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In 1967 singer-songwriter John Lennon penned a medically profound prescription for well being in the lyric, "All you need is love." Forty-three years later physicians are acknowledging that love, like nutritious food, exercise and rest, keeps us healthy.

To give and receive the kind of love that brings health and well being, however, we must first recognize what therapeutic love is not. Popular culture all too often equates love with the intense passion of new romance, a passion that inevitably harbors the stress of emotional highs and lows. Such "love" is a tangle of desires, attachments and insecurities. Its moments of exquisite, intimate union and feelings of togetherness are so fragile that when the smallest desire is thwarted the illusion of oneness shatters and gives way to anger, possessiveness, guilt, jealousy, manipulation and recrimination. Though sought after and celebrated, this form of love more closely resembles an ill-advised legal contract than a healing, nurturing state of being.

The love of which the mystics and sages of Yoga Science speak is a more stable and healing form of love. It facilitates connectedness, respect, growth, imperishable comfort and a brilliance of confidence. Love, the Supreme Physician, is love without conditions. It is a consciousness that recognizes the essential unity that exists within the diversity of all forms. For this reason, it is impossible to "unconditionally love" another person. We can only be unconditional love through our actions, for love is our Essential Nature. As Jesus the Christ would say, "We do not love another. We are the other. So love your neighbor as your Self." In that state of unicity, there is no fear, anger or selfish desire because the illusory space between the lover and beloved is eliminated. It's not that the two have become one; the One has simply manifested as two.

According to the twentieth century Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "Love is the affinity of being with being." Chardin saw love as the underlying fabric of the entire universe, manifesting every successive evolutionary form. Scientists use the word gravity to explain what attracts the planets to the sun in our solar system, but gravity is merely a synonym for what Chardin understood as love. It's the same universal principle that attracts and configures the atoms to form a tree. When the tree is cut down and planed into lumber, the affinity of being with being (love) is still present as the unifying force. When the lumber is cut into toothpicks or even sawdust, it is love that continues to attract the particles, molecules and atoms that create and preserve each successive new form. With this vision, Chardin concludes that love is not peculiar to human beings. "It is a general tenet of all life because it embraces and supports every form adopted by organized matter." That is why Swami Rama of the Himalayas taught, "Love is the most ancient traveler."

In order to harness and benefit from the therapeutic power of love, it is essential to incorporate the love-principle into each and every relationship. But that is not so easy to do--mainly because our concept of love is habitually skewed by the mind's lenses of fear, anger, selfish desire and the misperception that equates love with the lust for personal sexual gratification and the continuation of the species.

Therapeutic love is not a function of physiology. It is experienced only when we base our thoughts, words and deeds on our own inner intuitive wisdom. And that inner wisdom is available to us in every moment through a purified buddhi (the function of the mind, similar to the conscience, that reflects knowledge from the superconscious mind into the conscious mind). When we willingly choose to serve our inner intuitive wisdom--as opposed to the habits and promptings of the ego, senses or unconscious mind--the body and mind naturally return to a state of balance and health. And, of course, the converse is true. When we habitually compromise our inner wisdom for the sake of convenience and passing pleasure, we experience a dis-ease that, if left unattended, eventually leads to systemic pain and disease. As 20th century mystic Nisargadatta Maharaj observed, "We create our own disharmony and then complain! When we desire and fear, and identify ourselves with our feelings, we create sorrow and bondage. When we create with love and wisdom, and remain unattached to our creations, the result is harmony and peace."

The essential characteristic of all forms of love is attention. When we love someone, we eagerly direct our attention toward that person, and we are open to receiving love in return. In order for love to become therapeutic, we first need to direct our attention (our love) toward our own inner intuitive wisdom, and then make that discriminative judgment the basis of how we act in the world. When that union of outer action and inner wisdom takes place, therapeutic love effortlessly manifests to heal and nurture the body-mind-sense complex. This entire process is what the ancients referred to as Yoga (union).

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia report that lifestyle choice is now responsible for 53 percent of all reported diseases. This correlation between skillful actions and healthy consequences and between unskillful actions and unhealthy consequences has recently been the subject of research in the new science of epigenetics. Geneticists have long known that many, if not most, diseases have their roots in our genes. Genes determine how efficiently we process foods, how effectively we detoxify poisons, and how vigorously we respond to infections. Now scientists have discovered that sitting atop each gene is a switch called an epigenetic mark that, influenced by our skillful or unskillful lifestyle choices, can order the gene to switch on or off. In other words, science today is substantiating what Yoga Science has known for thousands of years: DNA is not destiny. Our everyday skillful choices--when greased with love--can reverse even the proclivities of our genes.

