The abundance of love
Toward spiritual sovereignty — Step 1: open yourself to this energy of Love that nourishes the universe and learn to become its conscious channel in every relationship.
Traversed by the Infinite
In my meditations and sometimes in my dreams, I feel what seems like an infinite Life — an eternal vitality — nourishing the universe in a constant movement of forces that balance and transform one another. And I myself — a tiny point lost somewhere in the immensity of this cosmos — am traversed and permeated by it. In this boundless Life, I breathe, I desire, I create, and I can grow. I can even, escaping the madness of men, learn to love and keep alive within me the hope of contributing to a more just world. And for that alone I give thanks — for being able, here and now, to be committed to this path of peace and beauty, and to walk it in fraternity with all those whose roads cross mine.
For this infinite Life, I always perceive it as an energy of Love that, behind appearances and the tumult of surfaces, patiently waits for us to become its hands, its voice, and its living word — to fullfill in the flesh of the world all the potentials for happiness, freedom, and splendor of which It has been, since the dawn of time, the promise tirelessly renewed at every dawn.
To become the conscious channel of this abundance of Love, to welcome it within oneself and radiate it outward, thereby participating in the slow and patient repair of the world — the tikkun olam, as the Hebrew sages say — this, to me, is the most sublime achievement to which a human being can aspire.
Presence to oneself, openness to the other
As we gradually awaken to this spiritual dimension, we discover that beyond the familial, social, and cultural determinisms that have shaped us, we can develop a quality of presence to ourselves that allows us to welcome our essential dimensions and thus understand ourselves more fully. By cultivating a mode of knowing that balances intuition and reason, we access to a psychospiritual understanding of ourselves that truly opens the path to our inner freedom — that path which will allow us at last to escape the shackles of our fears and our dependencies.
A more open state of consciousness then begins to transform how we see others: we cease to perceive human beings as separate and competing, and come to recognize them as co-responsible for their respective destinies, and as complementary in their differences. “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire,” both the Talmud and the Quran tell us. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” says Leviticus — “for he is you,” adds Rashi, the great medieval commentator. The living energy of Love that holds the universe together and makes spring bloom again is that same force which can, in the human dimension, nourish the most beautiful relationships, reconcile differences, enrich complementarities, and soothe conflicts.
If we open ourselves to this dynamic and consent to clearing within us the obstacles that lock us into our false identities and immediate self-interests, if we dare to let ourselves be traversed by this breath of the Infinite, we quickly discover how profoundly it can carry us toward an infinitely wider, more expansive way of breathing in our lives.
Am I in the abundance of love?
For authentic love — the kind that unfolds in spiritual life — is the most essential and most powerful dimension of all human existence. It is at once the origin and the foundation of every true relationship. Loving elevates us beyond ourselves: we escape the limits of our ego to genuinely welcome the life of the other, becoming aware that we can establish with them bonds of trust, complementarity, and mutual giving — and together build those spaces of sharing that make both of us grow.
Love allows us to apprehend the universe in its most sublime dimension: non-separation, the unity of the Living, Life with a capital L — in a word, it opens us to transcendence. But this breakthrough toward the Infinite plays out nonetheless in the most ordinary aspects of daily life, and depends entirely on our willingness to extend to the widest possible number this capacity to love that we all carry in the depths of our hearts. Let us ask ourselves plainly: am I in the abundance of love? Am I capable of loving others and giving freely — or do I love only those who are close to me and give back in return? Am I capable of reaching out to someone I don’t know?
In sincerely evaluating our capacity to love, we may discover that the desire to love is indeed alive within us, but that obstacles — accumulated disappointments, fears left unexamined, old wounds — limit its expression and narrow its radiance. If we consent to look at them lucidly and without judgment, to cross through them and move beyond, we will make a decisive discovery: the more our love grows, the more a deep sense of freedom, fullness, and peace settles within us.
Loving rightly
Love, like music, has several tonalities and several intensities. Depending on whether my capacity to love is directed toward my partner, my family, my friends, or my social connections, it will have neither the same face nor the same modes of expression. It will also vary according to the concrete possibility of expressing it toward any given person — something that depends both on the respective roles, the temperaments at play, and the singular history of each relationship.
But whatever its form, true love is first nourished by care for the other — without which it is nothing but self-love. It is fulfilled in our acceptance of loving the other as they are, without demanding that they become someone else, more aligned with our desires or expectations. Even if you perceive which choice or which change would allow the beloved to live more fully, never forget that the most beautiful love remains the one that shows without imposing, that inspires through example rather than pressuring through insistence.
