02/11/2025
The Three Stages of Love (Yoga)
There are three kinds of love we might experience in our life journey.
1. The first stage is falling in love.
This is what most people understand as love. It begins with attraction, emotions, and the wish to be together. Two people share their lives through joy and sorrow, through good and difficult times. It is a love of companionship and belonging. It includes the Kleshas(2.4) mainly attachment and jealousy.
2.The second stage is being in love.
Rabindranath Tagore described this beautifully in one of his stories. A woman was asked by her beloved if they should marry. She agreed, but with one condition:
‘We shall live on two sides of the lake. You will have your home on one shore, and I on the other. When we truly wish to meet, we will send each other an invitation. And if one day, while rowing across the lake, we meet by chance, it will be out of love, not out of duty. Only on the ground of freedom can this love blossom like a flower.’
This kind of love is rooted in freedom. It allows each person to remain whole within themselves and to choose love again and again, not out of habit, but from the heart.
3. The third and highest stage is being love.
Patanjali speaks of this as the highest evolution of consciousness, when love is no longer an act or emotion, but becomes our very nature. Through meditation, awareness, and inner stillness, one becomes love itself. Then you begin to love the trees, the birds, the wind, your work, and every form of life.
Yoga sutra 1.33
Maitrī karuṇā muditopekṣāṇāṁ sukha duḥkha puṇyāpuṇya viṣayāṇāṁ bhāvanātaś citta prasādanam
By cultivating feelings of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the suffering, joy toward the virtuous, and equanimity toward the non-virtuous, the mind becomes clear, peaceful, and full of love.
As we grow in life, we must also grow in love, moving from falling in love, to being in love, and finally, to becoming love itself.
This is what it means to live with awareness in every aspect of life: in your yoga practice, in relationships, in the way you eat, work, and raise your children. Every act can become an expression of love.
