In songs greeting cards, spiritual figures extol regularly the benefits of love.

We're told many things about love that it's indispensable

foundation for healing and for positive change.

I was just reading and for positive change.

I was just reading, the spur of tonight's talk

was I was reading a wonderful conversation

between the Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams, who's kind of a hero she wrote the book Radical

Darma and Sharon Salzburg who's a wonderful teacher and this tradition and in it Angel Williams said, one thing she said I thought was funny. I don't like a lot of people but I love everyone.

And then she also said, spiritual practice is all about love and liberation.

And obviously... and obviously I think we have an idea of what liberation means.

It's a kind of being able to shed the constraints of both our cultural programming, our family systems,

the society that we live in to seize the means to find both peace and hopefully some form of justice or way of being in the world that is different from what we're assigned.

So, but love itself is rarely if ever defined.

And I think that in all of these articles I've read where love is not defined,

it's actually dimming the value of the teachings because when we simply extol love without defining it,

we invite people to insert a meaning for what love means and there's got to be a better way of saying that,

insert their own meaning for what love implies.

And for at least half of us that grew up in insecure

childhoods that means that we will probably

uh... fill in a definition that's actually not beneficial or positive.

We'll actually fill in a definition for what love is that actually could be rather detrimental.

If we grow up with an anxious engulfing caretaker who's constantly preoccupied with others emotional investment,

...