If you feel inspired to experience love more fully, here is an exercise. It’s inspired by numerous sources, including Buddhist and Sufi methods.

1. Close your eyes. Take deep, belly breaths. Relax your body from head to toe.
2. Visualize your heart as putty. As you breathe deeply into it, see it softening, and becoming more pliable, and even porous.
3. Picture the part of you that is most vulnerable and tender. This may be your inner child, or even the part that gets angry and tries to protect you. Give it love. See an energy cloud around it – perhaps pink, or, another color that feels loving and supportive.
4. Have compassion for this struggling part of you. Tell it that it doesn’t have to work so hard, and you’ll be there for it.
5. While still breathing deeply and keeping an awareness of the above, open your eyes with a soft gaze. Notice an object near you. Be aware of the crafting of it that took place for it to exist, that someone spent such time creating. Or, notice a person near you – who has these similar raw places inside, perhaps like your own. Notice their tender beauty.
6. Become aware of imperfect perfection all around you – and in you. Nothing needs changing.