This blessing of giving love is yours. Understand what a blessing it is. It is a great gift given to you, this ability to love, this necessity to love. If you did not have the ability to love, you would not bemoan when you do not feel love. You may think you feel bereft when you feel unloved, but it is bereavement of your own inexpression of love that strikes your heart.

When you feel unloved, this is the time to find the stifled love in your own heart and let it out. Love stifled feels like no one loves you, but it is really the desert of giving love that pains you. It is your own giving of love that you crave to see.

Try it.

At those times when your heart feels dried up, and you feel you do not have a thimbleful of love to give, this then is when you will do well to return to the natural world I have given you. A walk in the woods will help. Looking up at the God-given sky will help. Begin by loving the natural environment. Look at a leaf of a tree. Pick a berry. Crunch your boots in snow. Look and listen. Hear the birds. What are they possibly chirping but Love, love, love.

It may help to pull weeds. And let each weed you pull symbolize a block to love gone. Be gentle with your blocks, not fierce. Tweeze them out. They are little nothings getting in the way of love. When truth be known, nothing can stand in the way of love, but something is belying the love in your heart. It feels stalemated. It feels like it has no place to go. So, then, beloveds, find a place for it. Feel compassion for all the growing things. Hold them to your heart. Wish to give them love if only you knew how.

Observe a puppy, and know that is what your heart is like, would be like if it had not been interfered with. Your heart would go all over the place, wobbly or not. Your heart would engage, endeavor, and explore all the lovingness in the world. A puppy knows only how to give. No one has taught the puppy restraint. He is love let go on the universe. Observe the similarity between your heart and a puppy.

When your heart feels hurt, lonely, empty, quasi-incapable of loving, know that it is protesting its disuse. Your heart’s giving has too often been discouraged by your deciding mind. Your heart is not by nature fussy, but your mind likes to pick and choose, find the best tomatoes in the bin, as it were.. All the while, the importance is not in picking but in giving. Give love. Give love until love remembers itself and flows from your heart. Give love until you remember how good it feels. Give love regardless of what your mind decides.

Your heart has been following directives of your mind, and so your heart has withheld love. It has felt forbidden to love, as though it needed a spectacular diamond to love. Not finding that spectacular diamond, your mind has told your heart to pick up its marbles and go home. Your mind has told your heart: “Recede. There is nothing good enough here for you to love. Go home.”

Obedient heart then denies its own nature and withdraws. This is what makes your heart ache.

Have your mind give your heart new messages. Let your mind tell your bereaving heart: “Okay, be yourself. Love everywhere. Be without object. Just love anyway. Never mind the restrictions I gave. Now I tell you to love. Pour that love out, and soon you will be swimming in it, relaxed, floating on your back, looking up at the sky, and happy to have given love as if you knew that love was always yours to give, as if you know that love is all you had to give, and that that giving is the lightness of heart you have been so desiring. I now give you permission to love and no longer deny yourself the joy of it. Let love be.”