
“When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”
What exactly is the realm of love? You know you have entered the realm of love when you have fallen in love with life itself. When you have gained an attitude of radical acceptance. When amor fati (love of fate) has become your mantra.
When you realize that life is too short not to fall in love with it and that life is way too long if you cannot, then you are ready to enter the realm of love.
Falling in love with life means being Love itself. It means allowing love to be free. It’s being in love with life as it comes. It’s accepting that everything is connected and deciding to be in love with the whole bit: the trauma, the drama, and the karma. It’s loving in an attempt to understand, discover, and co-create rather than control, own, or codependently stagnate.
The smoothest way to fall in love with life is to remain deeply curious and discover a profound sense of awe. When you’re curious, you’re engaged, hungry, and eager for novelty. When you’re in awe, you’re enthralled, enraptured, and inspired to live more fully. You’re on the edge of your seat eagerly anticipating the next chapter.
Your life’s mission becomes clear. Your passion becomes your purpose. Your immortality project becomes a reality. You feel it. You fall in love with it. Through and through. You become hungry for further heightened states of awareness.
Falling in love with life is a sense of oneness with all things. It is a feeling of unity, a surrendering of our separateness into the universal. Falling in love is being love. You cannot love unconditionally. You can only be unconditional love.
The Greeks have five words for the concept of love: Eros, sexual love; Storge, familial love; Phileo, friendly love; Xenia, hospitable love; and Agape, divine love. Being love is agape love. It transcends all other forms of love. When you are being love, you are in love with all of life—good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, tragic or comic.
Being love is unselfish, unconditional love for all things. It leaves you in a state of wonder and awe, soul-hungry for more beauty, more mystery, more life. When you are practicing agape love, you are practicing sacred presence.
When you are being love (unconditional), you’re in love with the interconnected cosmos (soul-centric) and you feel free, interdependent, passionate, alive, and connected. When you’re not being love (conditional), you’re only in love with your ego’s attachment to love (ego-centric) and you feel clingy, codependent, angsty, and disconnected.
When you’ve learned how to be unconditional love, then you know you have entered the realm of love. The question is, how do you get there? Here are four steps…
First: dissolve unhealthy boundaries:
“Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.” ~Jose Ortega y Gasset
As far as the realm of love is concerned, your comfort zone is a stifling thing. It may keep you safe, warm, and secure, but it will also keep you closed-in, mollycoddled, and placated. It’s a great place for a fragile ego, but it’s a terrible place for a courageous soul.
You cannot reach the realm of love if you’re clinging to a tiny comfort zone. You must be able to stretch your comfort zone into subsuming the realm of love. You must be able to transform your ego’s attachment to love into your soul’s detachment to unconditional love.
The best way to do this is to seek solitude and meditation in nature. The worst way to do this is to experience ego death in a Dark Night of the Soul.
Second: embrace vulnerability:
“There are heights of the soul from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic.” ~Nietzsche
Once you’ve dared to stretch your comfort zone and your soul has been invigorated with adventurous curiosity and wonder, it’s time to get vulnerable. It’s time to let down your guard. It’s time to ask the tough questions, to defy rigid answers, and to let go of your attachment to comfort.
Vulnerability is courage, and vice versa. It takes courage to be open, and openness is courageous. Especially when it comes to love.
It takes courageous questioning