Over the weekend, I was painting a room in my house when Guy Clark’s “Stuff that Works” came on Spotify:

I got a woman I love
She’s crazy and paints like God
She’s got a playground sense of justice
She won’t take odds
I got a tattoo with her name
Right through my soul
I think everything she touches
Turns to gold

Those words hit me like an NFL linebacker. Every single one is the love I used to feel for an ex-girlfriend—“the one that got away,” as they say.

We long ago agreed to be just friends, which has been great. But sometimes I still feel romantic love for her—when I see a beautiful painting, when the sunlight looks a certain way, when I bite into a perfectly cooked steak.

As I mindlessly painted, I decided to watch what emotions were coming up.

First came desire—I missed and wanted her. Then sadness. What if I never find someone like her again? I thought. Then regret and self-blame—Why couldn’t I have gotten my shit together sooner? Then compassion—we were young and still figuring things out, of course we fucked up.

But that’s when I struck gold. Next came love. Overwhelmingly love. For my ex, yes—but also in a much wider, ubiquitous way. My chest went tender with a little sadness but a ton of warmth. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, I couldn’t help but be in awe of “this one precious life.”

Here’s what I realized: That love is mine. It was inside of me from the start. I just needed someone else to help me feel it. But what if I can access it myself? What if love is available at any time, yet I just overlook it?

Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes about this in one of my favorite books ever, “Start Where You Are,” but about the flip side of the coin, about negative emotions, like anger.

“If you have rage and righteously act it out and blame it all on others, it’s really you who suffers. The other people and the environment suffer also, but you suffer more because you’re being eaten up inside with rage, causing you to hate yourself more and more.”

That makes me think of politics, of hating Trump and white supremacy and capitalist greed. I recently saw an Instagram video of white counter-protesters yelling hateful things at Black Lives Matter activists. As I watched, it was me who felt the hate. The counter-protestors were probably already home relaxing and watching TV. I felt like shit, like I was burning up inside.

What I’m saying is, we have to live with our emotions, good and bad. Might as well get to know them a little bit. And in getting to know them, we might stumble upon the fact that love is already inside of us. That it’s not out there. That it’s not something to acquire. That it’s not as hidden as we assume.

“We already have everything we need,” writes Chödrön. “We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.”

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out. Get my writing straight to your email inbox here.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

I met somebody interesting a few weeks before the shutdown—before I holed up at my parents’ house on their rural farm. Hours of FaceTime and hundreds of text messages later, she’s an irresistible mystery I’m dying to figure out in person.

But what’s my crush based on? How much about her has my mind invented? How much have I projected on to her? Probably a ton. Probably so much that I’ll hardly recognize her in “real life.”

Once, at the end of a meditation retreat, the writer and Zen Buddhist teacher Natalie Goldberg told us students, “Watch out. You might think you know each other, but you’re projecting so many things.”

I’d spent that week crushing on one of the retreat center staff members. Everything about Molly added up to perfection. Her sunbaked skin and snow-white teeth. Her glances in the kitchen, which broke the retreat rule of not looking at each other. Her California accent when I broke another rule by striking up a conversation one morning. (There’s actually a name for this instant obsession, the “Meditation Crush,” which Portlandia nailed in this sketch.)

In my head, Molly and I ran off together to buy a cabin in the nearby Sante Fe mountains. But, as I walked away from the retreat center on the last day, Goldberg’s advice came in handy. I’d probably never see Molly again, which hurt—but I knew, in my gut, that I’d fallen for a projection.

Here’s how projection works: “Your brain fill[s] in the gaps in an otherwise incomplete story and the way it does that is through use of your own past history—positive or negative,” writes the psychiatrist Paul Dobransky.

Key words: your own past history. We know ourselves more than anyone else. So, when we meet someone new our brain fills in the gaps based on this self-knowledge. Molly was more than just an attractive face—she was the wild, earthy free spirit that I’d wished I could be.

See, when we’re young, we get messages from parents, teachers, family, and friends that certain things about us are unacceptable, wrong, unworthy. We internalize these messages as shame, which causes us to hide and lose access to parts of ourselves. When we lose access to, say, our joy, we’re bound to idealize others who are unabashedly joyful. When we feel shame about, say, our tendency to get really anxious, we’re easily irritated by other people who get really anxious too.

The other day, I was flipping through one of my favorite books, Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are, and saw a note I’d made: “Molly, Sante Fe, May 2016.” Here’s the text beside it:

“Our sense of being defeated means that something got in. Something touched our soft spot. This vulnerability that we’ve kept armored for ages—something touched it. Maybe all that touched it was a butterfly, but we have never been touched there before. It was so tender.”

And that’s the thing. Even if the Molly I fell for was a projection, there’s a reason she got in. There’s a reason I made up the story that I did. And there’s a reason it hurt to let her go.

In other words, whether my pandemic romance turns into something real or not, I’m learning about myself. I’m peering into a mirror who also happens to be using me as a mirror, and we’re both growing together, as long as we stay openhearted—which is the whole point of falling in love in the first place.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.