A similar mind-body medicine formed the cornerstone of the ancient Hebrew, Christian and Islamic traditions. As if lifted directly from the Merk Medical Manual, Deuteronomy urges us to "Love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our might. Then, we will receive what we need to fulfill the purpose of our life. But if we turn our love away from our own inner intuitive wisdom and serve other gods," the scripture concludes, "we will experience dis-ease and pain."

Pain, therefore, is a critically important messenger. Unfortunately, the real meaning and value of pain is not well understood today. Instead of learning from the lessons of pain, our culture has developed a wide variety of avoidance techniques including reliance on drugs, surgery and even consumerism. But pain presents invaluable guidance. As the Greek poet Aeschylus observed, "Pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

The Book of Deuteronomy indicates that dis-ease or pain is the shadow of the outstretched hand of Divine Providence. That hand does not intend to punish, but rather to alert us when our likes and dislikes compromise our health and well being. Pain lets us know where friction exists between our self-willed attachment to passing pleasure (preya) and the wisdom-force of discrimination and love (shreya).

Yoga Science advises that we heed the whispers of pain at a low decibel level by unleashing our own healing force of love. If we don't, our experience assures us that the decibel level of dis-ease will only get louder and louder--until our dis-ease turns into a full-fledged disease. Pain can help redirect our attention toward the buddhi so we can consider a more holistic and healthy choice at every fork in the road--a change of mind and heart that can eliminate the cause of the pain and not just ease its symptoms. A genuine, heart-centered practice of Yoga Science requires swimming against the tide of our culture and the habits of a lifetime by relying on the power of love and wisdom that already reside within us.

The discriminative faculty of buddhi is always working, but its quiet voice is often overwhelmed by the noise of the senses, memories of the past, imaginations of the future and the self-serving advice of the ego. As a result, our health is often compromised by an undisciplined ego and senses that habitually make counter-intuitive lifestyle suggestions that inevitably lead us back to pain.

Our senses, ego and unconscious mind have been in charge of the city of life for many years. To rectify that situation, we need to place them in service to a loving intelligence greater than the mind and a truth that never changes. Even in the midst of a sea of confusion and turbulence, the wisdom and love that reside within us can serve as a beacon leading us toward better health and well being.

Since today's world view has been formed by a culture that does not wholeheartedly embrace this philosophy, our human effort will require sincere detachment, discrimination and discipline in order to serve the shreya and sacrifice the preya before we're able to become prophets of love in every relationship. Furthermore, because of the power of habit, we will need to exercise patience and love toward ourselves as well. In fact, the holistic nature of Yoga Science requires that we learn to love ourselves in all circumstances.

"The awful truth," modern mystic Eknath Easwaran tells us, "is that no one on earth is more severely handicapped than those who are unable to love. And without love, we are desperately deprived." But as challenging as that dilemma is, it may also be the key to unlocking the secret of health and happiness.

We all know that real love is extremely elusive. We cannot buy it, borrow it or steal it. In fact, it is available only in one rare form: as the skillful response of a mind and heart being guided by the inner wisdom of the buddhi. The only way to secure love (and health) is to purify and heal our own mind and heart.

To be sure, if the mind is constantly troubled by disturbing emotions and thoughts, the resulting bodily dis-ease cannot be reversed by using physical treatments alone. And no sage can offer us a magic elixir that assures good health. But the sages have already given us powerful mind-body medicine practices like meditation, mantra repetition, diaphragmatic breathing and Ayurvedic medical principles that we can put into practice to transform the debilitating effects of negative thinking and emotions like fear, anger, greed, jealousy, guilt and shame. This process of transformation is the whole purpose of training the mind through Yoga Science. When harnessed in service to our inner intuitive wisdom, the same mental energy that once ravaged us with pain and disease can be transformed into the healing force of love that actually enhances our immune system.

Claiming to have been inspired by Shakespeare, Paul McCartney placed this exclamatory couplet at the end of the Beatles farewell album, Abbey Road: "In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." Only when we learn to express this understanding in every relationship will we become the Prophets of Love, who profit generously from love. When we give our time, attention, talents and commitment to purifying our own mind, Love--the Supreme Physician--will provide us everything we need to fulfill the noble purpose of our lives.

Leonard is a philosopher, educator, author and founder of the American Meditation Institute.

