Love often carries conditions. It bends and shifts based on who stands before us, what they have done, and how they fit within our narratives. But what happens when love is no longer filtered through preference, judgment, or familiarity? What happens when love is not reserved for a select few but moves through everything, as everything?
The idea of loving everyone and everything as you love yourself is not about adopting a passive, all-accepting sentimentality. It is a radical act that dissolves the illusion of separateness. To love in this way is to recognize no fundamental difference between self and other, between what is cherished and what is feared, between what is understood and what is unknown.
Many believe they love themselves, but beneath the surface, self-love is often conditional. It thrives when things go well but falters in moments of doubt and suffering. If love for oneself is inconsistent, how can it extend unconditionally to others? This is where the real work begins – not in forcing affection but in dissolving the barriers that obscure the truth.
Love does not seek control. It does not require agreement. It is not contingent upon behaviour, belief, or shared experience. Love, in its purest form, simply is. To embody this means relinquishing the mind’s tendency to divide reality into worthy and unworthy, friend and foe, sacred and mundane.
Walking through life with this kind of love does not mean tolerating harm or ignoring injustice. It means meeting everything with the clarity that nothing stands apart from you. Love can take the shape of tenderness, but it can also be fierce, clear, and unwavering. To love everyone and everything as yourself is not to abandon discernment – it is to see beyond distortion, beyond fear, beyond the illusion that anything is truly separate from anything else.
This is not an instruction to be followed. It is an inquiry to be lived. How does love move through you when nothing is excluded? When no one is outside its reach? When the self dissolves into the vastness of Being, what remains but love itself?
Morgan O. Smith
Yinnergy Meditation/Neurofeedback, Spiritual Life Coaching & My Book, Bodhi in the Brain…Available Now!
Morgan O. Smith 