@jayshetty ON The 4 Stages of Love

So I want everyone to visualize that life is like a school of love. Like, imagine the world, planet Earth has been designed in order to help you learn how to love, approach life in that way. And when you approach life in that way, you realize that there's four different classrooms or there's four stages and phases that help you learn different lessons about how to love properly. And so the four stages are preparing for love, practicing love, protecting love, and perfecting love. And what I like about this is we usually like to jump from liking someone to loving someone. But these four stages give you the most important middle part, which is learning to love someone. And so I like to break things down into steps and stages because it stops it from being this big abstract idea and this fluffy, woo woo, kooky feeling to actually being like, well, where am I on this journey? What step am I at? What am I gonna have to learn at this stage? And I think when you approach it that way, it just gives you more confidence and self assurance. And the stages were mapped out based on the Vedas. So the Vedas break down these four stages and they talk about how we have to learn different lessons at each classroom.

Preparing for love, practicing love, protecting it, and perfecting it.

Correct.

I'm curious, do you think it's harder to learn how to love someone else or how to learn how to love yourself?

Great question. So I believe that if you've gone through, and first of all, I want to say these four stages are not like you finish one and then you start the other. They're always integrated. Integrated like you're always going to be in a couple of places. I find that if you're doing the work to learn to love yourself, that process and that skill helps you learn to love someone else. Let me give an example. Like, if I'm learning to love myself, it means I have to get to know my dark side. It means I have to get to know my flaws. It means I have to get to know parts of myself that make me feel uncomfortable. Now, if I recognize that I have all of that in me now, when I meet someone else, I'm not surprised when they have it in them because I've already seen it in myself. And I think often if we think, oh, like I'm going to meet someone and they're not going to have any issues or they're not going to have any challenges, it's partly because we haven't necessarily worked through our own. And so I think if your trauma is more visible to you, if your pain and your stress of the past is more visible to you. You're actually better at being compassionate to someone else's because you can see it's something that connects us.