It’s totally human to long for love. Often this longing first appears as a tremendous desire to connect with a particular romantic partner. If this longing is fulfilled you may be content for a time and look no further. If you are frustrated in your efforts, you may be more motivated to investigate the source of this longing. Either way, you will eventually come face to face with this mystery. What is this longing for love? Why is it so powerful? Where does it come from? And how can it be satisfied?

Spiritual wisdom tells us that you can only long for that which you already are. It appears that the love is in someone else, but this is only an illusion. The love that you feel is inside, it can’t be felt any other way. If you didn’t already know love intimately, you would not long for it. You wouldn’t even suspect its existence.

Most of us have forgotten that we are pure love and so we seek love outside ourselves. This longing is very useful because it activates your quest for love. Ultimately this search leads you to the realization that you feel love when you are being loving, not when you are being loved by another.

Exercise: This simple but powerful exercise came to me through Adyashanti. Try it and see what happens! The next time you feel that yearning for love, feel backwards into it. Feel it going in, even as it’s going out. Feel back, trace it back to its root and see if you don’t already possess what you seek. Take it as a question. Is it true that love is absent? Welcome the longing for love as an opportunity to do this practice until you find the love inside.

One of the main things I’ve learned in the last year is: It is always better to volunteer! What I mean by this is that if there are certain experiences coming your way, you can embrace them or resist them. As many of you have no doubt discovered, resistance is painful, but embracing may be a bigger stretch than you can say “yes” to at that moment. Sometimes you can sidestep the whole ball of wax by taking some action which moves you beyond the crossroads you find yourself at, which moves you out of harms way and off in an entirely different direction. It’s as if you have entered another dimension, a parallel universe where that cross roads has become a rotary with new roads branching off in many directions. This is what I am calling volunteering – discovering a previously unseen road and high tailing it down that road without hesitation.

For example, let’s say that you’re a forty year old woman who really wants to have a baby. Your partner of ten years has been reluctant to take on parenthood, but he finally decides he’s ready for it. You’ve been trying to get pregnant for a year and it’s not happening. If you are in resistance you will be stressing out about having waited too long, angry at your partner for ignoring your biological clock, and fearful that you will never get pregnant. You may be contemplating exploring expensive and invasive medical procedures to help things along and worrying about whether they will work and how you will pay for them. You can’t make yourself let go of the whole dream of parenthood and raising a family. Meanwhile, your closest friend who is few years younger than you are accidentally gets pregnant. The father has bolted. Your girlfriend really wants the baby but is afraid of going it alone. You suggest to your partner that you invite her to hook up with the two of you and raise this child together. He agrees, she agrees, and soon you are all attending prenatal education classes and shopping for nursery furniture together. You feel threatened by the growing intimacy between them, and you ask for their support in overcoming your fears. This is volunteering.

Many people commented after I broke my leg that I needed this to slow down, perhaps because I was commenting on how awed and amazed I was by the experience of spending much of the past four months in bed. Or maybe they’d discovered how long it takes to go anywhere when you’re on crutches! But the truth is that I was already slowing down A LOT before I broke my leg. I wanted to slow down and was quite clear that it was necessary. I was voluntarily slowing down. What I was not doing voluntarily was asking for help. I didn’t have to because as long as I was able bodied I was pretty much able to get by without asking for help. Breaking my leg changed all that in a flash. I needed help and not asking for it had immediate and disastrous consequences. If asking for help when I didn’t really need it (volunteering) was hard, asking when I was desperate and didn’t think I could survive getting a “no” was nearly impossible. But I had to. I had no choice. I had to stop taking it personally if someone said no, or said yes but clearly wanted to say no, and just do it. But looking back I can see that it would have been a whole lot easier to voluntarily ask for help with things I felt overwhelmed by when I did have choice. Looking back I can see that taking it personally when someone says “no” or does something harmful to me is not useful. It’s so much simpler to have clear boundaries and not waste energy feeling victimized.