8 Rules of Love

• “What is the difference between like and love?” asks a student. The teacher responds, “When you like a flower, you pluck it. When you love a flower, you water it daily.”
• The Vedas describe four stages of life, and these are the classrooms in which we’ll learn the rules of love so that we can recognize and make the most of it when it comes our way.
• The four classrooms are: Brahmacharya ashram, Grhastha ashram, Vanaprastha ashram, and Sannyasa ashram.
• In the first ashram, Brahmacharya, we prepare for love.
• And we prepare for love by learning how to love ourselves in solitude. Alone, we learn to understand ourselves, to heal our own pain, and to care for ourselves. We acquire skills like compassion, empathy, and patience (Rule 1). This prepares us to share love because we’ll need these qualities when we love someone else. We will also examine our past relationships to avoid making the same mistakes in relationships going forward (Rule 2).
• The second ashram, Grhastha, is when we extend our love to others while still loving ourselves.
• We tend to oversimplify love, thinking of it as just chemistry and compatibility. Romance and attraction are indeed the initial connection points, but I define the deepest love as when you like someone’s personality, respect their values, and help them toward their goals in a long-term, committed relationship. You may feel this way about your friends, and I hope you do, but I am talking about maintaining these qualities when you live with someone, see them every single day, and are at their side for their greatest joys, biggest disappointments, and all the mundanity and intensity of daily life.
• In Grhastha we will examine how to know if you’re in love (Rule 3), how to learn and grow with your partner (Rule 4), and how to set priorities and manage personal time and space within your relationship (Rule 5).
• The Third Ashram: PROTECTING LOVE
• In Vanaprastha we learn how to resolve conflict so we can protect our love (Rule 6). We also protect ourselves and our ability to love by learning when to break up, and how to deal with it if we do (Rule 7).
• The Fourth Ashram: PERFECTING LOVE
• We learn how to love again and again (Rule 8). We strive for this perfection, but we never achieve it.

Part 1: Solitude: Learning to Love Yourself

• In the first ashram, Brahmacharya, we prepare for love by learning how to be alone and learning from our past relationships how to improve our next one. Alone, we learn to love ourselves, to understand ourselves, to heal our own pain, and to care for ourselves. We experience atma prema, self-love.