Discipline your love: learn to sense what the other can receive, and hold to that limit with kindness. Do not read their behaviors or their words through your own lens, but genuinely put yourself in their place — welcome their way of being, different from your own, and become attentive to it. For by learning to measure your love according to the other’s capacity to receive it, you will discover that this discipline also protects you: it allows you not to lose yourself in the relationship and to live it in a balance that is both healthy and lasting.
If you develop toward those close to you this faculty of loving rightly — attentive to the other’s possibilities as much as to your own needs, respectful of their freedom to be themselves — it will naturally become easier to open yourself to strangers and to love them. Not with the love of a partner or a close friend, whose intensity and intimacy require time and shared history, but with that same quality of presence you have just cultivated: the care to understand, the readiness to give what the other can receive, the respect for their difference and their freedom.
The seed of Infinity we all share
Is it not already love — the kind whose Source surpasses us — to replace the habitual wariness that feeds all forms of violence with a willingness to experience the best with a stranger, according to the possibilities the encounter will offer? If we could, in all circumstances, transform our self-enclosure into a face radiating goodness and simplicity, and into that precious skill of exchanging a few generous or joyful words, we could then enrich one another by sharing, even for a brief moment, a little of our humanity, our dreams, or our sorrows.
For when we move beyond our ego, preoccupied with its own survival, to let speak within us what can connect us to the other — that seed of Infinity they too carry as a shared inheritance — something of a mysterious common vibration becomes possible between two beings who did not previously know each other.
Yet this capacity to love — more sentimental and intimate toward those close to us, yet generous and expansive enough to reach out to strangers in the hope of a genuine connection — can be thwarted at many turns by the vicissitudes of existence: moments of fatigue or weariness, setbacks and disappointments that come to dull our momentum.
Indeed, we cannot always be fully available to others. We live in cycles of expansion, contraction, and rest that affect every dimension of our being — and it is precisely by developing self-knowledge through conscious observation that we can gradually refine our way of being in relationship, aligning our availability with our actual state rather than with an ideal standard we cannot always sustain.
It is sometimes also legitimate to question whether it is even appropriate to express this love, when it runs up against relational difficulties with those close to us, or against the prejudices and rigidity of people we encounter. But if we manage to examine the situation without being trapped by our emotions, we will most often find that what is at issue is not the energy of love we carry — but the way in which we express it toward a particular person, ill-suited to what they can understand or receive in that moment.
The languages of love are as diverse as human beings are. If the other is waiting for a particular expression of affection or a particular form of welcome — because these correspond to what they practice naturally themselves — we find ourselves in misunderstanding and confusion, not for lack of love, but due to a lack of adjustment. In love as in chess, the quality of the relationship depends less on the force of our momentum than on our capacity to anticipate what the other can receive — and to adapt to it with flexibility.
Love is a work to be built
It is ultimately humility that makes the decisive difference — the kind that transforms love that waits and demands into love that understands and welcomes. In the face of the difficulties of human relationships which, even when carried by sincere feelings, run up against differences of temperament, outlook, and destiny, it is humility that frees us from rigidity and blockage, and opens within us the possibility of patience and constancy — those two qualities without which no lasting love can be built.
Humility strengthens the bonds between those who integrate it into their relationship and makes mutual forgiveness more accessible to them in moments of tension or disappointment. It allows the substitution of emotional outburst with the intelligence of the heart — that slow and attentive intelligence that takes the time to reflect before reacting, and to adapt to the other before asserting itself. For those who are humble have consented to see everything within themselves: their limits and their fragilities, their shortcomings as well as their qualities and their achievements, without flattering themselves for the former or condemning themselves for the latter. They strive therefore to act according to the best of themselves in daily life and to improve step by step. They have learned to love themselves as they are — a being on the way toward their spiritual fulfillment, neither perfect nor resigned.
This lucidity and this benevolent realism allow them to put themselves in the place of whoever stands before them. By stepping aside from their own personality, they can intuitively sense what is moving through the other and recognize in them their true alter ego. If they then persevere in love despite the obstacles, it is because they have understood that love is a work to be built — a shared work which, nourished by feeling but also shaped by time and skill, can attain, for those who devote themselves to it with constancy, the beauty and the fullness of a masterpiece.
One face, a thousand names
In the constellation of humanity’s spiritual traditions, this primordial force of generous love has received different names according to languages and cultures, but its face is everywhere the same.
