A Letter From Deepak Chopra

It has become a truism that to receive love, we must give it. Giving engenders receiving, and receiving engenders giving. The reciprocal action keeps the flow of love alive. Without it, love would stagnate. For so many of us, however, learning to give is extremely difficult. It runs counter to some deep conditioning that we all carry around inside. We may fear that if we give, we will have less. We have all been taught to hold on to a good thing.

It is the ego that has a hard time letting go of something precious because, at bottom, ego isn't guided by love but by the struggle to survive. It wants predictable outcomes, security, the prerogative to be right, and continuity. Anyone who has ever been trapped in a possessive relationship knows ego's smothering effect. Ego can't give someone else space to live his or her own life because of a perceived threat to its existence. In truth, giving space isn't simple. It requires the willingness to "allow" another person their whole being – to freely express their ideas, feelings, reactions even when they are in conflict with your own. In short, it is permission for your beloved to be unlike you.

While the ego's primitive nature wants to hold on and control, spirit has no such concerns. It wants being, love, freedom, and creative opportunities. Spirit isn't afraid to give because it knows that its essential nature is pure love, unbounded in time and space. The question naturally arises, how then do we free ourselves to love and give freely?

The first step is to recognize your true spiritual nature. In truth, you are pure spirit, pure love, created from the same spirit that in infinite form is known as God. Realize that the ego often acts like a scared bully trying to protect its tiny fiefdom, not knowing that it is part of an infinite field of pure potentiality and infinite possibilities.

One of the most effective ways to connect to your true nature is meditation. For thousands of years people have used this proven method of inner discovery, which takes you beyond the mind's mental confusion and emotional turbulence into the silence of pure awareness. When you meditate regularly, you go deeper and deeper inside yourself, beyond the ego's illusions, old thought-patterns, and rigid habits – into the silent, peaceful, unchanging level we simply call the self. This pure bliss consciousness is who we really are.

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