What’s Love Got to Do With It? Reflections on a Powerful Feeling

The following text is an adapted version of a talk given to participants of the MTTC (Mindfulness Teacher Training Course) at Waldhaus Meditation Centre, Germany in October 2025. I dedicate it to all who are experiencing heartache right now – whether over a romantic relationship, the loss of a beloved person or the state of the world. May this text be somewhat helpful in easing the pain.

What is Love?

Tina Turner asks us in her famous song: “What’s love got to do with it? What’s love but a second hand emotion?”

A kind of love which isn’t a ‘second hand emotion’ is the kind of love the Buddha speaks about: ‘Metta’ – a Pali word often translated as ‘loving kindness’ or ‘unconditional love’.
I find both translations not totally satisfactory – I prefer simply the word ‘love’.
The kind of love the Buddha speaks about is very different from the one which is almost exclusively being sold to us in films and pop songs.
“I love you because you love me, too.” “I love you – but only if I get something in return.”

The kind of love the Buddha talks about does by no means exclude people who are very close to us. It doesn’t exclude romantic love. But it does in itself not dependent on another person. It is not limited to a certain small amount of people in our lives, which we have chosen out of several billion.

I have been exploring this quality of metta these last months on retreat. Something which became even clearer to me during this time is that metta is not something we either have or don’t have. It’s not something which depends on what people around us are doing. It’s a quality which we can develop. Like training a love muscle in the meditation gym.
It might not be possible, of course – or even necessary – to love everybody. Metta practice does not demand of us to do that. But we can be clear about the importance to train our heart in the direction of this kind of love, on and off the meditation cushion. And if love is too big a word: How about training in the direction of non-harm…?

The Buddha states: “Anger is like picking up a hot coal with the intention to throw it at another person. Who gets burned first?” This sparked in me an image for metta.
To me, love is like a hot bowl of soup you cook on a cold winter’s day in a warm kitchen with the intention to feed someone. Who gets warmed by it first…?

We might feel anger or other strong feelings of aversion at times. There’s no need to beat ourselves up about it, tell ourselves we ‘should be more loving’, and thus add more suffering on top. But what we do need to be clear about is: Hate or anger is never of any use to anybody. And certainly it’s of the least use to the one who’s experiencing it. It hurts to be angry.

So an aspect of metta is certainly training in unconditional “non-hate”. Unconditional “non-blame”. This includes of course, not blaming ourselves when we experience negative emotions. We can then ask, too: “How can I meet this emotion, which I might not like, in a loving, or a non-harming way?”
If we add on top of the emotion: “I shouldn’t be feeling this, I should be loving everyone” – this isn’t practising metta. Instead, it increases the pain.

Metta can accomodate all emotions, including the unhelpful ones. Practising metta means looking with eyes of care at the anger, the fear. “Hello, welcome back. Have a seat. Have a cup of tea, take a biscuit, be my guest. Thank you for your input – but I’m not going to take actions based on your advice.”

There is a huge difference between allowing every emotion (which is helpful and leads to relief) and following its storyline, justifying it and then acting unskilfully as a result.

This is the great potential of this practice – everything is allowed to be here (if it’s here already, then not accepting its presence certainly won’t make it disappear) and at the same time we can see very clearly which emotions are worth acting upon and which aren’t.
We can apply the same approach when we are confronted with challenges others present us with. We can see: this is this person’s anger. I don’t have to react to it. If I am not joining in the game, all there is, is this person’s behaviour, which is of course, as everything a result of many causes and conditions, the majority of which I am not aware of.

What we certainly all share as humans is the experience that life is not a picnic. And that we often don’t act in ways we would like to. So whenever there is irritation arising in me about somebody else’s behaviour, can I remember that I probably have some tendencies which aren’t too dissimilar…? And the likelihood is that I get irritated the most by what I recognise best from myself. So to express it simply: giving those around us some slack.

At the same time it is important to acknowledge the capacities and limits of our heart-mind in any kind of relationship with others. If the heart-mind is feeling overwhelmed for example, it is very important to listen to that. To remember the right to remove oneself from a situation which the being just can’t handle at the moment.

In this case a loving attitude is to say: “This is too much for me right now. I need to go for a walk and we can carry on this conversation later, once the heat of emotions has cooled down.”

And, of course, we also have the right to remove ourselves entirely from a relationship, especially if the dynamic is proofing harmful to us and/or the other person.