  I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.—HAFIZ

• Loneliness makes us rush into relationships; it keeps us in the wrong relationships; and it urges us to accept less than we deserve.
• We must use the time when we are single or take time alone when we are in a couple to understand ourselves, our pleasures, and our values. When we learn to love ourselves, we develop compassion, empathy, and patience. Then we can use those qualities to love someone else. In this way, being alone—not lonely, but comfortable and confident in situations where we make our own choices, follow our own lead, and reflect on our own experience—is the first step in preparing ourselves to love others.
• “Language has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”
• The difference between loneliness and solitude is the lens through which we see our time alone, and how we use that time. The lens of loneliness makes us insecure and prone to bad decisions. The lens of solitude makes us open and curious. As such, solitude is the foundation on which we build our love.
• Solitude is not a failure to love. It is the beginning of love. During the time we spend without a sidekick, we move through the world differently, more alert to ourselves and the world.
• In fact, studies show that if we never allow ourselves solitude, it’s just plain harder for us to learn.
• when we avoid solitude, we struggle to develop our skills.
• There are three stages on the way from loneliness to solitude: presence, discomfort, and confidence.
• Presence - The first step to making use of your solitude is being present with yourself. Even when we’re not with other people, we’re often busy, distracted, and distanced from our own lives. When we pay attention to how we feel and what choices we’re making, we learn what we prioritize in life—our values. Those values steer how we make decisions. Being present and seeing your values gives you a sense of who you are, and you get to decide if that’s the person you want to be. You spend more time with yourself than anyone else in your lifetime. Take the time to appreciate your strengths and admit the areas where you need work. Then, when you enter a relationship with someone else, you’ll already have a sense of what you’re bringing to the table and where you could improve. We don’t think about the importance of bringing self-knowledge to a relationship, but being self-aware means you can temper your weaknesses and play to your strengths.
• Discomfort- If you’re not in the habit of spending time by yourself, it may feel awkward and uncomfortable at first. It can be hard to be alone with your thoughts. You might feel like you’re not achieving anything or you don’t know what to do with yourself. You might feel like there’s no obvious benefit to it.
• Knowing more about ourselves and what we enjoy helps us feel comfortable in solitude. We’ll be more willing to spend time pursuing our interests without needing the safety net of a companion. The activities you choose and what you learn about yourself from those activities will expand your self-awareness and help you make the most of the time you spend alone.
• Confidence - is important in a relationship because it helps us talk to the person we like without seeking their approval or hinging our self-esteem on their reaction. When we aren’t looking for them to validate our tastes and choices, we can appreciate their kind words without being misled or distracted by them.
• We need to get in the habit of assessing ourselves and making efforts to improve our own lives.
• In a relationship, remember that until you act on your goals, your partner won’t know that they are truly important to you.
• Once you’re spending productive time in solitude, you begin to know your own personality, values, and goals. During this process, you develop qualities that prepare you for love at every stage of a relationship in several ways.
• When we’re alone we fully rely on ourselves, figure out what we care about, and learn who we are. We learn to navigate challenges on our own. We can, of course, welcome help if it comes along, but we don’t expect or depend on it.
• There is nothing wrong with attraction, but we are easily carried away by what looks appealing, feels good, or sounds right. In solitude we learn to create space between sensory stimulation and decision-making.
• If we don’t understand ourselves, we risk taking on the tastes and values of our partner. Their vision becomes our vision. We might choose to sign on to someone’s vision because we admire it—
• Solitude helps you recognize that there is a you before, a you during, and a you after every relationship, forging your own way even when you have company and love.
• Two of the key skills we learn in solitude are self-control and patience. They’re connected, because the more we improve our self-control, the more patient we can be. Without these two skills we become prone to following our senses and whatever attracts us.
• Self-control is the time and space you create between the moment when you’re attracted to something and the moment you react to it.
• Solitude gives us time and space between attraction and reaction.
• Synching with other people can log us in to their bad vibes as well as their good ones. This is why we need to self-regulate, comforting ourselves, calming ourselves down, or pepping ourselves up. If we’re always turning toward others to help us tune how we feel, we’ll stay more like that infant who is incapable of self-soothing and self-supporting.
• A relationship with someone else won’t cure your relationship with yourself.
• When you come to a relationship as a whole person, without looking for someone to complete you or to be your better half, you can truly connect and love. You know how you like to spend your time, what’s important to you, and how you’d like to grow. You have the self-control to wait for someone you can be happy with and the patience to appreciate someone you’re already with. You realize that you can bring value to someone else’s life. With this foundation, you’re ready to give love without neediness or fear.
• You want to go on a journey with someone, not to make them your journey.
• Any step toward knowing yourself in solitude will help you love others because in addition to knowing what you bring to the table, the very process of learning to understand and love yourself helps you understand the effort required to love someone else.
• Perhaps the most important lesson solitude offers is helping us understand our own imperfection. This prepares us to love someone else, in all their beauty and imperfection.

  Do not be led by others, awaken your own mind, amass your own experience, and decide for yourself your own path.—ATHARVA VEDA

