Love Is the Medicine
“An Emotional Relational Ecology”
“How does love land when you’ve never felt like you were enough?”
This was my challenge for the first 35 years of my life. My definitions of love left me constantly searching outside of myself to find acceptance and love, but it never came. I felt it in fleeting moments, but it never stuck. The hoping, wanting, yearning, and grasping eventually led me into increasingly dire situations, pressuring me to extract love from substances, people, or experiences.
I searched, endlessly, for something to fill the void. I chased approval in relationships, achievement in work, and comfort in substances. I chased until the chase claimed me. The more I sought love outside of myself, the more disconnected and misaligned I became. There were moments when I felt its warmth, but like the rays of sunshine peeking between storm clouds, it was quickly lost to the bleak darkness. The perpetual yearning was unsustainable. Eventually, the seeking led me into crisis, a crisis of my own making. In the wreckage, I was gifted both the pain and opportunity to shift.
My turning point came when I got sober, sitting in silent reflection, confronting the discomfort I had been running from for so long. Not because sobriety fixed everything, but because it stripped away the noise. It brought me face to face with the discomfort I had spent years avoiding. In that stillness, I began to understand that love could not land until I was willing to receive it. And I could not receive it until I stopped trying to earn it.
Before I could love myself, I had to accept myself. Then, slowly, I began to like myself. That quiet miracle made space for something more lasting to emerge, something sacred. Not love as posturing or performance, but love as presence.
The first act of love was self-love, which created the opportunity to heal. But for it to endure, I had to expand my understanding and community. I had to learn how to love others, not for who they made me feel like, but for who they truly were. Eventually, I had to extend that love beyond human relationship into the web of creation itself. This sacred act brings us into connection with something larger than ourselves - call it nature, divinity, source, or spirit, it is accessible to all who seek.
This is how I came to understand love, not as a feeling, but a container that holds the fullness of our lived experience. It is a living, dynamic emotional relational ecology. One that requires cultivation, stewardship, and care.
1. Love of Self: Returning to Wholeness
In a culture obsessed with self, self-love can be confused with indulgence, affirmation, or self-care. But true self-love begins long before any of that. It begins in the quiet places, where we stop running from ourselves and learn to sit with ourselves, beyond the discomfort. A space where one confronts the stories they’ve internalized and ask if they’re still true.
In early sobriety, I realized how fractured my relationship with myself had become. I could show up for others, perform competently, offer generosity, and even care. But beneath the surface was a void I couldn’t fill. I had spent years betraying my own truth to be accepted, admired, or chosen. I didn't know how to give or receive love inwardly because I hadn't learned how to hold my own humanity: one built on complexity and paradox.
Loving the self allows space for grief. Not the grief of what was lost, but of what was never given. I didn’t learn to attune to my own needs without judgment or condition. No one showed me how to set boundaries without guilt, or to speak to myself with the same kindness I offered to others. I had to learn and re-learn it again and again – slowly, stumbling, repairing, repeating.
Authentic self-love is not narcissism or avoidance. It is the courageous act of restoring inner alignment so we can become trustworthy to ourselves again. It allows us to stop performing and start living. It affirms our belonging as we return home to our hearts.
If love cannot land inside of us, if we cannot hold it, it will slip through our fingers no matter how beautifully it shows up in others or in moments.
2. Love of Other: The Art of Co-Creation
If self-love is how we heal, then love for others is how we make it durable. Family systems are often the first culture that teaches us to abandon ourselves, prioritizing attachment at the expense of our authenticity. We’re taught to seek love in others before we’ve built a foundation of safety to love ourselves. That early rupture reappears in our relationships, which mirror our own fragmentation.
When I began to show up differently, humbly and securely grounded in my authenticity, I noticed that not everyone could meet me there. Some relationships were lost after the disclosure of my traumatized life choices. Others slowly fell away, growing apart with time and lack of nourishment. My family connections and some close friendships deepened, but really, the clearing created space for new relationships to strengthen. There were certainly moments of loneliness, but learning to be with myself allowed me to disrupt the codependency that had plagued my life and habitual grasping at others. What remained were the connections that felt chosen, not obligatory or conditional. Relationships that could hold both grace and accountability. Partnership that didn’t depend on my performance or perfection, but on our willingness to choose truth and practice love, because love is a skill, just as it is an emotion.
