaching any hidden emotional invoices. You make good choices about whom to give your phone number to, whom to date, when to have sex or not, whom to be friends with, and when it’s authentic to stay in a relationship or leave.

Your capacity to love yourself also influences how much you let yourself be loved by others. When you feel loveable, you don’t need to put on a pleasing image to win love. Nor do you slip into a role in order to deserve love. You let love in. You are a good receiver. You aren’t threatened by too much love. You are receptive to what is really happening. You recognize when you are being loved or not. You trust in love and in how loveable you are. This makes sense when you remember that we all come from the same love. In a loving relationship, “my love” and “your love,” and “his love” and “her love,” are all the same love, shared.

Chapter 6

Self-Love Monologue

While I was designing my first Loveability public program, I got clear that the primary focus should be on our relationship to love. I sketched out a three-day program with 12 modules, each one examining an essential facet of love. The central idea for the program was: love is the lesson; love is the teacher. The more you learn about love, the more it teaches you about everything else, including how to be authentic, how to be intimate, how to communicate, how to enjoy your relationships, how to forgive, and how to be truly happy.

I wanted the Loveability program to be more than just an interesting academic exercise. Love isn’t just an idea; it’s real. I didn’t want my students to read a menu full of Greek types of love, for instance, and not actually taste anything. The Loveability program was to be an active meditation full of practical exercises to help students to recognize love and, ultimately, to know love. So, how do you begin to know love? The thought that kept coming to me was To know love you must first know yourself. As my friend Tom Carpenter once told me, “Seen rightly, ‘What is love?’ and ‘Who am I?’ are really the same question.”

An inquiry into self-love happens early on in each Loveability program. I facilitate this inquiry in several ways. One way is using an exercise called the Self-Love Monologue. The brief is simple. Students pair up, each pair with a person A and a person B. In part one, person A talks about self-love for ten minutes, while person B listens without making any comments; in part two, person B speaks and person A listens. That’s it. I don’t give any other instructions. I simply say, “Your time starts now,” and I hit the timer. The invitation is to reflect on your relationship to self-love. Ideally, I want you to share your personal experience of self-love, what you’ve learned, and how you practice it.

I recommend you try the Self-Love Monologue. You can do it with a friend or on your own using a voice recorder so you can listen to what you said. It’s a very revealing exercise. My students often have a lot to say in the review. Many of them comment that ten minutes feels long. “Ten minutes is too long,” say some. Some students report that this is the first time they’ve consciously thought or talked about self-love. “I had no idea where to begin” is a common comment. Another one is “I think a lot about being loved by others, but never about loving myself.”

So what is self-love? This is surely one of the most important inquiries of a lifetime. I’ve assisted thousands of people with this inquiry over the years. To get the inquiry started, I often invite people to complete the following sentence: “To me, self-love is . . .” Some responses are playful and amusing, like “taking a bubble bath while wearing a tiara,” “wearing sequins every day,” and “eating organic 70 percent dark chocolate.” Some responses hint at old wounds: “not being a martyr,” “setting clear boundaries,” and “no sex on a first date.” Other responses include “getting more sleep,” “doing my daily spiritual practice,” and “being true to myself.”

Most people cite positive actions in their initial responses to what self-love is. I did the same thing, too, when I first did a similar exercise. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I probably mentioned “my morning meditation,” “playing more golf,” “eating Banoffee pie,” and “wearing Paul Smith socks.” Responses like these, which are based on positive actions, are healthy, but they don’t come close to what real self-love is. Self-love isn’t just a verb; it’s deeper than that. Self-love isn’t just about what you do for yourself; it’s about the essence of who you are.

Self-love is, in essence, a loving attitude from which positive actions arise that benefit you and others. This attitude of self-love is based on an awareness of who you are and what love is. Actually, this awareness