• People think karma means that if you do something bad, bad things will happen to you,
• Karma is more about the mindset in which we make a decision. If we make a choice or take action with or without proper understanding, we receive a reaction based on that choice.
• Punishment and reward are not karma’s purpose. Rather, karma is trying to teach you—in this case transparency and honesty. I don’t want you to attribute every good or bad thing in your life or the world to karma. That’s not productive. Karma is more useful as a tool than as an explanation. It enables you to use your past experiences to make the best choices now.
• Karma is a mirror, showing us where our choices have led us.
• In our search for love, we subconsciously try to repeat or repair our past experiences. We imitate or reject. But we often give these early influences undue weight. They affect our choices, for better and worse. They interfere with our judgment more than we realize.
• If there is a gap in how our parents raised us, we look to others to fill it. And if there is a gift in how our parents raised us, we look to others to give us the same.
• We first seek validation from those closest to us. Then, unsatisfied, we look for it from everyone. And finally, we find it in ourselves.
• The people who had held the warm coffee described the individuals they read about as being substantially warmer in personality than those who had held the iced coffee. (So the next time you arrange a first date, you might want to take them for a nice hot cocoa instead of an ice cream sundae.)
• The promise of a happily ever after turns out to be an obstacle to happily ever after.
• In other words—if you don’t learn anything, you repeat the same mistake. Karma encourages you to reflect on the choice, the reason you made it, and what you should do differently next time.
• Generally, men have lower levels of oxytocin than women, but sex causes men’s oxytocin levels to spike more than 500 percent. New York University neuroscientist Robert Froemke says that oxytocin acts like a volume dial, “turning up and amplifying brain activity related to whatever someone is already experiencing.” During and after sex, we feel more in love, but it’s not actually love. We feel closer chemically even though we’re not closer emotionally. Additionally, the hormone actually has a temporary blocking effect on negative memories, so all of those “little things” that were bothering you or that argument you had beforehand—which might have been a major warning sign—could fade after sex.
• In psychology, the halo effect is a type of cognitive bias where we form an inaccurate impression of someone or something based on a single trait or characteristic. For instance, if someone is attractive, we’re more likely to assign other positive attributes to them, like intelligence, wit, or kindness.
• When we see a good-looking person, we might make unconscious assumptions that they’re wealthier, or more ambitious, or more likable, and so on, and this can influence our attraction to them.
• Being attracted to our partners for what they have or what they’ve achieved is not a bad place to start, but it’s not a good place to end.
• The only way we can know what qualities a person truly has is by spending time with them and observing them. Only when we know someone intimately and deeply do we find the sweetness in them.
• It’s important to put out the version of yourself that you want someone to be attracted to, as opposed to the version of yourself that you think someone would be attracted to. These are two different things. If you attract someone through a persona, then you’re either going to have to fake being that promotable person forever, or they’re eventually going to discover the real you.
• Our relationships aren’t supposed to be responses to what our parents did and didn’t give us or balms for the insecurities of our youth. If we look to our partners to fill an emotional gap, this puts undue pressure on our partner. We are asking them to take responsibility for our happiness. That’s like saying, “I won’t drive my car until my partner puts gas in it.” Why wait for someone else to make you feel good? And that’s why it’s so deeply important that we heal ourselves, taking charge of that process instead of shifting blame and responsibility to a partner. If we’re trying to fill an old void, we’ll choose the wrong partner. A partner can’t fill every gap. They can’t unpack our emotional baggage for us. Once we fulfill our own needs, we’re in a better place to see what a relationship can give us.

