“Love has nothing to do with someone else. It is all about you. It is a way of being. It essentially means you have brought sweetness into your emotion. If a loved one travels to another country, would you still be able to love them? You would. If a loved one passed away, would you still be able to love them? You would. Even if a loved one is not physically with you anymore, you are still capable of being loving. So, what is love then? It is just your own quality. You are only using the other person as a key to open up what is already within you.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 65)
Beyond the Quote (290/365)
Why is it that our love gets locked behind a door that needs opening? Why is it that we aren’t able to open up to what is already within us on our own, intuitively, and without prompting? Why is love seen only (or perhaps primarily) as being a product of something that happens in a relationship between two people? For, as Sadhguru points out above, love has nothing to do with anyone else—it has only to do with you. And if that’s true and if love is a way of being, then where might we have lost our way? Why might we have stored our love away behind a locked door? Shouldn’t “sweetness into our emotion” be the default and most enjoyable state that beats any of the alternatives?
Perhaps it is the case that “sweetness into our emotions” gets more and more bitter as we continue to see and experience the harsh, cold, and vile world. How to not get bitter when bitterness seems to be the immersing feeling that engulfs us on all fronts? Better to build up walls and layers of defense to protect against that, eh? And perhaps it is through this very effort that we decide to lock our sweetness away behind a closed door, or into a vaulted safe, or deep into the basement of our being. Perhaps it is so that our sweetness doesn’t get destroyed or damaged for good and so that we may preserve it for those who earn it through strong displays of trust?
Or, perhaps it is the case that we are confused and have been taught to utilize our love in only specific and given ways. We grow up watching fairy tales and hear love stories that put love into the context as being something that is shared between two people. How often is a story shared that talks about love as a state of being? Much of the art we see displays two people “in love.” The movies we watch and TV series we binge all have love canistered into the same context. Heck, think about some of the most popular love songs and take a closer look at some of the lyrics. Love is what “completes us,” we would “die without another person’s love,” and “how do we breathe, without them here by our side?”
Or, perhaps maybe hardest to detect, it is the case that we are simply disconnected from our love and love has wandered into corners of our being that are unbeknownst to us. How do we disconnect from love? By disconnecting from our present moments. For, love is not possible without some form of presentness. Because love is an action that is expressed with a sweetness behind the intention and that doesn’t happen when we are thinking about past or future. In fact, the more time we spend thinking about what happened or what might happen, the less time we will be able to spend on what’s happening and that’s the only space where love flows. And perhaps it is the case that certain people aren’t keys to a locked love, bur rather are simply connections to the present moment—and allow love to flow because they get us out of our heads and into the now.
Hard to know for sure as each of our situations are so drastically different. But, the solution, in my estimation, seems (to me) to be all the same. Whether our love is locked away for “safety,” confused behind the zeitgeist of the time, or disconnected from our headspace—the solution is tied to our awareness and our ability to reconnect to the present moment.
Once you become aware that your love is locked away because of bitterness, then the solution is to remove the bitterness and surround yourself with more sweetness. This way, you can lower your walls, open your locked doors, and reconnect your sweetness to the sweetness of the present moment. Or, once you become aware that you were confused, then you are no longer confused. Because the fact that you were confused implies a past state—one that is no longer the present state. You can then enjoy all of the art, music, poetry, and tv romances as they’re shared and know that love in those contexts is just one aspect of love—not the whole picture of how love manifests. And once you realize you can connect to love by connecting to the present moment, and that you actually don’t need another person in order to do that, then present mindedness can become the default state. And so, too, can love.
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Read Next: 30 Sadhguru Quotes from Inner Engineering on Spirituality, Love, and Understanding Life
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