What is love? According to the book Real Love: The Truth About Finding Unconditional Love and Fulfilling Relationships, unconditional love is true love. It is caring about another person’s happiness without demanding any benefits for themselves, accepting and embracing another person for who they are, with all their strengths and weaknesses.
Unconditional love is not when someone likes you only because you can give them what they want or when someone only loves you under certain circumstances, like for example: when you’re happy, healthy or wealthy.
Poetic love
Poetic love is catching up all over again. Youth these days listen to romantic poetry by performers. One such Sufi poet whose works have become popular is “Rumi”. His ecstatic love poetry is seen everywhere on social media and even inked by people. His works render comfort to broken hearts and solace to spiritual seekers. In Sufism, the human form of love can be, and for the Sufi is—- the ladder to Divine Love.
One of the earliest Sufis, a woman saint by the name Rabia of Basra, said, “Love of God hath so absorbed me that neither love nor hate of any other thing remains in my heart.”
Loving the Sufi way is foregoing your old life to be reborn into a new dimension. It means to have a relationship where the more you love someone, the more and more “You” are extinguished. Which means, you will have experienced the limitations of egoistic living and tasted the ecstasy of surrender.
To love so that nothing of you remains, is the way to enlightenment. Non-being is the way to being, and love is the most adequate method to disappear. Just as Nature, the Supreme also abhors a vacuum. When you become a vacuum, love of Supreme is imbibed within your soul.
For Rumi, passionate love, ishq, has two expressions. The first is love in the material world, ‘like love between male and female,’ and the second is the ‘real love,’ which is ‘love towards God.’
Unconditional love in relationships has honesty attached to it. Each of us wants to be loved as we are, without conditions, and to see ourselves as capable of bestowing unconditional love on our loved ones. However, this type of love, in its narrowest definition, is difficult, if not impossible.
When we take the Sufi way of love, we reach the divine and that is the ultimate purpose of our life. Therefore, Sufism is called the way of the heart, designed to bring the human being to its ultimate objective of loving intimacy with the divine.
As the heart becomes pure; as in unconditionally in love, the inner spiritual senses come alive to balance the outer senses. The mature Sufi’s heart becomes identified with the spiritual heart, which is in constant rapport with the essence of the divine. It is aligned with the Divine and the entire universe, in a sense, become the Universe.
Dr. Monica Nagpal, Ph.D in education is the founder of Hope and Happiness. She is a parent mindset coach enabling parents to raise mindful happy kids. She is also an inner image consultant enabling women to recognize their true self. She is a Happiness doctor, helping people find the true purpose of their life. Dr.Monica uses Yogimeter as an assessment tool to gauge one’s mindset and suggests remedies based on yogic science to transform one into an effective parent, a happy and mindful individual. She advocates value-based education methodology and integrates mindfulness and meditation and uses them as tools for bringing transformation in individuals
Wonderful