10 Ways to Deepen Love
As a teenager, I remember hearing on the radio a popular song called How Deep is Your Love?
It was sung by an English group called the Bee Gees. Reflecting on my adolescent conception of love, it was all about some of those lyrics—”And you come to me on a summer breeze, keep me warm in your love then you softly leave, and it’s me you need to show, how deep is your love?”
Wow. Like me, do you remember when your heart first experienced the emotions of love?
Was it the closeness of a parent’s love, the warm affection of a pet, or the attention someone paid you that made you feel warm in love?
Like the foam on a lovely cappuccino, if we stay on the surface of things, we won’t taste the deeper reality beneath.
1. Be Receptive
Consciously listening for your Divine Mother, or your soul’s higher guidance can bring you deeper. Try to remember a time when your heart was feeling its fullest—full of love—so full that you actually felt bliss, and in love with the world.
When you are quiet and still, love can enter, if you are receptive.
Talk to your heart with a simple prayer demand, help me to be more receptive to deeper love. This is most effective when done during deep meditation, or when you are being quiet and inward. The more sincere your call, the more sincere will be your answer.
Divine Mother listens to our heart. The heart is the most sensitive and vulnerable organ in our body. This is true of our astral heart as well.
2. Affirm the Positive
We can begin to deepen our love by pushing away our own limited conception of what love is and simply say this affirmation: I love you. If you have a spouse, child, a friend, even a pet, try saying out loud to them, I love you. If you don’t have a partner, animal or friend, try saying this in the mirror 3 times a day.
Taking it further, now look into the mirror and visualize someone you have difficulties with, or who you feel is unlovable, and say to them, “I love you.”
You can even say this to a plant, or a living thing, and see if you can change it, and yourself.
The famous naturalist, John Muir, said, in “My Life with Nature”, “My days in the wilderness will live with me always. Everything there is so alive and familiar. The very stones seem talkative and brotherly. One fancies a heart like our own must be beathing in every crystal and cell. No wonder when we consider that we all have the same Father and Mother.”
Yogananda advised that we can transform our energy just by smiling, becoming what he called “smile millionaires”. If you aren’t used to smiling, stand in front of a mirror and with your fingers make yourself smile. As you continue this for several months, see if it changes your consciousness.
Affirmations are powerful. They contain thoughts and intentions that can change your life.
If there’s something you’ve been wanting to change about your life, your success or your happiness, join our online affirmations workshop now before it starts on February 14th. Our very kind, supportive and sensitive instructors will help you create a custom affirmation uniquely tailored to your needs.
3. Take a New Posture
Another way to deepen your love energy is to meet the world with an open heart. Stand up straight with your heart pushing out in front of you, as if your heart is leading the way. Some ballet dancers do this naturally, with their chest forward when they dance. Feel the love pouring out to the world as you do this. This is a very graceful way to flow through the dance of life we live every day.
The Ananda Yoga posture, Dhanurasana—the Bow Pose—is a good stretch to help you open your physical heart. The affirmation that goes with this pose is “I recall my scattered forces to recharge my spine.”
Swami Kriyananda was a perfect example of this—when he’d enter a room his heart went first, and he usually always had a big smile on his face.
4. Listen to Chants that Awaken Your Feelings
As sound travels into the human body and brain much deeper and quicker than anything else in the universe, the Rishi’s of India used chanting as a way to awaken the heart’s devotion. For this reason, yogis chant before meditation.
In India many years ago, I visited the tiny ashram of Trailanga Swami in Varanasi. It was early morning, and no one was in the ashram yet. I quickly moved downstairs to the far end of the ashram to meditate. Spread out on the floor in front of Trailanga’s statue was the temple priest, weeping his eyes out, his head down, calling to his guru, Oh Master, oh Master, over and over between tears. It was the first time I’d witnessed this depth of devotion in another human.
Listening to one chant, over and over, can awaken the devotion of the heart. Try singing this chant, or listening to it, when you first wake up in the morning:
Door of My Heart, chanted by Swami Kriyananda:
5. Water Your Efforts with Patience
If you set out a soul call to purify or deepen your heart, or even draw your perfect partner (we can explain what Yogananda said about this, in the above-mentioned workshop), stop and reflect. To make yourself more lovable or to find a way to have more love in your heart, know that it takes time.
Many people want results instantly—they want enlightenment from a weekend retreat and deeper love without putting in the time.
Just like watering the seeds in your springtime garden, you need to water them each day before they begin to sprout.
“Divine Mother, today I will plant, in the garden of life, the seeds of my new creative efforts. I will plant there seeds of wisdom, health, prosperity and happiness. I will water them with self-confidence and faith, and I will wait for You to give me my much-needed harvest.” ~ Scientific Healing Affirmations
6. Be Creative in Your Efforts
We are living in a world that is as creative and expansive as we ourselves think it so. Those who meditate, or practice the deeper Kriya Yoga Meditation, can have infinite access to creativity through mindful habits.
The great Rishis say that words carry not only your intentions, but also your vibrations. One way to increase your heart’s intuitive faculties is to write poetry.
