Living in Divine Love: Steps to Cultivate Higher Love
Explores how to live in divine love through prayer, spiritual practice, and presence, leading to higher love and harmonious relationships.
Transform your life by cultivating divine love through prayer, spiritual study, and being fully present.
Earlier messages in this series on divine love explored the origins of love as the reality of God permeating all of life and calling us to awaken to higher love beyond self-interest. This journey of awakening invites us to deepen our understanding and practice of divine love in our daily lives.
Let’s begin with a peace prayer.
O Lord, may we hear with our ears what is always auspicious, may we see with our eyes what is always auspicious. May we live the fullness of our allotted lifespan with good health and strong vitality, offering our praises to Thee. May all the Divine Ones protect us, save us from harm, nourish and bless us with spiritual wealth--a mind capable of understanding the Truth and a willing heart bold enough to live it.
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti (Om Peace, Peace, Peace)!
—Kaivalya Upanishad
Purifying the Mind for Divine Love
Our response to the persistent call of divine love to awaken requires purifying the mental field, clarifying our thoughts and emotions so that the light of divine love can shine through to inspire us and transform our lives.
"Each condition of inharmony and criticism which I meet is a direct call to me to release the power of understanding, friendliness, and love."
—Paramahansa Yogananda
Now, we can look at how to live in love by letting divine love lead the way. The message began with a beautiful prayer from the Upanishads. Prayer is the first step to take when we want to live in love. It is the intentional way to start and conclude the day.
The Power of Prayer: Setting Spiritual Intention
Prayer orients our hearts and minds toward a higher power, higher love, and supportive grace. It opens us to divine possibilities for healing and blessing. With prayer, we set a spiritual intention to live in love every day.
May my ears hear what is auspicious!
Consider the profound sense of what auspicious means. It means favorable, promising, bright, good, optimistic, hopeful, encouraging, opportune, timely, fortunate, providential, felicitous, advantageous, beneficial, and full of promise. Prayer guides us to notice what we are listening to throughout our day.
May I be aware of good, uplifting, truthful words. May I contemplate the teachings in all I hear.
May my eyes see what is always auspicious!
May I see through changing conditions and recognize the power and presence of divine love always at work in life.
May I be open to hearing the truth.
May I turn my attention to notice what is uplifting.
Prayer is how we set our intention to receive and be a vehicle for divine love. We position ourselves every morning and every night (and in between) with prayer. Mahatma Gandhi wrote that prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening. To live the day with love, start the day with prayer.
Cultivating Divine Love in Daily Life
Although prayer is powerful, most of us need more than that to consciously live in love. I wanted to know how to love, live in love, and, in the case of marriage, stay in love. I began by asking the wise ones I knew. What advice could they give me about love?
First, my grandmother, who I consider my first guru. She gave me the ancient advice: Never go to bed angry. Good idea! But it does lead to a lot of sleepless nights on the couch.
Be Kind and Loving
Next, I asked my spiritual teacher, Roy Eugene Davis, what the key to loving relationships is. He said: Be kind to one another. Simple. Clear. Also, good advice. But I needed to learn how to be genuinely kind and loving—not codependent or self-serving.
Row the Boat of Life
The third piece of relationship advice tied it all together. It came in a letter to my husband Amarnath and me on the eve of our wedding nearly thirty years ago (so far, so good!). Amarnath's guru, Baba Hari Dass, wrote to us: You are getting married. Congratulations! When two people with complimentary samskaras get together, they are tied down in all levels of life. They live together with lifelong commitment.
What??? We wondered about complementary samskaras. Wait! What about soul mates? Nope. It’s samskara mates. Your karmic impressions and divine grace brought you together to awaken to love and find liberation in this lifetime.
Then he wrote: May God bless you both. Row the boat of life with the oars of the virtues and find peace and happiness together.
How to Let Divine Love Lead the Way to Fulfillment
Discover how divine love leads to fulfillment! Explore prayers, spiritual practices, and stories that inspire a life of love.
Sadhana: The Path of Practice
This is the next step for living in love: sadhana, or purposeful spiritual practice. It is how to root out anger, how to learn to be kind, and how to live in harmony with divine love and truth. But one row, one paddle stroke, doesn’t get us across the lake. It’s row, row, rowing the boat of spiritual practice with self-discipline, spiritual study, and surrender to God, letting go of the illusion of a being separate from the Source of Love. As we do that, spiritual awakening and harmony in relationships naturally follow.
Embracing the Present Moment: A Key to Divine Love
The third step to cultivating divine love is to be present. Our life circumstances can be experienced as one distraction after another or one worry after another, but we have the capacity and the power to slow it all down and change our reaction to it by learning how to be fully present: breathing, noticing, and focusing.
The Zen Story
Here's a Zen story about a fellow being chased by a tiger. He’s running as fast as he can, but the tiger is gaining on him. (Do you ever feel like you are running as fast as you can in life, but the tiger of trouble or worry is gaining on you?). He runs to the edge of a cliff, where he grabs hold of a strong vine and dangles over the edge. He looks down and sees that there are more tigers below him. And the vine he is clinging to? A mouse is gnawing it. Just then, he notices a lovely cluster of red ripe strawberries growing on the vine. He lets go with one hand, reaches across, plucks a ripe strawberry, pops it in his mouth, and declares: delicious!
Eyes-Open Meditation
There are many teachings in this parable, but let one of them today be that even during times of challenge, if we stop and notice, we can find beauty, nourishment, and freedom from worry.
Author Barbara Kingsolver wrote: In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the Crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again.
This eyes-open meditation is one of my daily practices. I look intently at one thing. I notice the grain of wood on my desk, the white rose blooming in the garden next to the red maple, or the luminous shine of my dog’s white fur.
Living in Love
When one just looks, truly looks, the mind grows quiet, the heart opens, and the soul light shines through. We sense how precious this life is and how important love is.
We all can be in love with our life. Our life is where God is—where divine love continuously flows, where we can receive it, and be fulfilled, if only we turn to it. Pray. Practice. Be present.
Those three steps into the field of divine love have a foundation that supports them. The foundation is faith—faith in the One omnipresent Reality called God, faith in the spiritual truth of life, faith in our divine Self. That faith inspires us to live a soul-inspired, soul-guided life.
Love and Boldness
We commit to Love by loving life because life is God, and we commit to loving our life because God is our life. We live our life with and in love because that is where love is. Not when things get better, but here, now.
Love requires a bold heart of faith to trust our soul's inspiration and inclination. What does that look like?
Here is a poem by Laura Martin (published in the Friends of Silence Newsletter, Dec 2023).
If you wake up early, do not wake up to maximize productivity for someone else's agenda,
But wake up early to sit on the border of dark and light and listen for the Word,
if you stay up late, do not stay up late to fulfill a list that will never satisfy
but stay up late because your spirit is caught in something true.
If you say yes, say yes from a place of your soul's landing in the world.
If you say no, say no to be free for your own verses.
Move in the world—early, late, between, yes, no—
you made of holy stuff,
like eternity and found Light,
And remembering that.
Pray. Practice. Be Present
Remember, higher love is right where we are when we wake up.
O Lord, may we hear with our ears what is always auspicious, may we see with our eyes what is always auspicious.
May we live the fullness of our allotted lifespan with good health and strong vitality, offering our praises to Thee.
May all the Divine Ones protect us, save us from harm, nourish and bless us with spiritual wealth—a mind capable of understanding the Truth and a willing heart bold enough to live it.
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti (Om Peace, Peace, Peace!)
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