By Paige Leigh Reist┃Posted: May 25, 2019

Whether it’s by choice or by circumstance, being single doesn’t mean that your life needs to be devoid of love. For the most part, all of us want to be loved, and to give love as well. It’s in our nature, and it’s in our biology.

Love is the most powerful uniting force in the universe, and being single is, believe it or not, the perfect season of life to revel in it. After all, your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship you will ever have.

Here’s how to fill your life with love, regardless of your romantic status.

Seek sensuality

Pleasure, joy, and sensuality do not have to be restricted to the realm of romantic relationships. Your body may be your temple, as the old saying goes, but don’t forget that many temples in all religious traditions have dancers, feasts, painted ceilings, and many-voiced songs echoing through grand marble halls or simple wooden rooms. Temples are alive.

Seek sensuality through dance, therapeutic massage, and a vibrant, delicious plant-based diet. Yoga may have a reputation of asceticism and restraint, but anyone who’s practiced can tell you about the intense pleasure of pigeon pose or the sweet surrender of child’s pose. Yoga celebrates the strength and sensuality of your body and all it can do, and it’s the perfect chance to get back in touch with your physical self while also loosening up, relieving stress, and getting a bit of a workout in, too.

Remain in the present

We frame finding a romantic partner as one of life’s “essential” milestones--it’s just something that you’re apparently supposed to do, right along with purchasing a home and finding your dream job. As a result, sometimes being single feels like you’re waiting around for the future to begin.

If you look around, you’ll see that there are single people who are perfectly happy as well as unhappy, and that there are paired couples who are happy and those who are not. Your happiness doesn’t depend on whether you’re in a relationship or not, and once you can realize this, life can become a celebration of the current moment.

Bringing your attention back to the present, and really focusing on yourself and your life how it is right now, can bring a lot of joy into your day-to-day life and soothe a lot of anxiety about the future. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of dreaming, but being present can have a huge effect on your overall happiness. Developing a meditation practice can help you become more present in the current moment, and make a significant impact on the person you’re becoming for the future.

Love yourself as though you were a child

Often times the fear of being single has to do with the deep-seated fear that nobody likes us, that we’re fundamentally unlovable, or even that we don’t deserve love at all. These limiting beliefs keep you from growing into your happiest, healthiest self. When we believe that we are unlovable, how can we love ourselves?

Care for yourself like you would a child. Parent yourself. This means, of course, feeding yourself well, putting yourself to bed at a reasonable hour, and maintaining your physical health, but it also means being patient and forgiving with yourself, seeking to teach yourself about the world and its people, and letting yourself explore and have fun. When you begin to look at yourself from a more caregiving point of view, you’ll see that you are, in fact, worthy of the love that you seek, and that you’re capable of giving it to yourself, too.

Awaken into spiritual love

Romantic love isn’t the only fulfilling love. In fact, the ancient Greeks identified eight different kinds of love: ranging from the unhealthy obsession that characterizes Mania to the playful innocence of Ludus. There’s also a form of spiritual love in this classification system, and it’s called Agape: a love that is pure, unconditional, and infinite. It is utterly and wholly divine, and we each carry within us the capacity to experience this love, as well as the capability to share it.

Finding that source of inner love might not be easy. It will require that you descend into the caverns of your soul and face the demons that have been living there for sometimes years: demons that lie to you about your own worthlessness, demons with faces that look like your parents, your teachers, your grade school bully, or any other people that have hurt the child within. These demons will tell you that this love doesn’t exist, that you are too flawed, too damaged, too broken to find it. But this doesn’t change the truth of the matter--it’s there, and it’s real, and it’s your birthright.

Agape love lives inside of us all. In ancient Sanskrit, this well of love is called Samadhi, and is characterized by a deep, abiding peace and tranquility. One of the ultimate goals of meditation is to connect us to this love within, so that we can return to the waking world with greater strength and wisdom. It’s not only good for your state of mind--Sahaj Samadhi meditation, for example, greatly benefits your physical health, too.

Remember always that your relationship status does not determine your worth as a person. If you desire love and companionship, the greatest way to attract it is to give it out! Be generous with your heart, your time, and your friendship, and love will cease to be a concept and begin to be a reality.

“Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.” — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

Learn more about what Sri Sri says about love:

Paige Leigh Reist is a writer, editor, blogger, and creative writing instructor.