As you deepen your heart’s feelings, your words will naturally mirror your thoughts.
To access the inner worlds of your heart, our 6-week online Journey Inward: Poetry Workshop for $63, starting March 1st will help you find your unique poetic voice. Working with Nayaswami Nefretete, this workshop will encourage reflection and self-expression to help you identify and articulate experiences more effectively and authentically.
The group format will expose you to a variety of styles and perspectives that will inspire new ideas, build confidence, and deepen your understanding of the inner voice and the written word.
7. Think and Feel Like a Saint
Think you’re the only one who ever wanted to experience deeper love?
Even the great saints long for human love, sometimes after waiting for decades.
Swami Sri Yukteswar and his disciple, Yogananda (pictured above) had the kind of love that spanned incarnations. In the Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda shares his heart’s longing.
He explains that he often wondered if Sri Yukteswar loved him because his guru was so self-contained and unemotional. Yogananda elaborated, “His was a strange nature, never utterly to be known; a nature deep and still, unfathomable to the outer world, whose values he had long transcended.” Yogananda plied Yukteswar by saying, “do you realize that once only, on the day of meeting, have you ever said, ‘I love you’?” Yogananda wanted to hear Yukteswar say out loud that he loved him. Finally, Yukteswar acquiesced, saying, “Yogananda, must I bring out into the cold realms of speech the warm sentiments best guarded by the wordless heart?”
And this was Yukteswar’s reply: “Be it as you wish. During my married life I often yearned for a son, to train in the yogic path. But when you came into my life, I was content; in you I have found my son.” Two teardrops stood in Sri Yukteswar’s eyes. “Yogananda, I love you always.” (from Autobiography of a Yogi)
Longing for the unfathomable impersonal love expressed by saints? Here’s a love chant for you:
Where is There Love, chanted here by Nayaswami Haridas:
8. Immerse Yourself in Heart-Opening Environments
There is a reason that we love certain places on this planet. Their physical beauty and their art remind us of the astral planes. Their music is heart-opening. The people seem full of love and familial warmth. Even the food is heavenly.
Yogananda said that environment is stronger than willpower. In a place full of beauty and saints, you can naturally feel your heart open much wider.
Our tour to Italy this September 9-24 takes you on a heart-opening pilgrimage to the land of the saints. It feeds you on many levels. Deadline to sign up is this March. To receive a $250 voucher, sign-up by March 7th to claim your discount (enter code HOLIDAY250 when you pay your deposit).
You’ll find the cappuccinos very frothy.
9. Give What You Would Like to Receive
Giving to others before thinking of yourself is one of the signs of a refined soul. This is why in many families the mother always feeds her family first. In spiritual organizations, the leader will always think of the well-being of others first.
To think of others, we must surrender our personal desires, our likes and dislikes. I like this person, but not that person closes down the heart. Instead of being the foam on top of the lovely cappuccino, become the deeper heart.
This, admittedly, can take lifetimes to learn. Impersonal love is based upon compassion and has no personal interest at stake.
This is why the saints are the true custodians of spirituality on our planet. Their compassion for us is endless.
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
(from Saint Francis of Assisi)
At the deepest core, we find love not by being loved, but by loving. As Swami Kriyananda said, Love is infinite; it is never ours to create. We can only channel it from its source in Infinity to all whom we meet.
10. Love is the Panacea for Human Suffering
In his timeless book, The Holy Science, Sri Yukteswar reveals many deep truths about our universe, who we truly are, the various astral heavens, the nature of time and the Yuga Cycles of Time.
He also reveals that there is nothing greater in all the three worlds than love.
When you are in deep meditation, or deeply praying for others, try mentally saying these words, love, love, love, over and over again. As you do so, see this love flowing out from your heart center to the whole world.
A French saint from the nineteenth century, St. Jean Vianney, would remind people, “If you only knew how much God loved you, you would die for joy!” And Yogananda told his followers “I will come back a million times if after a million years of suffering one stray brother is left weeping by the wayside!”
Love, when expressed under all circumstances, can heal deep wounds.
The Buddha told his followers, “You should love everyone because in one former incarnation or another everyone has been dear to you, everyone in the world.” Today, that’s over 8 billion people.
Finally, if you can use some of these suggestions for deeper love and attempt to keep your vibrations pure and high, this planet will become a more peaceful, loving place.
Eventually, hatred and violence will begin to diminish.
“Individual effort can be more important than mass karma. One who in every way tries to uplift himself, harmonizing body, mind and soul with the Divine creates positive karma not only for his own life, but in his family, neighborhood, country, and world.” –Paramhansa Yogananda
Each one of us, sending love out into the ether can make a difference.
Love, Love, Love,
Nayaswami Nischala
Ananda College of Living Wisdom
https://anandacollege.org/
This affirmation will help you to feel love in your heart in every situation, and to love everyone, even strangers:
“I will love others as extensions of my own Self, and of the love I feel from God.” ~ Swami Kriyananda, Affirmations for Self-Healing