Dogstar

God's mercy, the fact of impermanence and the seeming progression of my identity.

I bought the life course - haven't delved too deeply in it yet - but it is mainly oriented towards finding and creating a career.. finding your place in the world.. very practical. I don't think it will help you much in the area of spiritual enlightenment.

Love is kind of like a muscle that you can make stronger. As your title suggests, you can in fact stir feelings of love. What has worked best for me in the past and present is the practice of metta meditation (metta translates to "kindness"). When I first started, I used a guided meditation but now I can do it without any guidance. Just like you can enhance concentration or mindfulness during meditation, you can also play with the intention to create feelings of kindness and compassion towards oneself. This meditation literally saved my life - I recommend it to anyone who struggles to love themselves. I'll tell you a little more about the practice but I urge you to find some kind of guided meditation on YouTube or something like that. As in regular meditation, you start off in a comfortable position - in a chair, in lotus position, whatever works for you. You start off with the intention of planting long-term "seeds" in your mind of how you wish to feel about yourself. These are kind of like affirmations, but focused on the future - "I wish to be happy... I wish to be strong, etc." then you start consciously thinking about all the things you like about yourself... even just one thing, can be a very small thing if nothing really comes up.. if nothing comes up, merely stay present in your wish to feel good about yourself, which is rightful, appropriate and beautiful. You, like all beings everywhere, simply wish to feel love and be happy. It is important to be gentle with yourself in this meditation and not to try to force wonderful states of being. The point is to merely connect with your intentions and try to feel that you can be the source of these good feelings - that you don't need to wait until you do something huge before you can love yourself, or wait for God to shine love down upon you spontaneously. You are literally the one asking yourself to connect to these wishes to feel happy and safe and loved and you are also the one with the power to allow these feelings. This might take a leap of faith and takes practice - over time you will be able to stir these feelings within minutes or seconds instead of 20-30 minutes or however long it takes at first. After harvesting feelings of kindness and love to yourself, you move on to sending the same wishes of love and happiness to the person or few people in your life who have truly helped you and taught you, then move on to a friend, then a "neutral" person, then someone who annoys you.. the purpose being to expand your field of love - when you expand it to others, you feel it more in yourself. You end the meditation sending love to all beings everywhere. As I said, this meditation saved my life. Perhaps worth giving it a try. Nothing for me has worked to stir feelings of love more than this practice, besides overcoming adversity and just learning more about life allowing me to be content with what I have - but the meditation is something you can actively do whereas life experience is less in your control.