The Path to Love encapsulates Deepak Chopra’s self-help philosophy, although it is focused specifically on the concept of love. “In spirit you are unbounded by time and space, untouched by experience. In spirit you are true love,” (Chopra 2). The book is about different types of love, including self-love, but also romance and familial love. Although the book comes across as being new age fluff, it is nevertheless useful in engaging the reader and inspiring a positive mindset. The author does a good job of linking together various types of love, starting with the fundamental features of universal and self-love, progressing through the more mundane forms of love between people including romance. In the process of covering the different types of love, Chopra talks about how to cultivate a deeper and more meaningful life through recognition of the power of love. The Path to Love shows how actively cultivating and conscientiously practicing and developing love creates opportunities to heal.The subject of how we can heal becomes a central concept of The Path to Love. Particularly in chapter two, Chopra talks about how the entire purpose of the book is “to heal the split between love and spirit,” (17). Chopra urges readers to consider the “higher” forms of love, in spite of the fact that many sections of the book are about the relational manifestations of love. Higher love is more than just being infatuated with a person, and even more than human kindness and caring. Rather, the higher forms of love...

Through love, a person can overcome fear, and “bring us closer to God,” (Chopra 18). Love can be directed at the self first, to encourage forgiveness and compassion, which can then be extended towards others. It is critical that a person practices compassion both for self and other people, in order to reap the rewards of loving kindness.
Love offers the power to heal the self, and also heal relationships. While Chopra makes no outlandish promises about love’s capacity to heal the body miraculously, what the author does say about the way love heals psychological trauma and interpersonal relationship disharmony does ring true. The lesson is simple: by loving the self and others, the individual becomes a more stable, peaceful, and genuine human being. A person releases inhibitions, and becomes willing to open the heart to new people and new situations. Love is the energy shared between people, an energy that heals not just individuals, but whole communities.

Love is far beyond romance, even beyond the connection between mother and child. In The Path to Love, Chopra helps readers distinguish between the superficialities of human relationships and the deeper, underlying love that translates to compassion, kindness, and selflessness Love that is selfish and tied to conditions is not true love at all: something that most readers understand on an intellectual level. Chopra shows genuine love is something that is utterly…