By Guru Rajesh Ananda
We spend so much of our lives searching for love. But what if love is not something we need to find?
Adapted and Edited by Constandinos Tsindas
Editor’s foreword
Be yourself, don’t force love
This is the foreword I’ve had most trouble with. Love is love right? Why not look for it, why not actively search for that brightness, through healthy relationships and kindness? Why is that so bad?
But then I got to the gist of the guru’s hypothesis.
He is not asking us to waive that sense of love and gentleness away. He is asking us not to be needy, not to constantly shape our thinking around the social pressure of having an instagram circle of fun loving beautiful friends who share all the difficulties and support us through thick and thin.
Most of the time that’s what we want to believe. It’s a false mirror.
Needing that is not bad. It’s human emotion.
What’s bad is pushing too hard, to the point where our need is exploited by the ever rising phenomenon of ruthless narcissism, with an increasingly larger number of people suffering from this disease, still remaining undiagnosed.
When we meditate, we won’t be looking for gratification of belonging.
We will be our loving selves, our authentic selves. Love will come to be sure, in the form it is supposed to come by whoever responds.
It just won’t be forced.
Love cannot appear at our whim. Our stay at our whim. We just need to let it be.
I’ve often found that when I moved through the daily wrangle of professional and interpersonal relationships, NOT pushing is the best policy.
And when I did that, the people I thought were furthest away and would never approach me, we’re the ones that actually appreciated me the most, something which came as a stunning superb surprise.
Not really a surprise. Project yourselves, not what others want you to be.
As Oscar Wilde said, ‘everyone else is taken’.
The Magnetism of Love
From the moment we enter this world, we seek connection. We want to be held, understood, appreciated and loved. As we grow older, the forms change, but the longing endures.
We look for love in our partners, families, friendships, and even the approval of strangers.
Yet herein lies the amazing paradox.
The more desperately we search for love outside ourselves, the more elusive it becomes.
Perhaps this is because we have misunderstood the direction in which love flows.
Love is not merely something we receive. It is something we become.
My Guru, Gururaj Ananda Yogi, expressed this beautifully when he taught that to become lovable, we must first learn to love.
And when we become loving, something extraordinary begins to happen.
We become magnetic.
LOVE BEGINS WITHIN
Think of a flower.
A flower does not chase the bee.
It simply blossoms.
It opens to the sunlight, releases its fragrance, reveals its beauty—and the bee comes naturally.
This simple image holds something profound.
We often expend enormous emotional energy trying to make people love us, understand us, or behave as we would like. Yet spiritual growth reverses this process.
Instead of asking:
Why am I not receiving enough love?
we begin asking:
How much love am I expressing?
This shift changes everything.
Because love is no longer dependent upon somebody else.
It becomes ours.
MEDITATION OPENS THE HEART
This is one of the great gifts of meditation.
Meditation does not magically remove every difficulty from our lives. Nor should it.
Rather, meditation creates sufficient quietness within us to see ourselves more clearly.
When the mind is turbulent, we become entangled in thoughts and emotions. We defend ourselves, justify ourselves, and blame others.
We replay conversations and arguments endlessly in our minds.
But when the mind becomes quieter, something changes.
We acquire perspective. It requires courage.
We may begin to recognise that we were perhaps unkind. Perhaps our anger was unnecessary. Perhaps we neglected someone we love. Perhaps we were so consumed by our own difficulties that we failed to notice another’s suffering.
This is not about guilt.
It is about awareness.
And awareness gives us the possibility of change.
Meditation therefore becomes much more than sitting quietly with our eyes closed.
Meditation becomes a mirror.
Not a mirror that condemns us, but one that allows us to see ourselves without distortion.
THE COURAGE TO CHANGE
Spiritual unfoldment requires both inner experience and conscious effort.
We cannot meditate in the morning and then spend the rest of the day behaving as before.
The stillness we experience within meditation must gradually enter our relationships, our work, conversations and choices.
We begin noticing ourselves.
We become aware of the moment irritation is becoming anger.
We recognise jealousy before it becomes resentment.
We notice the impulse to retaliate before the words leave our mouths.
And in that tiny space between feeling and reaction, we discover something immensely powerful:
choice.
We can choose differently.
Not always perfectly. Not immediately. But gradually.
This is how we evolve.
Not through some dramatic transformation, but hundreds of moments in which consciousness begins replacing unconscious reaction.
WHEN LOVE BECOMES MAGNETIC
As meditation deepens and awareness expands, our relationship with other people also begins to change.
We become more perceptive.
We notice when somebody is struggling behind their smile.
We hear the sadness beneath their anger.
We begin to recognise that difficult behaviour often emerges from difficult inner circumstances.
And naturally, compassion grows.
This does not mean becoming weak.
Love is not weakness.
Nor does loving someone mean accepting harmful behaviour or abandoning healthy boundaries.
Sometimes love requires us to say no.
Sometimes love requires distance.
Sometimes love requires extraordinary courage.
But there is an enormous difference between protecting ourselves from another person’s behaviour and filling our hearts with hatred for them.
One preserves us.
The other imprisons us.
LOVING THE DIFFICULT PERSON
This brings us to one of humanity’s most challenging spiritual teachings:
Love thine enemy.
At first, this can sound almost impossible.
Why should we love someone who has hurt us?
But perhaps the teaching is not primarily about them.
Perhaps it is about what happens within us when we hate.
Anger, bitterness and resentment occupy enormous psychological space. We may believe we are punishing another person through our hatred, yet they are often completely unaware of what is happening inside us.
We carry the burden.
Gururaj taught that deliberately cultivating kinder thoughts towards someone we regard as an enemy begins to dissolve our own anger and hatred.
This does not mean pretending that something painful did not happen.
It means refusing to allow another person’s actions to determine the quality of our inner life.
That is freedom.
WE SEE DIFFERENTLY
As the heart opens, our perception changes.
The world itself may appear different.
Gururaj once described this beautifully: greater awareness allows us not merely to see a flower’s petals but to perceive the sap and the Divinity within it.
The flower has not changed.
We have.
And perhaps this is one of the deepest transformations brought about by meditation.
We stop merely looking at life and begin experiencing it.
The ordinary becomes extraordinary.
A sunrise.
A child’s laughter.
Someone holding our hand.
The silence before dawn.
The face of someone we have loved for many years.
These moments were always there.
We simply became present enough to notice them.
YOU ARE THE MAGNET
We live in a world that constantly tells us what we need to acquire in order to become complete.
More success.
More possessions.
More recognition.
More followers.
More approval.
Perhaps even more love.
Yet the spiritual journey points us in precisely the opposite direction.
It says:
Go within.
Beneath the turbulence of thought, the fears and insecurities, beneath the accumulated experiences that have shaped our personalities, there is something quieter.
Something whole.
Something profoundly loving.
Meditation helps us touch that inner reservoir.
The more deeply we touch it, the less we need to demand love from the world around us.
We begin giving it.
We become kinder.
More compassionate. forgiving and present.
Strangely, when we stop desperately seeking love, we often find more of it around us.
Because love recognises love.
The flower opens.
The fragrance spreads.
And the bees arrive.
This is the magnetism of love.
We do not become magnetic by asking the world to love us.
We become magnetic by allowing the love already within us to unfold.
And perhaps, ultimately, this is why Gururaj reminded us of one of the simplest yet most profound spiritual truths:
Love is God, and God is Love.
Rajesh Ananda’s Book – The Science of Stillness
Rajesh Ananda’s Author Website