Impersonal Love

Practising metta does not mean we can’t have people in our life that we feel a special kind of love for. In my view it would be a shame if these practices led to an idea that we shouldn’t experience romantic feelings or maintain special friendships for example.
The love towards those very close to us actually benefits from developing a more impersonal quality of love. It becomes more spacious . As there’s more love in our heart, we become less and less ‘needy’ towards those people to fill that need for love, which brings more lightness, freedom into these kind of relationships.

Practising metta is very empowering in this way because the question ‘Am I loveable?’ gets more and more replaced by the question ‘How much love is there in my heart?’.

This kind of love is not restricted to humans, either. There can be a very deep
emotion of love when looking at the night sky, listening to a beautiful song or feeding a cat.
I believe we need to free this word ‘love’ from its cage in order to recognise more moments of love in our daily life. There’s the potential for so many of them, regardless if we have a partner or children, regardless of which kind of relationship we have with our parents – these are often the only examples of love we are conditioned to recognise as such.

Being receptive to this independent, more spacious kind of love gives much nourishment and peace, as it can’t be taken away. It is not dependent on anything or anybody.

Love in Action

To train the heart in the direction of love does not mean to become passive; the opposite is the case. In this way love is actually the best fuel for change.
We can practice loving, or at least non-hate, towards anybody, and at the same time an expression of metta can be to oppose very clearly a behaviour which is unethical.
We don’t even need one inch of hate in us for doing that!

It makes a huge difference to our heart and, I would claim, to the likelihood of a good outcome of our actions, whether we act out of a place of ill-will, anger, blame or from a place of non-hatred. We can call out that which is clearly unethical and yet we do not have to poison our heart with hate. Otherwise we become part of the problem, rather than the solution. Or as the Buddha puts it: “Hatred will never cease through hatred but through love alone. This is the eternal law.”

Find your Style

Examples of expressing love can range anywhere from putting a new toilet roll on the toilet roll holder when nobody is watching to gluing oneself to the road in protest.
From getting up in the middle of the night to change nappies of a baby to giving service or money to a community or a project for the benefit of all.
From making choices in what we buy, eat, how we live which take into account the welfare of other beings to giving up our time to listen to a friend or stranger in need.

As my teacher Christopher Titmuss states, “acts of love do not depend on the emotion in the heart being present at the time.” The feeling might be there at the time of engaging in a loving act, or it might not. For example: I do not love giving a talk in front of thirty people. Most of the time I do not even love talking. I love many things. I love solitude. I love reading poetry in a Kuti in the woods. I don’t love public speaking. And yet here I am sitting in front of a group of people, talking. It’s an act inspired by love without the feeling ‘I absolutely love doing this’ right now. I have a deep love for these teachings, the practises we are engaged in. They have radically changed my life. And I have immense trust that they can do the same for other people. So out of that love comes the motivation to share, to do something out of my comfort zone. The love generates the energy to prepare a talk and get onto a full train, without a loving emotion present at that time.
It’s an unshakeable love, even though I don’t always feel it.

And then again I do feel it very much as an emotion, too:When I teach a course and a participant comes up to me afterwards to express appreciation, says it has made a difference to them. When I see people engaged in sharing as a result of a talk. There’s a very natural resonance arising in the heart, and these moments are very precious for us as nourishment. But the love itself does not disappear if these moments aren’t there, it is not dependent on them.

If we engage in acts inspired by love and stay very close to our loving intention, then a wonderful effect is that we become a lot less dependent on results.
I might still not love speaking in front of a large group of people. But I’m also not terrified of it anymore. Because no matter if this talk is well received or not, I know that the intention was a loving one. This makes me feel at ease. I have not much influence over the result. How you receive this talk does not only depend on ‘my performance’ – it also depends on how you slept last night, if what you had for breakfast agrees with your belly, and all experiences you’ve had so far in your life.

In this way love can counteract fear, it can free up much energy and also creativity, as we become less concerned with what other people might think about the ‘product’ of our love.

So not comparing ourselves to others in this process. Not thinking ‘what should I do?’
But really listening inwards: WHAT IS MY STYLE to express love?

If we connect with the quality of metta inside us, it will find its expressions through the being, naturally. We don’t have to look around what anybody else is doing.

If the heart opens, then love wants to be expressed, it wants to flow out of the being.

So my heartfelt encouragement to all of you is: TRUST in this quality inside yourself. TRUST your style in expressing it.

There is no amount of expressing love which is too small. This world needs every little bit of it.