How to Love

by Sophia Gubb

It seems such a simple question, yet many people do not know how to love. Some people think they do, but have themselves fooled. Other people are beginning to realise that they don’t come up to the standards they hold themselves to. Some of those people might think that knowing how to love is overrated and choose to more consistently hold themselves to different standards; think of them as gangsters or atheistic businessmen who are happy to admit that their life centres itself around just making a buck. Others, however, might start to ask how they can find out how to love.

To love is both easy – the easiest thing in the world – and difficult. Difficult, because if you are not accustomed to doing so it can be hard to find a space, a point of view, or an energy which allows you not to need to ask the question of how to love. When you are in this space – as we’ll call it – however, it is easy to love – so easy and so enjoyable that you will ask yourself why so few others do it this way. Perhaps then you will start writing messages to help others reach this space.

The first thing you need to know is that it is natural to love and it is a sign of sickness not to love. When a sickness is cured, the health is shown to have been there all along. Love, therefore, is not a skill to be learned.

The next step in learning how to love, therefore, is to cure the “sickness” of unlove. There are many ways to do that, some better than others.

In principle many spiritual paths proclaim to be the way to ultimate love and ultimate happiness (and yes, happiness and love are inseparably linked), yet they are often perverted into mere traps for the eager seeker which he or she finds themselves unable to get out of. A spiritual path may be positive if it affirms that you are already where you need to be. It may be negative if it instead makes you believe that realisation is some goal that is forever far off in the future, and that you are in fact inadequate to reach it, at least in this lifetime. Ask yourself in this situation if you really want to know how to love (or how to be happy, etc) – or do you prefer to run around in circles and waste your time? “Official” spiritual paths are optional, as we all have an “inner compass” which will show us where to go if only we listen to it. If you think an “official” spiritual path is not necessary for you, most likely it isn’t.

As with all spiritual processes, remember that healing the sickness of unlove is something that is natural, and whatever you may do to disallow your wound to heal is unnatural. Therefore, having faith that where you are is where you need to be is a powerful help. This faith simply stops you from doing things that may continue to hold you back. On the same note, allow the processes you go through to happen normally. If you feel like hating, hate. If you feel like being uncaring, be so. All things pass in time, and if allowed to recede, these hurts will show a jewel of love beneath them when they disappear.

In short, to learn how to love you must simply remember who you are. Do whatever it takes to get there, and don’t expect your path to necessarily look like anyone else’s. Follow your heart, and you will get to where you want to go.