What is Love, Anyway

We have spent our lives being taught that love needs a relationship to be real. That loving someone who doesn't love you back is a wound to be healed. That loving someone you've lost, or left, or grown apart from is unfinished emotional business — an attachment that hasn't been properly processed. That the love ends, or should end, when the relationship does.

None of that is true. And believing it has caused an enormous amount of suffering that goes largely unnamed.

This episode makes a distinction the culture almost never makes — between love and the relationship that sometimes houses it. Between the feeling and the attachment that arrives alongside it. Between loving someone and being entitled to anything from them, or them from you.

Love, in the Taoist sense, is a state. It is a disposition toward another person's wellbeing that exists in the person who holds it — not in the relationship, not in the reciprocation, not in the response. You can love someone who is gone, who has hurt you, who will never know it. That love is not incomplete. It was never waiting for the relationship to make it real.

Also: a listener question from Randall in Salt Lake City who wants to know how you actually tell the difference between meditating and just being quiet — and whether there is one.