Part 2: Compatibility: Learning to Love Others

• The second ashram, Grhastha, is the stage of life when we extend our love to others while still loving ourselves. This stage introduces the challenges of learning to understand, appreciate, and cooperate with another mind, another set of values, and another set of likes and dislikes on a daily basis. Here we explore the challenges of kama/ maitri—loving others.
• A survey showed that men are quicker to say “I love you” than women, taking an average of 88 days. A whopping 39 percent of them declare their love within the first month. Women take an average of 134 days, and 23 percent of them declare their love in month one. It’s hard to imagine that the people who feel love within weeks actually live up to what their partners think that statement means.
• You may feel like you know someone because you’ve spent time with them and you like their personality, but you may not know their dreams, their values, their priorities, the things that matter to them. You think you know their heart, but you just know their mind. Love takes time.
• Phase One: Attraction
• Lust is governed more by testosterone and estrogen, whereas attraction includes dopamine (the reward chemical) and norepinephrine (the brain’s version of adrenaline, which when combined with dopamine can generate that feeling of euphoria around the target of our attraction).
• The Three-Date Rule. In my experience working with clients, three dates usually provide enough time to determine if you and another person would be a good match. These three dates don’t have to be your first three dates, and you don’t have to do them one after another. You can spread them out. Sometimes it’s nice to just see a movie!
• In these dates you’ll focus on three areas: whether you like their personality, whether you respect their values, and whether you would like to help them achieve their goals.
• First, we start with personality because it’s the easiest thing to spot, understand, and connect with. In their personality, you’ll see how their past has shaped them. Second, you’ll explore their values, which define who they are today. And third, you’ll try to recognize their goals, which encapsulate what they want in the future.
• What’s something you love to do? Do you have a favorite place? Is there a book or movie you’ve read or seen more than once? What is occupying your thoughts most at the moment? What’s something you wish you knew more about? What’s the best meal you’ve ever had?
• Here are some uncommon questions you can try out on Date Two that will help you learn what they find interesting, how they deal with challenges, what they value, how they tolerate risk, and how they make decisions. Who’s the most fascinating person you’ve ever met? What’s the most out-of-character thing you’ve ever done or would like to do? Have you ever had a big plot twist in your life? If you won the lottery, what would you spend the money on? What’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done? What is a tough thing you dealt with in your past? What makes you proud? What would you do if you had enough money to not need a job?
• Do you have a dream you’d like to fulfill one day—a job, a trip, an accomplishment? What would you like to change about your life? If you could meet anyone, who would it be? Is there a single moment or experience that changed your life? Is there someone you consider to be your greatest teacher?
• Phase Two: Dreams
• How you handle your differences is more important than finding your similarities.
• Instead of chasing the dream of what it might be to live happily ever after with this person, spend time getting to know them, building your connection.
• Dreams are an illusion. Reality is far more interesting.
• Phase Three: Struggle and Growth
• Phase Four: Trust
• Trust begins with ourselves. We need to be trustworthy. This means aligning what we think, say, and do.
• We trust people more when they make us feel safe, when they make healthy decisions, and when we feel like they conduct their life based on values that we agree with. To evaluate the depth and breadth of your trust for your partner, consider these three aspects: physical trust, mental trust, and emotional trust. Physical trust is when you feel safe and cared for in their presence. They want to be with you, they’re present and attentive, and being around them feels good. Mental trust is when you trust their mind, their ideas, their thoughtfulness. You may not agree with every decision they make, but you trust the way they make decisions. Emotional trust is when you trust their values and who they are as a human. Do they treat you well? Are they supportive? Do you trust how they behave not just with you but with the other people in their life, from close friends to a waiter?
• Trust builds very slowly and needs to be nurtured and sustained. Think of it as growing by percentage points. Each time someone thinks, says, and does the same thing, trust grows by one percentage point.
• In the beginning, you trust them to speak the truth—about whom they’re with, what they’re doing, and what they think. Each time they do, trust grows another point. Then, as we ask them to understand our emotions and they listen, the points add up. When we share our faults, trust grows further. But trust fluctuates. If they fail to understand us or they mislead us or they betray us, our level of trust sinks and needs to be rebuilt. When we overcome a challenge together, trust grows again. We begin to trust them with our plans and dreams. And finally, we trust them enough to share our trauma with them.
• Once in a place of trust and commitment, you and your partner reveal yourselves to each other, and share more of yourselves than you allow anyone else to see.

  Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

• there isn’t one guru and one student. You are both gurus and students for each other.
• Your partner should be someone you want to learn with and learn from and learn through, and vice versa.
• A guru offers guidance without judgment, wisdom without ego, love without expectation.
• But if you think your partner should do what you want when you want, I want to change how you look at your partner. That’s not a relationship, that’s ownership. Ownership is born of control.
• A good partnership is transactional. Transactions are part of getting along with another person. We figure out schedules, we coordinate responsibilities, we balance our lives. But a great relationship needs more than transactions. It needs growth. Love is not just compliance or trade. Love is working through it together.
• Life becomes more enjoyable when you know each other, watch each other grow, and grow together.
• You have to put effort into a relationship in order to get something out of it—but it’s not a vending machine. You can’t put in effort and expect an immediate, guaranteed reward. What you invest will have to be heartfelt and true, and what you receive will be illuminating.
• Become a Better Guru
  • Do Not Lead, Serve
  • Set a Good Example
  • Support Their Goals, Not Yours
  • Guide Them to Learn in Their Own Way
  • Don’t Criticize, Judge, or Abuse
• A guru doesn’t hesitate to play any position if it helps their student. There is no ego involved. The guru is honored and grateful to support another. A real guru doesn’t want power but empowers their partner.
• Wanting to help our partner should not be confused with wanting to control our partner.
• if you approach your studies diligently enough, with an open mind and heart, you can learn even more from a mediocre teacher than you might from a great one.
• Become a Better Student
  • Be Open-Minded and Curious
  • Practice Humility
  • Be a Good Translator
  • Appreciate the Guru
  • Your Guru Is Not Your God
• Humility is honoring other people’s skills, abilities, and growth rather than dishonoring your own.
• “Most people don’t listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” There are three steps to responding effectively when your partner shares an issue they have with you. First echo what they said, then say what you heard, explaining it back to them in your own words. Finally, when you’re sure that you both understand the issue at hand, tell them how you feel. We tend to respond with what we feel first, using what they said to justify our feelings.
• Just because you learn from them doesn’t mean you shape yourself to their ideal and stop learning from anyone else. It doesn’t mean you stop going to other people for different activities and insights. Your partner is your guru, not your god. They help you become better, but they aren’t better than you.

