360 Degrees – Love

“Love is a noble quality that needs to be intensely called upon from deep within the heart. Keep on focusing your life on Love. It is at the root of any process. Yet, Love is not innate in everyone. One has to call on it intensely and make it one’s daily food to quench one’s thirst continuously at the Source. But the practice of Sahaj Marg [Heartfulness] brings convincing results. It opens the Heart.

“Love attracts Love.”- Swami Vivekananda

I have often read this quote by Swami Vivekananda and sat in meditation; with a deep and sincere prayer, admitting, that perhaps I did not know how to call upon love intensely, and yet with a deep desire to cultivate it in the innermost recesses of my heart, so that my heart can flower with lightness, joy and peace, nurtured by its presence.

I feel so much hope in Heartfulness because it makes the presence of that which is intangible, tangible. As I sat in prayer, admitting that I did not know how to call upon love intensely, a wave of deep absorption took over, and I experienced a feeling of almost unearthly joy, lightness, and bliss.

In the middle of this experience, I found myself feeling nearly sad, for I knew that I would have to open my eyes and come back to the real world! Instead, I found myself correcting myself – that the world I had experienced, indeed, was very real. I just had to carry it in my heart, through the day. How much easier, and wonderful our world would be, if we could bring those states into our lives, by the minute!

Even though I am in the process of cultivating it, as humans, I believe we are deeply privileged to have experienced this beautiful energy and the beautiful things it can do. One night, as I lay in a hospital bed in pain, unable to sleep and crying, my father sat beside me, gently caressing my hands and my back. The next thing my father did was to take my hand in his and close his eyes.

As if his hand were a disk, I felt waves of Love radiate 360 degrees from his hands. Before I could realize it, I was asleep. The next day, as I shared my experience, my father said that the only thing he had done was to hold my hand in his, with a prayer. The essence of Heartfulness – transmission – had played its magic.

There have been other times, when I have sat in meditation; and perhaps without realizing, even held a slight resistance. Yet, by the end of the meditation, my head bows down in humility to the love being bestowed and carrying us gracefully through life. I believe Love is like immunity. When we have the time – especially, when times are rosy, those are the opportunities from nature to intensely cultivate it and call upon it from the heart. That way, when life brings upon us its own set of challenges, Love – which is always right, and bigger than any force in the Universe – will hold us through life, and ask of us that which needs to be done.