All We Need is Love

A couple of years ago, I was driving to the studio to teach class. It was a warm day, so I had the window down, and, as I often do when I am driving, I was chanting along with Krishna Das to the Hanuman Chalisa.

While I was stopped at a red light, I heard someone say, “Excuse me?”

At first, I ignored him because I did not realize he was talking to me. When he called out again, I turned down the music and looked over at the man in the car next to me.

“What does ‘All One’ mean?” he asked.

For a moment I was confused. Then I remembered the “All One” bumper sticker, which I had picked up at the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, that was on my car. “Sub Ek,” or “All One,” was one of my Guru Maharaji’s most important teachings.

So, while hoping the light would stay red long enough for me to explain, I gave this stranger a very abbreviated dharma talk through our open car windows.

I told him that most of the time we see separation. We see ourselves as separate from other people and separate from the world around us. Yet the great teachings of yoga tell us that this apparent separation is not the Ultimate Reality. Beneath all our differences, everything and everyone is part of the One.

He listened, nodded, and thanked me. The light turned green, and I drove away smiling at the picture of Maharaji hanging from my rearview mirror while I turned the Hanuman Chalisa back up. 

I wrote about that encounter at the time, but I have been thinking about it again as I contemplate this month’s Jivamukti Yoga September Focus of the Month, “All You Need Is Love.” Because if it really is All One, then no one is outside of the One. 

Not the people we love and the people we do not particularly like. Not only the people who agree with us, understand us, and make us feel comfortable, but also the people who challenge us, frustrate us, or see the world completely differently than we do. Everyone.

Which brings me to another of Maharaji’s deceptively simple teachings: Love everyone. I have been Maharaji’s devotee long enough to know that his simplest teachings are often the most difficult ones to actually live.

It is easy to put “Love Everyone” on a bumper sticker or a T-shirt. It is easy to talk about unconditional love in a yoga class. It is even relatively easy to feel that love during kirtan, when we are chanting the Divine Names together and our hearts are open.

It is much harder when someone hurts us, disappoints us, angers us, or behaves in a way we simply cannot understand. And yet Maharaji did not say, “Love everyone who agrees with you.” He said, “Love everyone.”

This month’s Jivamukti Focus reminds us that beneath all the different kinds of love we experience—love for our partners, families, friends, animals, nature, work, teachers, and spiritual practices—there is one Divine Love. The Upanishads teach that this Divine Reality is not separate from us. Tat tvam asi: Thou art That.

In other words, Love is not something we have to acquire. Love is who we really are. I understand this teaching intellectually. Living it is another matter entirely. One of my favorite teachings from Ram Dass is his invitation to see the “soul, not the role.” We become so caught up in the roles we are all playing: parent, spouse, teacher, student, friend, stranger, helper, leader, person who agrees with me, person who does not.

These roles are real on one level, and they matter. But they are not the whole truth of who we are. Yoga asks us to look deeper. Can I look beyond another person’s role, personality, behavior, and opinions and remember that the same Divine presence that resides within me resides within them?

Can I remember, as Maharaji taught, Sub Ek? All One.

This does not mean that loving everyone requires us to agree with everyone. It does not mean we ignore harmful behavior, abandon healthy boundaries, or remain silent when something needs to be said. In fact, Maharaji also instructed us to tell the truth.

Ram Dass once struggled with these two instructions from Maharaji: “Love everyone” and “tell the truth.” What happens when telling the truth does not feel particularly loving? What happens when loving someone seems to require us to say something they do not want to hear? Maharaji’s answer was that we must do both.

This month’s Jivamukti Focus explores this same relationship through satya, truthfulness, the second of Patanjali’s five yamas. Satya does not mean simply saying whatever we believe to be true. Our truthfulness must be practiced in relationship with ahimsa, non-harming. Truth should be expressed with compassion rather than harshness. 

That is a much more challenging practice. It asks me to consider not only, “Is what I am saying true?” but also, “Why am I saying it? How am I saying it? Is what I am about to say necessary? Can I speak this truth and still recognize the Divine being in front of me?” Sometimes I can. Sometimes I cannot. This is why it is called a practice.

One of the practices that continually helps me return to the heart is mantra.

Maharaji was constantly repeating the name of Ram. He encouraged his devotees to chant the Divine Names and to recite the Hanuman Chalisa. Mantra has become an essential part of my own sadhana as well.

There is a reason that on that ordinary day at the traffic light, the Hanuman Chalisa was playing in my car. Chanting has become the main way I remember. When my mind is busy, mantra helps me remember. When I am anxious, mantra helps me remember. When I become caught in judgment or my own stories about how someone else should be behaving, mantra can help me remember. 

Ram. Krishna. Ma. The Maha Mantra. The Hanuman Chalisa.

Again and again, the Divine Name brings the mind back to the spiritual heart. This is one of the reasons I love Bhakti Yoga so deeply. Bhakti is the yoga of devotion, but I also think of it as the yoga of relationship. Through chanting, prayer, puja, service, and remembrance, we cultivate a relationship with the Divine.

At first, God may seem to be somewhere outside of us. We chant to Krishna. We sing to Ram. We call to Hanuman or the Divine Mother. We bow to the Guru. But the deeper teachings of yoga tell us that the Divine for whom we are searching is also the deepest truth of who we are. The One we love and the one who is doing the loving are not really separate.

Sub Ek. All One.

And this is where the practice moves beyond the meditation cushion, the yoga mat, or the kirtan. Can we carry that remembrance into the grocery store? Into our families? Into our workplaces? Into social media? Into a conversation with someone whose experiences and beliefs are very different from our own?

Can we see the soul rather than only the role?

I think this is especially important right now. There are so many forces encouraging us to focus on what separates us. It is remarkably easy to reduce another human being to a label, an opinion, a behavior, or a single moment in their life.

Yoga asks something different of us. It asks us to remember our connection.

This does not mean pretending our differences do not exist. Oneness does not mean sameness. We can disagree. We can speak out. We can set boundaries. We can work to change things that cause suffering.

But can we do those things without closing our hearts? Can we tell the truth and still love everyone? I certainly do not always succeed. I suspect very few of us do.

But perhaps the practice begins simply by remembering. When I notice myself judging someone, I can remember. When I feel myself becoming reactive, I can remember. When I want to make someone else wrong so that I can be right, I can remember. And when I cannot remember, I can chant. Ram Ram Ram.

Maharaji taught, “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.” I have come to believe that these are not really separate instructions.

When we remember God, we begin to recognize God everywhere. When we recognize the Divine in another being, service becomes a natural expression of that recognition. And perhaps, little by little, we learn what it really means to love everyone, not as an abstract spiritual ideal, but as a practice we return to again and again. To remember God. To see God in one another. To serve one another. To love everyone. Sub Ek. All One.

Namaste,

Sharada Devi