Lately, I have been thinking a lot about love.

About how we are always calculating love’s scoreboard.

About how we know we shouldn’t but we can’t help it. It seems so natural for us to get tangled up in the do’s and don’t’s, the right and wrong, the eternal calculation of everything. Agonizing over every detail, certain that if we get it wrong everything will be a mess… and if we get it right, the sun will come out and we will finally feel joyful, safe… and loved.

First of all, it is clearly impossible for the intellect to calculate who is actually ahead in love’s game.

Humans are clever and can solve many problems with calculations.

But we are not dealing with variables in an equation and there is no theorem out there, no matter how many self help books we read, to solve our dilemmas about Love.

Second, love is never equal. Not ever.

No matter how much we crave love to be equal at all times.

It just isn’t.

Our spouses and children and careers cannot be summed up in a variable. And the only place where they all play out together is in our lives, in our minds and hearts. Like billions of snowflakes, these connections intersect in far too many ways to graph. There is no right equation, grand solution, no healthy relationship…

There is only the flowing

or not-flowing

of love.

What if there were a shortcut to finding love’s secret balance?

What if asking ourselves the question, not what’s fair or right, but what is needed here… to make love flow? is the equation, dare I say the spell, we are looking for?

Love is not a path to follow and at the end magically, suddenly stumble upon the dream we’ve been waiting for. The path is the quiet tugging of our hearts, the opening, inch by inch, of the gates of our heart, letting more and more love flow into every chamber, and then following it to the next thing, and asking the question all over again.

What is needed here to make love flow?

What choice, what action allows the most love to flow?

Because Love is not the destination; it’s the waters that will carry us down, deeper and deeper into connection with each other. Your Soft Animal instinctual self, your somatic wisdom, knows more than any book. It knows exactly what is needed. Try it and you’ll see.

Our instinct for balance is actually a good and noble one. We’re asking the right question, but using the wrong formulas to find the answers.

We don’t need to use our heads or even our hearts. It’s our bodies that really know where the symmetry lies. Ask what will let love flow, and trust love to carry you where you need to be.

Now that’s a spell worth casting.