If you would like to feel more love in your life, there is a guaranteed method to open your heart: do selfless service.  We all have an inherent human need to feel we are contributing towards making the world a better place. Altruism is not just a characteristic of  a few special saintly people that we admire from afar – it is our part of our true nature. If we are not expressing our need to feel that we are helping others, something is missing, and we feel depressed, lonely, empty – even when we may seem to have everything we need on other levels.

I am speaking from personal experience. In my early 20s I went through a very dark period in my life, and I was suffering from a deep depression.  Something was missing in my life – but I wasn’t sure what it was. My attempts to understand myself had only led me deeper into an inner labyrinth – the more I analyzed my depression, the more reasons I seemed to find to be depressed.  Depression, though, is a wonderful catalyst for personal and spiritual growth – and indeed, it led me to begin my own personal quest to understand the meaning of life.  This led me to the local library where I began to systematically devour the section on spirituality – reading wisdom teachings from many different sources which gave me the thrilling realization that they were all saying remarkably similar things.   Read more