Image source – Pixabay

We are called humans because of the many emotions we exhibit in various situations. No animal species possess such a vast amount of different emotions. Emotions like anger, fear, lust, frustration, etc. are what make us humans. Most of these emotions prove to be detrimental to our physical and physiological well-being. It becomes difficult to control these emotions and you may end up harming others or yourself. It doesn’t mean that you can’t overcome these emotions. You should try to alleviate the effect of these emotions by embracing emotions that produce a positive effect on your mind and body. The only emotion that could keep other emotions under control is love.

Love is an emotion that is found in all the animals in the world including humans. It comes out with more profoundness in the case of humans. Like any other emotion, love also can’t be quantified but it could be expressed in several ways. The more you use it the more it allows you to find peace in life and spread joy around you. Love keeps you in constant touch with other human emotions and expressions. It subdues them whenever they try to override your body, mind, and soul. Practicing love in any situation keeps your emotions in check and provides much-needed peace to sort out things.

How to practice love all the time?

Is love connected to spirituality?

What is the spiritual meaning of love?

There is not much difference in spirituality and love. Most of the spiritual masters have used love as a tool to reach spiritual heights. Love is the main ingredient of most of the spiritual practices we see in the world today. There is no doubt that love is deeply connected to spirituality and you need to dig deep if you want to know what is the spiritual meaning of love.

What is Love?

You can describe love in many ways. Giving a toffee to a child, hugging a random person, presenting something to your wife all these activities may amount to love. But if you observe keenly, you will notice that all these activities involve some exchange. The purity and sanctity of love are somewhat lowered when you show it as a reaction of an exchange. Humans are hard-wired to such love, and they fail to distinguish between conditional and unconditional love. You need to have a broader perspective of love to understand it completely. Spirituality is the only tool that can make you understand love in its purest form.

When you express love without any reason or expectation, that love becomes free from any conditioning. It takes a lot of dedication and practice to free love from other emotions and conditions. Taking a spiritual path may ease the process of making love unconditional and devoid of any negative emotions. Love is a basic element of all the spiritual process. Once you involve yourself in spiritual practice, you start seeing love in its real form. You will eventually find the answer to the question of what is the spiritual meaning of love.

Spiritual Meaning of Love

The spiritual meaning of love depends on several factors. Spiritual love could be expressed at different levels. It depends on the intensity, depth, and knowledge you already have about love. Love is founded on several positive emotions that make it strong and untenable. If are holding negative emotions inside your heart and mind, then it would become difficult to understand the meaning of love through spirituality. Spiritual love needs positive emotions like compassion, empathy, sympathy, caring, and sharing.

Let’s see these emotions one by one and understand how they answer the question of what is the spiritual meaning of love.

· Compassion – Compassion is one of the closest expressions that make love stronger. It doesn’t require anything or expects anything in return. Being compassionate to others’ sorrow, distress, and misery gives strengths to others in their difficult times. Compassion is nothing but spreading love through sharing their sorrows and distress. Giving them much-needed comfort by showing them, love. Making them come out of the situation as soon as possible and prepare themselves to face life again. If you want to strengthen the love, you have in your heart, show compassion to people around you whenever they are in need.

· Empathy – Being empathetic towards an individual or community is the best form of showing your concern for them. Empathy is an expression that allows you to understand the plight of a person and the problem he is facing. Without being empathetic towards a distressed situation, you can’t understand it completely. Empathy allows you to share the feelings of people facing a bad situation or going through a difficult phase. An empathetic individual is bound to show more love towards people around him. Such unconditional behavior would eventually make the love stronger in his heart.

· Sympathy – Sympathy is a lot similar to empathy but with a slight difference. When you feel sympathetic about a person’s misfortune, you would try to find a solution for him and provide much-needed succor. Being sympathetic means you are ready to share a part of the struggle or problem of an individual. You can’t be sympathetic towards a person or a cause if your heart is not filled with love. The love nudges you to show sympathy and in turn, gets much-needed strength to grow further.

· Caring – Caring for someone is an expression that is only a step away from love. You can’t take care of a person without having love in your heart. Caring is an expression that needs pure dedication towards an individual or a cause. You can’t achieve it without pure and unconditional. Of course, you may care for a person expecting some reward but there won’t be any exchange love. So don’t act like you are caring unless you are ready to show love.

· Sharing – We all learn to share things from our childhood. Our parents tried to imbibe the attitude of sharing in us because they knew that it would eventually lead to the sharing of love. We see the purest form of sharing in children because they share without any condition or expectation. If you cultivate the attitude of sharing consciously, love would eventually grow at enormous speed.

Forms of Spiritual Love

Love generally involves showing affection to an individual or people. When it becomes spiritually aware, the same love transforms into a higher emotion. A spiritually aware love transcends all the boundaries of enmity and hatred. It looks at every aspect of life in a balanced way and treats everything equally. Understanding spiritual love is essential if you want to go beyond materialistic love.

Spiritual love may be acquired by understanding different forms of love. Though it is difficult to divide spiritual love into different forms, it is the only way to educate people about spiritual love. Let’s see the three forms of spiritual love to understand what is the spiritual meaning of love.

· Self Love – Loving oneself is considered as the lowest form of love. But when you embrace spiritual self-love, it may open the doors to other forms of love. Spiritual self-love involves loving yourself without any condition. Loving yourself with all your follies, drawbacks, and weaknesses is considered as spiritual self-love. If you hate yourself by comparing your abilities with others, you divert yourself from spiritual love. To experience other forms of love you must love yourself without any condition.

· Communal Love – Once you start loving yourself with all your heart, it becomes easy to love everything around you in the same way. Whether it is animals, people, or objects, you should be able to love them without any reason. You should also hold the same position even if they show hatred towards you. Acquiring such love needs a large heart and unwavering will power. Communal love is the next level of self-love and covers a wide range of living and non-living beings. One way to gather spiritually enhanced communal love is to consider everyone and everything around you as yourself. Once you start seeing yourself in everything, it becomes easy to spread spiritual love.

· Absolute Love – Absolute love consists of nothing but love. No people, animals, or objects come into the picture when you acquire absolute love. It the higher form of love where nothing matters but love. Absolute love transcends everything around you including yourself. It helps you to understand higher forms of spirituality. When you are embraced by absolute love, pain, sadness, sorrow, hatred, etc. vanish without any trace. Attaining absolute love is the goal of many spiritual practitioners.

Conclusion

You may or may not understand what is the spiritual meaning of love after reading this article. But one thing is sure that you are trying to understand what is love in its entirety. It is a good sign and you should keep exploring different avenues to understand spiritual love. You should trust your guts and intuition to find the true path of love.

So don’t stop and keep looking for love in all the forms.