"The Flemish Master" by Jenness Cortez Perlmutter ©2007


The Yoga of Love
By Linda Johnsen

God bless celebrity marriages! Top stars will easily spend $2,000,000 on their wedding-and then shell out another $200,000 to their lawyers when they split up two years later.

These days, rather than visiting their minister for premarital counseling, savvy couples meet with their attorney to work out how they'll divide their assets when they divorce. You select your bridal gown, choose a beautiful venue for the reception, and hammer out your pre-nup.

Today many of us Americans marching down the aisle, promising to cherish each other "till death do us part," really mean we'll cherish each other till we find someone else we like better.

"I wanna know what love is," goes the song. I don't think it's this. I guess I'm old fashioned: if you can turn it on and off like a faucet, I don't believe it's love.

But wait! We're all yoga students here. Isn't yoga all about nonattachment and renunciation? What can the yoga tradition teach us about love?

Household Yoga 

The classical Vedic tradition divides life into four stages: studentship, marriage, retirement, and renunciation. First, as a child you learn what you need to know to flourish on this planet. Second, you find a job, get married, and raise a family. Third, you start getting older, you begin pulling back from your worldly responsibilities, and increasingly turn your focus to spiritual life. Fourth, when the body begins to fail, you abandon material life all together, focusing exclusively on your inner work as you prepare for death.

Many of the famous sadhus (ascetics) of India skip directly from stage one to stage four. A lot of yoga texts are written by these adepts, so unsurprisingly their works (like Patanjali's Yoga Sutras) reflect a renunciate's viewpoint. This has given some Western practitioners the mistaken impression that yoga is anti-family. But many other Indian scriptures, such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana as well as the holy Veda itself, hold the perspective of working men and women living with their families. Yogic practices were integrated into their lives long before they reached the state of renunciation.

In traditional Vedic society, giving your word was literally a sacred pact. Breaking a marriage vow, or any promise spoken before God, was unthinkable. By our current Western standards that seems draconian, but it did give Vedic culture tremendous stability.

In this ancient society, love (prema in Sanskrit) was not confused with moha (romantic attraction). To our horror today, we learn that people in India rarely selected their own mates; their parents did the choosing for them. They felt that sexual attraction was not necessarily the best basis for marriage, since the giddy delight of romantic infatuation almost always ends as quickly as it begins. (Witness the astounding divorce rate in our own romance-oriented culture.) Rather, marriage was based on a heartfelt social commitment, which formed a context in which genuine love could grow. It's not that mutual attraction wasn't important in India; it simply wasn't all-important.

I certainly wouldn't have wanted my parents to pick a husband for me! Yet there's a lot to be said for making marriage a form of spiritual practice, a yoga of love. When I look at couples whose marriages have endured-couples who are authentically happy, not just sticking together out of habit or a co-dependent bond of mutual misery-it's easy to see Spirit at play. There is a relaxed attitude of easy-going trust, yet the sense that they can rely on their partner under any circumstances is firm as rock. Given what a turbulent experience life can be, this trust makes their home a tranquil refuge, a sort of castle of the Golden Era ensconced within the squalor of an angry and malefic Iron Age.

Recently I was amused to watch one of the happiest couples I know arguing about which TV program to watch. Jim wanted to see Law & Order. Lindsey wanted to watch a documentary about the Yellowstone super-volcano on Nova. "Let's watch Nova!" Jim insisted. "No, no, no-turn the channel to Law & Order," Lindsey kept saying. No matter what they tell you on the commercials, I couldn't help thinking, real love is not about how sexy you look. It's about sincerely wanting your partner to be happy, and ungrudgingly making the sacrifices, large and small, to make sure that happens.

Lindsey and Jim have stepped out of the cramped quarters of their own desires into a broader universe of authentic caring. They see each other's quirks as charming rather than annoying. They are comfortable with disagreeing; different points of view strike them as interesting, not as sparks for a fight. Both of them have been attracted to other people during their 30 years of marriage, but neither of them acted on it. They didn't consider a passing fancy worth disrupting the happy home they've created for themselves and their children. There is a cheerful maturity to Jim and Lindsey that I find refreshing in our egocentric culture.

In India the second stage of life, marriage and parenthood, is called grihasta ashrama. During this time of life, we yoga students have the opportunity to turn our home (griha) into a center of peace (ashram) where meditation and active service both flourish. The sattvic atmosphere resonates not with clinging, needy love, but with a vibrant love that nourishes and supports family life and spiritual practice.