Hebrew Kabbalah names it Chesed — expansive love, the unconditional goodness that gives itself without calculation or measure, the first of the seven qualities of the soul that the spiritual seeker is called to cultivate at the heart of spring, as if nature itself were showing the way by making sap burst through the trees after the rigors of winter. The Sufis call it mahabba — that divine love of which Rumi says it is the hidden key to all existence, the living water that secretly traverses the most arid stones to make a spring surge forth at the most unexpected moment. Buddhism designates it as metta — the loving-kindness that knows neither borders nor conditions, which expands from the beloved to the stranger, then from the stranger to the adversary, until every living being is enveloped in the same radiance of benevolent attention. The Christian tradition names it agape — that gratuitous love of which John of the Cross says that “where there is no love, put love — and you will draw out love”, a formula that alone summarizes an entire life of practice. Confucianism recognizes in it ren — the humanistic benevolence at the foundation of every civilization worthy of the name — and Vedanta celebrates it under the name of prema, designating unconditional love as the very nature of the deep Self.
All these traditions converge on one conviction: love is not first a feeling that arises, but a capacity that one develops, a quality of presence that one cultivates day after day, until it becomes the permanent tonality of our way of being in the world.
A few guidelines for the journey
These few paragraphs are not meant to say everything about love — they are meant to reopen a door. For those who wish to linger a little longer, I offer below a few questions to meditate on and a few concrete gestures: to help us assess where we stand — with kindness and without judgment — and perhaps to make a first living move in the direction of this abundance of love we have just explored together.
As a complement, you may also want to revisit the article “Alphabet: H for Humility.”
1. A Few Questions to Let Resonate
Take a quiet moment to sit with these questions, without trying to answer them too quickly. Let them resonate within you as you would let herbal tea steep — what surfaces spontaneously is often more revealing than what we seek to formulate.
On my capacity to love
What is my actual capacity to love others? Am I in the abundance of love or in a state of withholding? Do I give freely, or only when I’m sure of receiving something in return? Do I truly make room for the other in my life — or do I love from the comfortable distance of my own needs? Am I afraid to open up, to show vulnerability, to be hurt if I give too much?
On the way I express my love
Do I actually express what I feel — or do I hold it back out of fear of the other’s reaction? Do I speak the other’s love language, or only my own? Is my love adapted to what the other can receive — or do I sometimes overwhelm them to the point of flooding them? As Hasidic wisdom says: rain is a blessing because it falls in drops that do not flood the fields.
On the reach of my love
Do I love only those who resemble me or who give back to me? Am I capable of loving a stranger — of reaching out to someone I don’t know, without expecting recognition? Do I express my love only when it is comfortable, or also when it costs me something?
On the quality of my love
Is my love sufficiently disciplined — or do I sometimes become the support that someone takes advantage of, in the name of love? Do I truly respect the freedom and limits of those I love? Do I see them as they are — or as an extension of my own needs and projections? Does my love make me humble, or does it sometimes feed the pride as the giver?
On the constancy of my love
Does my love hold up through trials, through the highs and lows of existence? Am I prepared to fight to preserve a bond that matters? Does my love have endurance — or does it evaporate at the first disappointment?
2. A few gestures for the week
Helping according to the other’s needs
Identify a person in your circle who needs help right now. Offer your support not according to what you think would be useful to them, but according to what they tell you they need. If they don’t say, ask them. Then do it, even if it takes you outside your usual habits.
Reaching out to a stranger
Choose a moment during the week to spontaneously offer a gesture of love to a stranger — a warm word, a practical helping hand, a genuine smile. Observe what it produces in you, and in them.
Swallowing pride
Is there a person with whom you are on cold or tense terms — a close one, a friend, a colleague? Take the first step toward reconciliation, without waiting for the other to move. Not out of weakness, but out of nobility: those who truly love know that pride costs more than forgiveness.
Building together
Propose to someone you love to create something together — a project, a meal, a walk, a deep conversation. Love is not content merely to be felt: it is built, it is cultivated, it demands hands and time.
3. Celebrating this step
At the end of these seven days, or however long you devote to this step, take a moment to identify one concrete thing that your capacity to love has brought into your life — a strengthened bond, a reconciliation, an unexpected encounter, a shared joy. Write it in a notebook, or say it out loud. For love that is not recognized and celebrated risks going unnoticed — and what we celebrate, we invite to return.
And there it is — this first oasis on the journey. Next week, we will explore a second quality of the soul: how inner discipline — far from extinguishing love — gives it its true power.
Happy journeying to all.
Jérôme Nathanaël
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