This is what co-creation is: a devotional practice to return again and again to love. That’s what Tami and I created. It doesn’t follow cliché scripts, but it’s still our happily ever after. It isn’t flawless, but rather a growing, living mosaic. It’s not perfection, but it’s our imperfect masterpiece. It is a place to play, to be, to fall, to break, and to let go of expectations or conditions. Our love didn’t “just happen.” It was co-created through every hard conversation, every moment of vulnerability, and every shared commitment to grow, for ourselves, for each other, and our family.
Love for another is not about completion. It’s about being seen, heard, held, and valued, and after all of that, continually chosen. It’s the sacredness of being known and the responsibility of knowing another. It’s less about feeling right and more about becoming real.
Love asks: Can you stay when it gets uncomfortable? Can you tell the truth without using it as a weapon? Can you see the person across from you as both sovereign and sacred?
Love of other becomes the testing ground where we practice what we’ve reclaimed within ourselves. And when both people are doing the work, not perfectly, but honestly, it becomes a container for transformation for the individuals and everyone around them.
3. Love of Creation: Returning to Reverence
It seems anathema to say, but even after learning to love yourself and others, something still may feel missing. A lingering sense something deeper remains unmet. A gnawing hunger no person or practice can satiate.
After decades of self-proclaimed atheism, I found myself questioning that conviction. I felt a deep connection to the mysteries of life: awe, wonder, and the unseen. But I didn’t just want connection, I wanted communion. With a lifespan that feels both immense and fleeting, I yearned for something larger than the human experience. A sense that I belonged not only to my body or my relationships, but to something vaster. Love of creation became that realization.
It is the humility to see ourselves as part of, not apart from, the world around us. If one examines the way humans interact with the world, one might presume that the world belongs to humans. A resource to be pirated, pillaged, dominated, tamed, and owned, commodified for our indulgence and gain. In reality, it is humans who belongs to the world in all its wildness and wonder. An animal, one amongst many, but a part of a delicate system that strives for balance and reverence. Just one of the many creatures entitled to receive creation’s beauty without needing to possess it. There is a sacred intelligence woven into and connecting every living and non-living thing in this universe.
For me, this love emerged slowly, over long runs, in beloved community, through meaningful work. It didn’t begin in language, but in subtle sensations: a quiet return to knowing. A gentle force inviting me back into alignment.
Psychedelics played a role here, but they did not create the connection. Pain did. It was through suffering that the path was alchemized. The clarity in sobriety and the sacredness of psychedelic experiences strengthened this knowing, reminding me that love is not confined to human bonds. It is the fabric that holds everything together. But we must still ourselves enough to hear it, witness it, feel it. We must be humble enough to accept it.
Love of creation is not about spiritual bypass or romanticizing the natural world. It is not a banner call to choose a religion, pick a side, or take up faith. It’s about cultivating reciprocity with the sacred and remembering that the silence holds memory. And that silence can speak if we listen, it can guide if we allow it, and it can hold us when we let go. Creation, in all its complexity, is worthy of our homage and awe.
I’m reminded of the words shared by Rick Williams (Oglala Lakota/Northern Cheyenne) at the opening session of Psychedelic Science 2025, “We are supposed to be a civilized people. But a civilized people know better than to destroy what sustains them.” When we love the world this way, we stop trying to dominate, commodify, or exploit it. We learn to live in service of it. We become stewards, not extractors.
Love Is the Medicine
When love is present, it transforms everything it touches. When love is practiced, it has the power to heal everything from the micro to the macro. Many of us arrive at this work searching for something shaped by trauma, pain, or conditioning that tells us love must be earned, proven, or sacrificed. But love does not demand conditions. It is not the transactional reward for a job well done. It is the container that holds our lived experience.
These nested networks begin within, extend outward, and expand beyond. Love is an emotional, relational ecology: a dynamic, living environment that metabolizes its inputs into abundance. It is the sustaining force that makes healing possible.
This is not abstract philosophy, but a living, devotional practice. In the containers we create for healing, whether in individual work, couples’ sessions, or community spaces, love is always felt. Not the idea of love, but the conditions that make it real: safety, transparency, and trust. This space and these requirements allow one to be heard, seen, held, and valued with compassion and care.
That is the medicine. Love is the medicine.
With love and light,
John Moos, MD
Soul Surgeon