Cultivating divine love for others
Love thy neighbor as thine own self
Today’s hyper-polarized world needs more people trying try live both parts of Christ’s greatest commandment.
The love breathing technique can be adapted to help people cultivate love for others. I’ve attached here a section from the original book.
Developing a habit, synchronized to your breath, of feeling God’s love in others, becomes a wonderful way to experience life.
Bearing Witness
Here is another variation to love breathing that came when attending a weeklong spiritual renewal retreat, roughly two years after first starting this practice.
Focusing on loving God helps diminish the ego; however, even when feeling a joyful communion with God, the egoic thought can still arise: “Isn’t this wonderful, I (egoic I) can feel such joy with God.” This very thought reinforces separation and cuts down on one’s joy. If the practice only involves you and God, a sense of isolation can creep in.
Turning love breathing into a form of prayer for others can counteract this and helps diminish the ego further.
When love breathing, instead of sharing love between God and you, feel God loving someone else. As before, breathe in love and energy into your heart and mentally chant “God” on the exhale. But on the exhale, instead of feeling you and God loving each other, feel from your spiritual eye, God loving this person. Sense God’s incredible joy in His love for this person’s soul. Feel and affirm God’s incredible delight in this person, His child.
If it helps, picture God’s golden light surrounding the person. Feel like it is God seeing this person through your eyes. Do all this in one breath, then keep repeating with every breath.
You can pick one person and then, throughout the day, just focus your practice on that one person. Or you can shift your focus to the different people you interact with throughout the day. Also, when in a group of people, you can love breathe while sensing God loving the entire group.
This practice isn’t projecting your love out to others or even trying to project God’s love out to others. Rather, it is more like being an observer or “bearing witness” to God’s infinite love for another.
When I first realized this “love breathing for others” should become my main practice, I felt sad and somewhat remorseful. After two years of just practicing God and me loving each other directly, I was to give this up and mostly be an observer! Well, the remorse lasted about half a day until I first practiced this in earnest. What joy! What an incredible sense of unity comes when sensing God loving others, loving us all.