Love in a Time of Dissolution

When my teacher Swami Rama blessed a couple, he would counsel them that in our tradition marriage is a lifetime commitment, ending only when one of the partners dies or when, by mutual consent, the two separate to undertake sannyas, devoting their remaining years exclusively to spiritual practice. And yet the divorce rate in the yoga community is no less than in Western culture at large. People change, circumstances change, values change, and perhaps inevitably, our partnerships change.

In an odd way, we're all renunciates in America now, wandering and unattached. We have more relationships than ever, yet we've never been more alone. Maybe we burn karma faster this way. Or maybe chasing a romantic fantasy is how the ego runs away from the lack of love it senses in itself. The ego fears boredom, distracting itself from its own emptiness with exciting new experiences and a parade of new partners. Most of all, the ego fears being alone.

One of the great benefits of a lasting happy marriage, other than providing a stable environment for one's children, is that you have a loving, familiar partner at your side through the increasingly difficult years of old age and infirmity. What a comfort! Yet Swami Rama cautioned us that at the time of death, our spouse will not accompany us. This is a journey each one of us must undertake by ourselves.

Ultimately, each of us and the partner we love will be separated by divorce or death. These departures can be wrenchingly painful. Therefore the tradition urges us to love fully but without attachment. When I first became involved with yoga, I met numbers of young people who misunderstood the call for "nonattachment" to mean that yoga condoned multiple commitment-free relationships. Yet authentic spiritual masters demonstrate that there is no commitment in the universe more unshakable than that of a guru to his or her disciple. The teacher's love is unbounded even by space and time, reaching out across lifetimes. Those of us in committed relationships can learn from this, to love inexhaustibly. Still we must be prepared to calmly let go when our paths inevitably wend their separate ways. The inner pilgrimage is silent and solitary. In the final stage of life we learn to embrace that which has no form, but which endures after all forms have dissolved away.

The yoga tradition encourages us to seek out the companionship of our own Self. Much of the time our attention is so fully engaged with the people in our lives that we neglect our higher Self, that part of us sages tell us does not dissolve at death. That, after all, is the true Lover, and the source of all love. There can be no loneliness when we directly experience our true nature. The love we seek so urgently from others envelops us from within. Learning to attune to that inner radiance makes all the difference during crises in life, when otherwise we can feel hopelessly isolated. Ironically it's by turning to the Self that we directly experience the indivisible unity between master and disciple, between devoted husband and wife, and between all beings everywhere.

The Embrace of Spirit

During near death experiences, some people have reported they were completely enveloped in light and love. Mystical experiences also speak of infinite compassion. One saint I interviewed told me that during her first experience of samadhi, deep meditative absorption, she viscerally experienced the very essence of the cosmos as unlimited love. That single experience transformed her entire life. From that moment on, she could imagine no other way of living than selfless service and meditation.

Yoga scientists speak of God as nirguna, completely transcendent, consciousness so pure it borders on total emptiness. At other times they speak of this same Supreme Being as saguna, full of divine qualities, resonant with unconditional love. We are so distracted by the scenery, the images that unveil themselves before our eyes, the dramas that play out in our relationships, that we miss the all-embracing clasp of Spirit. Perhaps we'll experience it at the moment of our death. But why wait?

Perhaps paradoxically, as yoga students we are called on to cultivate both prema (love) and vairagya (detachment). Both, the sages say, are qualities of the divine. We uncover these same qualities in ourselves when we discover the divine within.

Some of our celebrity heroes model a cheap imitation of love, sparkling and valueless as faux diamonds. It ecstatically embraces an attractive partner, but soon this fraudulent love runs thin, and finally runs out. The lover is then discarded like an outfit that's gone out of style.

Today many of us remarry as often as our grandparents used to schedule dental appointments. Loving is not what it used to be. But love itself, real love, is always the same.

Real love is not something we fall into, or fall out of for that matter. Swami Rama called it "the most ancient traveler." It's beginningless and endless, present everywhere, but sensed most powerfully where it is most welcome. We should spend more time in meditation, cleaning out more space in our hearts, so that genuine love can take up residence there. Then the futile quest for perfect satisfaction in one failed relationship after another will be replaced by tranquil joy. Then, like the saints, we will pass the time simply sharing the love gleaming in our soul.

Linda Johnsen, M.S. is a regular contributor to Transformation, author of "Lost Masters: The Sages of Ancient Greece" and seven other books on spiritual life currently available at the AMI bookstore.

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