This was not a typical get-back-in-touch letter from a business associate who moved out of town some years ago. Instead, a mother wrote about the quiet death of her five-week-old daughter in the child's car seat. It happened on the way to the home of baby's grandparents, where the extended family was anticipating the arrival.

What should have been a joyous visit turned to stunned anguish.

True love. Most of us search high and low for true love in that one ideal relationship. We struggle over it and with it, yearn for it, craft books, music, and poems about it--all without a clear understanding of what we seek or why we want it so desperately.

We're not even sure what love is. How do we define it? The definition of love is as unique and as varied as every individual who experiences it.

If home is where the heart is, so also dwells there a place for healing the grief and anguish of losing a child or any loved one.

All we need do is step inside our heart by means of a heart-centered meditation.

The heart isn't only a physical organ or merely an intellectual concept. The heart is the very center of our self-awareness--our consciousness as created souls.

Many of us search for years if not our entire lives for love. We're convinced--or at least hopeful--that it' out there, somewhere.

As the Waylon Jennings song laments, however, most of us are "looking for love in all the wrong places."

Tragically, not many of us would think to look in the mirror for love. Or, if we do consider it, we usually dismiss self-love as mere narcissism.

A healing circle--better known as a seance--is one of the most misunderstood and thus inadvertently abused of all spiritual healing practices. The very word seance immediately brings to mind what most people consider the unreal and laughable notion of "conjuring up spirits."

Derided by some, proscribed by others, the healing circle tragically has degenerated into a casual pastime with no more apparent significance or meaning than a video game.

Just because someone has asked for a healing circle does not obligate you to conduct one. Check into the inquirer's motives carefully. You not only have the right to feel comfortable with the inquirer, you actually need to establish some sort of rapport to help ensure the success of the session.

Do not force a session down the throat of a person whose fear level is too high.

After requesting protection, the healing circle conductor then tells the inquirer to speak the name of the soul in question. The inquirer verbalizes the soul's full name two times and a pet or nickname the third time.

Thought-Energy Communication

Sometimes, the soul hesitates to enter the circle precisely because there are strangers present.

"Donna" was trapped in an agony of indecision.

Her eight-year marriage to a man older than she, of another ationality, culture, and religion, had never been easy. Now it was threatening to founder on the rocky shoals of severe financial strain and quarrels over in-laws. At age 29, she already had one child, a daughter nearly three years old.

The caramel-colored corgi spotted me walking toward the city-run recreation center. Out for a walk with his person, the little dog stopped in his tracks and fixed me in his gaze. The woman on the end of his leash tried to move him along, but he wouldn't budge.

He stood his ground, waiting for me to approach him. I bent down and opened my palm for him to sniff, talking softly to him.

True love--that is, unconditional love--is such a puzzle for so many of us. We give it names like agape or grace, and think it is reserved only for a certain few or that it is so rare that we have little hope of ever finding it.

Yet true love displays many of the same characteristics as the lighthouse, which is neither rare nor all that hard to locate.