“I feel so happy, I found him, it is crazy, I feel like hugging the whole world!” I must say I get emails like these quiet often from my clients. In ecstasy of love, have you felt your heart exploding with bliss? Have you ever felt even a few days of separation being a torcher? Sadly this ecstatic feeling disappears after the initial high wears off. Where did all that love go?–What is Love? The dictionary definition is a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
Love is the greatest force in the Universe, we are constantly trying to become one with this attractive force whether we know it or not. This insatiable seeking towards underlying oneness is probably the true goal of all lovers where a lover longs to unite with his beloved.
Often people tell me emphatically, “Vish, I don’t believe in Soul Mates,” “True love does not exist,” or, “I’m just not lucky in love.” How frequently I’ve heard, “All the good ones are taken,” or, “You have no idea what I have gone through,” or, “Dating is not working; I have tried everything.” Irrespective of how these people phrase it, they are all saying the same thing: “Every relationship I have been in has led to either pain or hurt or emptiness, so you better show me something extraordinary before I even consider what you have to say.”
So why are people feeling so disillusioned? Why is love so elusive? The reason is simple: We have blocked ourselves off by putting so many conditions around love and neither do we understand what love really means.
As the great love poet Rumi once said, “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.” He was right: Our challenge lies in our frequent inability to break those barriers within us to experience love every day, every moment. These blocks are part of our conditioned ego that veils or inhibits our true inner nature and gives rise to confining walls that come from our own prejudices, personality weaknesses, selfishness, and negative emotional experiences with fear, hurt, and anger.
These barriers block our ability to know love, feel love, and give and receive love. This is detrimental to our personal growth. So what is Love really? Love is the very nature of our being, and a source of eternal joy and bliss for us. Love is so much more than its superficial depictions in movies, books and the media; it is much more than just an emotional experience; it is the very core of who we are! So if we block love, we continually feel disconnected from whom we really are.
We can begin to remove our walls by asking ourselves some fundamental questions before seeking a relationship or understand what love really means: What is the purpose of a relationship? What is the purpose of love? What is the goal of marriage? Is there a purpose at all? A lot of times we don’t know what we want, we attend only to immediate wants and needs, and we listen to what society thinks love must be and entail. When we lack a clear conception of love, we don’t know what we are looking for. But if we have one—we will find love!
The easiest way to understand love is to learn to give unconditional friendship to someone; nothing more, nothing less. To be called a lover, we first must learn to be a friend; to experience love, we first must be a giver. Then, in an experiential sense when it comes to feeling love, that experience in us (in its highest sense) is an integrated, expanding, and holistic experience of truth, consciousness, and joy. Meaning, if you are in love right now, your experience must satisfy simultaneously these three conditions:
- True & Unconditional: The Love you feel must be based on truth (must be lasting, come rain or sunshine, the love must be unconditional and permanent).
- Love Consciousness: You must be conscious of the love experience. (You must feel completely loved , here in this moment exactly as you are, irrespective of your flaws)
- Joy in Love: You must feel joy every time you think of the person or situation yes, every time you relive it, your heart must explode with happiness every time without exception.
All experiences of love meet these conditions. Think of a time when a wonderful man or woman may have said, “I love you,” to you, and you were swept off our feet. For a few moments, days, weeks, or months after that, you experienced incredible love from within—from the very core of your being—and you declared passionately, “I am in love!” When two individuals experience oneness in love this way, there is an incredible ecstatic high.
Well, what really happened here? Your romantic partner was just a key who unlocked and awakened the love already present inside of you, just waiting to be discovered. It didn’t come from outside. The two of you were awakening one another’s love incessantly, with no limits, no separation. Even if the relationship turned out to be only temporary, you knew you had unleashed and tapped into the source of love because you felt the high. Didn’t you? It felt real, didn’t it? The only difference is, in a relationship where two people are open to love and have removed their barriers, the joy lasts, and is always present.
The highest experience of love we seek is found when two beings are happily striving to become one at the physical, emotional and soul levels, with no walls of separation. Thus there is a purpose to love, a purpose to marriage: To achieve harmony with one another so that we experience oneness in spirit through love. Where there is oneness, there is happiness, there is joy, and there is growth. Our irresistible urge to merge with another being and become one through love is programmed into our human nature, with sex a beautiful outer expression of that innate desire to become one in love. Perhaps that’s why sex is called lovemaking?
But if this is the case, why is the experience of love often so fleeting? Even what you felt in sex is temporary, right? Why doesn’t a relationship last? Why was the experience so brief, with those barriers opening only momentarily to allow love to flow in and out? How do we bring lasting love to us, every day and every moment? Our billion-dollar question is: “Where is that true friend and partner with whom I can experience constant joy and happiness for the rest of my life? How do I find this mystery person? Is there a solution, a tool, or a journey so I can attract joyous and lasting love with another?” Yes, practice Yoga techniques to find and sustain love like I did for myself.
"It is about learning to love from the inside out. Yes a big part of the book is about Yoga, but the core message of it , is learning to and how to love yourself on the inside. It emphasizes so much on focusing on yourself, that is such a refreshing perspective on relationships.” Paulina D, San Diego, CA
"The core message of the book is before you unite with someone try to unite with yourself. It is learning about yourself, finding yourself and then if you choose to you can find love on the outside . The book gives ways to do just that in simple step by step way.” 
"Yoga is a life long process and the goal of life is self exploration. The book inspires me to make myself whole, integrated, to feel complete unto myself. Once I do that , I will attract a holistic, integrated person who is a totality of himself, which is how a relationship is supposed to be.” 
"Yoga is love, love is Yoga. It is not a relationship book, it is not just a love book, it is a lifestyle book. It is educational, informative, a message that everybody can apply. It teaches you how to be a better person, so that you don’t just find the love of your life but learn to have better relationships with everyone.” 