I grew up in MSIA<\/a>. When I was five and six years old, we\u2019d go over to the Stratigakes\u2019 house for home seminars. As long as I sat through calling in the Light and the contributions, I could play with the Stratigakes boys for the rest of the evening. I remember chanting, \u201cani-puuuuu\u201d and thinking that it was hilarious.<\/p>\n When I got a little older, and the Strats moved away, we\u2019d still do seminars. Just me and my parents and I\u2019d stick around to watch the seminar.<\/p>\n In July, we\u2019d go to Conference. At first I was a baby sitter.\u00a0 And then I was a participant, having just signed up for Discourses<\/a> after my mom asked me, \u201cDavid, do you want to come to Conference with us?\u201d We would drive down to the Sheraton Universal each morning and then the 60 miles back to Palmdale.<\/p>\n I remember those fruit-filled dessert tacos at the celebration dinner and always missing the fourth of July fireworks.<\/p>\n It happened a few times, where I\u2019d start Discourses just in time for Conference, read them for a couple of months and then stop. It took me years to get through the whole box and then at some point I stopped all together.<\/p>\n Forward to 2007 and I\u2019m in my college apartment at the desk in my room in front of the single-paned window that looks out into a thick foliage of a tree. I\u2019m writing an email, sitting in a vintage black vinyl swivel chair with chrome legs that I grabbed from a campus dumpster.<\/p>\n The campus is UC Berkeley, and the apartment is on the North Side. Just east of Euclid, up the hill on Ridge road, tucked in amongst other student housing and right next door to a co-op named Stebbins – we call it The Stebs.<\/p>\n My hair is long, and my face is clean-shaven. I\u2019m 19 years old.<\/p>\n My desk is wide and deep and has some small plants on it. My computer is a thick 17\u201d MacBook pro that weighs about fifteen pounds.<\/p>\n I\u2019m writing an email to one of my professors to thank her for the class we\u2019ve just completed and I realize that I love her. I want her to know this, so I sign the email, \u201cLove, David.\u201d and I\u2019m about to click send when I hesitate. I don\u2019t want my sign-off to be misinterpreted as a come-on.<\/p>\n I start thinking about all of the letters and notes that I\u2019ve written to people throughout my life. And how I\u2019ve navigated this telling-people-that-I-love-them situation in the past. My friends, my girlfriend, my family, my teachers & bosses, and even strangers.<\/p>\n I remember that I would always make sure that the last thing I said to my mom and dad when they dropped me off at school was, \u201cI love you.\u201d If something were to happen while I was at school, I wanted to be sure that the last thing that they heard out of my mouth was \u201cI love you.\u201d<\/p>\n I remember the feeling of butterflies when I said, \u201cI love you,\u201d to my first girlfriend and she replied with the same. And I remember wondering if saying \u201cI love you\u201d meant that we would get married some day.<\/p>\n I always wanted people to know that I loved them. It was important to me and I sensed that there was a deeper experience of love than a lot of them understood. So I devised ways of saying \u201d I love you,\u201d without really having to say it. In my senior year of high school, I had signed my friends\u2019 yearbooks: \u201cMuch Love, Dave.\u201d<\/p>\n Mostly I was concerned that the word love would be misinterpreted as a romantic or sexual thing, which in most cases it was not. It was the love of friends and brothers, the love of family.<\/p>\n Now, I\u2019m finishing my letter of gratitude to my professor and I\u2019m caught with this same question. How do I communicate my love?<\/p>\n I decided to go with my old fallback from high school: \u201cMuch love, David.\u201d \u00a0I don\u2019t know if she understood what I meant or not. I do know that connecting years later has been important for both of us and that she\u2019s on my \u201clife mailing list\u201d of the people who I keep informed about what\u2019s going on in my world.<\/p>\n Back at my desk, I click the Send button and have a realization: Love is really important to me and I use it as a guiding compass in my life.<\/p>\n And then I have an epiphany: \u00a0When I say, \u201cI Love you,\u201d the people in MSIA really know what I\u2019m talking about. I realize, that I am a student of love, that love is my course of study and that I\u2019ve selected my college classes based on my experience of the presence of love.<\/p>\n I knew that the MSIA family understood me when I talked about Love. And that John-Roger<\/a> had taught me about Love, whether or not I paid close attention at my family\u2019s home seminars.<\/p>\n I chose to enroll myself in the school of love and I signed up for Soul Awareness Discourses<\/a>, not just to go to Conference, but to go to a place where I felt understood – a place where I could ask direct questions about the nature of love and receive answers.<\/p>\n I would come home from class, stretch out on the white freebee couch under the loft that I had built and do my Spiritual Exercises. When my roommates asked me what I was doing, I was nervous to share so I just told them I was napping. And then I said, \u201cI love you.\u201d<\/p>\n