  The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.—DAVID VISCOTT

• Dharma is the intersection of passion, expertise, and service. Living in your dharma means that you’ve connected your natural talents and interests with a need that exists in the universe. Your dharma doesn’t have to be your job. You’re fortunate if you can earn a living following your calling, but that isn’t always possible.
• Your dharma is a journey, not a destination. It can take a long time to find the ways to best extract meaning, joy, and fulfillment from your pursuits. As long as a person is pursuing their purpose, they’re already living it.
• Your purpose has to come first for you, and your partner’s purpose has to come first for them. Then you come together with the positive energy and stability that come from pursuing your purposes.
• In every relationship there are actually three relationships: your relationship with each other, your relationship with your purpose, and your partner’s relationship with their purpose.
• If you want to truly love someone and give them your best self, then you have to be your best self.
• The Pyramid of Purpose
  • Learn — Devote time to learning in the area of your purpose
  • Experiment — Take what you learned and try it out for yourself in order to discover what works for you and what doesn’t
  • Thrive — Perform your purpose, building consistency and steadiness in what you’re doing
  • Struggle — Face the challenges that inevitably come and use them for growth
  • Win — Celebrate successes, big and small
• Help Your Partner Prioritize Their Purpose
  • Help Them Learn
  • Help Them Experiment
  • Give Them Time and Space
  • Be Patient When They Struggle
  • Celebrate the Small Wins
• As Albert Einstein said, “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”
• We complain when people are late, but we never thank them for being on time.
• Two Purposes Collide
  • Pursue Your Purposes After Hours
  • Give One Person’s Purpose Priority
  • Take Turns Prioritizing Your Purposes
  • Go All In on Both People’s Purposes
• When you’re a part of each other’s growth, you don’t grow apart from each other.

Part 3: Healing: Learning to Love Through Struggle

• Vanaprastha is where we reflect on the experience of loving others, discover what blocks our ability to love, and work on forgiveness and healing. In Vanaprastha we learn how to resolve conflict so we can protect our love or know when to let go of love. In the course of overcoming difficulties in relationships or in finding ourselves alone again, we discover the possibility of bhakti, a deepening of love.

  Conflict is the beginning of consciousness.—M. ESTHER HARDING

• Every couple fights—or should.
• Every time one of you loses, you both lose. Every time the problem loses, you both win.
• One of the biggest factors in a long-lasting relationship is knowing how to fight.
• when partners can express anger to each other in healthy ways, they build certain qualities and abilities. The qualities—such as compassion, empathy, and patience—help you understand the challenge. The abilities—like communication, listening, and understanding—help you solve equal or greater challenges in the future.
• How to Have Productive Arguments
  • Purify the Ego
  • Diagnose the Core Problem
  • Know Your Fight Styles
• the reality is that most couples are navigating their issues on their own. Everyone wants the other person to be the one to back down and take responsibility, but if neither of you steps up, both of you might end up waiting indefinitely. To resolve a conflict, at least one of you will have to rise to neutrality so you can guide and shape the conversation with an even hand.
• Don’t waste time arguing about something you don’t care about. Instead, find the actual problem.
• Identifying your partner’s fight style and your own is the first step toward fighting for love.
• In their book Dimensions of Body Language, the Westside Toastmasters organization describes sitting next to one another as “the co-operative position” because it “allows for good eye contact and the opportunity for mirroring,” where we assume a similar posture or body movements as the other person. Just like repeating some of what the other person says back to them, physical mirroring helps people feel like you’re hearing them, and ideally you actually are hearing them. Sitting or walking next to someone helps mirroring happen naturally.
• Most arguments are you, you, you, you, you, me, me, me, me, me. This is what you did to me. If all your language is oriented around yourself, you’re creating a divide. Your partner will respond with defensive words like “I would never do that. I’m not like that. This is your problem.” Before you go deep into your individual feelings, establish the intention that unites you. Then you can hear each other’s feelings in light of that intention.

  Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.—RUMI

• Being judged in the short term is better than being stuck in the wrong situation for the long term.
• in the aftermath of cheating, it’s natural to want to end the relationship immediately, and that may be the right decision. But it can be hard to tell when emotions are running hot. “Even if you’re still not sure whether the [relationship] can be saved,” she writes, “you shouldn’t make your decision based on the lowest point in your relationship.… To do the hard work ahead of exploring the meaning of the infidelity, you will need to build a foundation of commitment, caring, and compassionate communication.” For the partner who was cheated on, that includes putting your own best foot forward. “You and your partner can work together to create a healing atmosphere that is calm, where information can be shared and where caring begins to bind you together again. [And you] can start making specific repairs to the relationship that will help each of you feel more connected.”
• A client of mine says she has friends she can talk to for hours, but she doesn’t know what to talk to her girlfriend about. She asked me if that meant her girlfriend wasn’t “the one.” I told her that in the same way a plant needs sun, water, soil, nutrients, and shelter, we need to keep tending our relationship for it to flourish over time. You may say, well, why don’t I just buy a new plant? But if you move on, you’d have to learn to water that plant every day too.
• As a quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt goes, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
• A 2000 study commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association (no bias there!) found that couples who traveled together are significantly happier and healthier in their relationships. Eighty-six percent of couples who travel together said that their romance was alive and 63 percent believe that traveling actually inspires romance. And 68 percent of couples believe that traveling together for leisure is necessary for a healthy relationship. According to the report, traveling helped people prioritize each other. When you get away together, you’re better able to set aside your other obligations and focus on each other.
• The more vulnerable you are when you experiment, the more intimacy you’ll feel.
• Research shows that play is the mental state in which we learn best, and that play is essential for our mental health. When you attempt a new and challenging activity together in a space where success doesn’t matter, you can both let go and learn.
• When you accomplish something new together, you bring that experience to all areas of your life.
• anything that arouses our senses—can help to revive and refresh our interest in our partner. Their takeaway was that “a small amount of stress can spur amorous feelings.”
• Research shows that areas activated in the brain when we’re in love are the same as those involved in cocaine addiction. So the way your brain experiences a breakup is kind of like the misery of detox. Just as addicts crave a fix, we can literally crave the other person. This happens in part because our brains flood with chemical messengers that are part of our reward and motivation circuitry. Our brain sends urgent signals that we should hurry up and retrieve what’s missing.
• when your relationship crumbles, you are not what’s breaking. Your soul doesn’t end. Your expectations of your partner are breaking. What you thought you were building with them is breaking. What you had together is breaking. That’s where the hurt comes from. But you have not lost your purpose. You have not lost yourself. Something is breaking, but you are not that something. You existed before this relationship, and you will outlast it. When you think about your consciousness this way, you start to separate yourself from the pain that you feel in the moment.
• Avoiding pain today increases pain tomorrow.
• The law of karma states that everyone will receive an equal and opposite reaction to their action.
• we have different worth to different people.
• If you have an intrusive thought, ask yourself, do I like this thought? Is this thought useful? Is this thought insightful? Is this thought helping me move forward? This is how we move from the mind’s conversation to the intellect’s conversation.

Part 4: Connection: Learning to Love Everyone

• The fourth ashram, Sannyasa, is when we extend our love to each and every person and area of our life.

  The river that flows in you also flows in me.—KABIR DAS

• We are connected, and when we serve others, we are serving ourselves.
• Why limit love to one person or one family? Why experience love only with a few people? When we expand our radius of love, we have the opportunity to experience love every day, at every moment.
• When Kabir Das, the fifteenth-century Indian poet and saint, wrote, “The river that flows in you also flows in me,” he was suggesting that we’re connected to all humanity through our actions, words, behaviors, and breath. We impact one another in all we do.
• “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.”
• The joy we feel from serving others has been labeled the “helper’s high” or “giver’s glow,”
• helper’s high not only endured for several weeks of service, it came back when people simply recalled their service. And helper’s high doesn’t just feel good in our brains; it’s accompanied by lower levels of stress hormones and improved immune system function.
• Instead of expecting love, we have to find ways of expressing love.
• We’ve been taught to believe that the only way you can experience love is when you receive it, but the Vedas say you can feel love anytime you want simply by connecting with the love that is always within you.
• Try to love someone for the spark in them, not what surrounds them.
• The easiest (and safest) way for us to give love to the people who cross our path is to smile.
• the greatest way to experience love is to give it.
• You can seek love your whole life and never find it, or you can give love your whole life and experience joy. Experience it, practice it, and create it instead of waiting for it to find you. The more you do this, the more you will experience the depths of love from different people throughout every single day for the rest of your life.