Love First Is…

Love First is an idea, a philosophy, a way of life—and so much more—that helps you live your best life enriched by the magic of Universal Love, all while working to create a better world that works for everyone—including our home itself, our beautiful Spaceship Earth.

Life can be scary and challenging and overwhelming, and sometimes it feels like just getting by is all we can do. But there is so much more that we are capable of, once we unlock our innermost power, presence, and purpose! Love First offers teachings — both new and timeless wisdom of the ages — to help you remember the truth of who you are and live up to your greatest potential. Not just to live your own best life, but to be part of a group of people who also want to lead with the heart while becoming their best selves, and co-create a world where Love is the foundation of everything.

Why ‘Love First’?

Our world is in dire need of help. It needs healing, and our society needs transformation. The future is looking bleak, and so many of those in power are focused on making the rest of us blame each other rather than doing something about our problems. Fortunately, countless individuals at every level of society, all around the world, are working hard day and night to try and prevent calamity from happening. But this work, this mission, is one of epic, legendary, even mythological proportions.

And so we need to do more. Much, much more. We need to organize and innovate, not just to become better and heal ourselves from trauma and ancestral wounds, but to create brand new systems to operate and run our society with. Our entire civilization must be reimagined from the ground up using a new philosophy. This new philosophy should incorporate the many brilliant and beautiful things that are working, and help inform, design, and create new systems—from incentive models to economics, from science to spiritual practices, and beyond—to fully replace those that are causing harm to our planet, our cultures, our communities, and our very souls.

We need to change the world.

And the first step in changing the world is changing ourselves.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

Love First aims to change the world by changing how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the planet. It offers a philosophy, framework, and set of tools and practices all rooted in Love and designed to help us create this new world, together.

But it goes further than that! Love First is also a shared identity that helps us find and connect with each other more easily, while simultaneously spreading what may be the single-most important message for the world to hear:

We are in an existential crisis, and the only way out is through Love. Not fear, not violence, not exploitation, not extraction, not oppression—Love, and only Love, can help us overcome all of the challenges we are facing.

So whether you’re looking to just better yourself but also want to feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, or you’re excited to the max to devote yourself to the most ambitious mission you may have ever heard of, Love First is here for you.

That’s why Love First is…

An Idea

First and foremost, it's an idea. A bold idea. It’s this idea that Love is a cosmic current, a fundamental property of our Universe, an energy field that we can tap into, align with, and apply to our everyday lives and relationships like a magic wand. (Read more about the energy field)

The first beautiful thing about Love First is that the two words themselves convey so much of the underlying feeling, emotion, and purpose. As an idea, you only need to say “Love First” and people immediately have a good impression of the big picture of it. But then those two words unpack into…

A Philosophy

Love First is a philosophy of love for people who want to live in alignment with their deepest truth, in right relationship with one another, and in service to something bigger than themselves. It’s a way to be part of and create a more conscious humanity, a way in which we as people can stand together and say we are taking the evolution of our species into our own hands, consciously and intentionally.

For the individual, it is a way of being, a moral compass, and a practical set of tools for living with greater purpose, clarity, and connection.

At its core, Love First is about putting love—not fear, profit, or power—at the heart of every decision you make. It asks us to live from our hearts, guided by truth and possibility, in order to co-create a more just, sustainable, and beautiful world.

As a philosophy it borrows the best teachings from ancient philosophers throughout history, the wisest guidance from different religions all over the world (because every religion has beautiful things to offer), and combines it all with the latest scientific research and understandings of psychology, neuroscience, physiology, biology — even quantum physics, consciousness research, and the science behind the magic and mysticism of the universe! Love First puts it all together in…

A Framework

Love First has been formulated into a 55-piece framework to help people understand, integrate, and apply it into every aspect of their lives. You can use the framework as guidance for improving relationship dynamics, creating greater career success, attracting and manifesting what you want in life, and becoming the best version of yourself. But you can also use it as a lens to evaluate through, looking at conflicts big and small and having a compass to help you navigate it.

This framework is pragmatic, widely applicable and usable, and intuitive to work with. Each piece can offer wisdom, guidance, and strategy by itself, but it is in their collective that their true power shines. Think of it as the compound interest in a savings account, or when creating good habits: with each additional piece you put into practice, you get better and better results. That’s why Going Love First is an invitation to embody being a Love First Person, because this is…

A Way Of Life

Love First isn’t just a set of teachings you can selectively apply and use. It is that, yes, but to really understand Love First you have to live it. You have to embody it, embrace it, and be a Love First Person: someone who lives these teachings as a way of life.

A big part of the teachings are social in nature, meaning, you practice the lessons and guidance through interactions with others. So this isn’t just personal development—it’s People Development.

This is by design. Part of the reason is to help combat the rising loneliness epidemic, a result of our increasingly digital lives that are ostensibly “more connected” but leave us feeling more isolated and alone. This gives rise to online tribalism, often centered around ideological lines, which create a false sense of belonging and community—because the moment you question or disagree with the dominant ideology, you risk being rejected.

Love First envisions community differently. Both as a philosophy and as a technical platform, it is designed to help us create transparency in our values and find commonality with others through our shared values. It also fundamentally seeks to subvert ‘political purity’ by creating modalities to understand our differences through the lens of spectra of alignment, rather than the false dichotomies of binary “right or wrong”-thinking. You may disagree with someone 100% on one topic, but more likely, you disagree with people only 50–60% on contentious issues, and even then, when you look deeper within yourselves, you’ll find that you actually have a high level of alignment on shared vision and goals. You just have a different strategy on how to achieve them.

Once you start embracing more and more of the modalities of Love First, you start to see how much more you have in common with people than you differ, and that’s where it helps that Love First offers…

A Shared Identity

Love First offers a shared group identity that anyone and everyone can embrace and make their own. To be a Love First Person means to be one of the many people that are trying to make a better, more conscious, and more loving world that works for everyone. A world where all people are free from oppression, apartheid, and exploitation. A Just, Equitable, Diverse, and Interdependent world.

To make that happen, we need to do more than ‘just’ (ha!) change our inner world for the better. We need to stand strong in solidarity, and we need to use subversive tactics to spread our message and our mission. That’s why Love First is so important to embrace as an identity, because it helps us accomplish all of those things. Identifying as a Love First Person signals so much more than ‘just’ practicing some new philosophical teachings. It creates awareness, and it offers a profoundly powerful benefit for your personal self-image. It serves as an immediate, constant ethical compass in times of challenge or strife.

But being a Person is just the baseline—every human is a Person, so this is really the most common denominator. That’s why Love First also doubles as…

A Prefix

‘Love First’ serves as a prefix to any way you identify. Truly! You can be a Love First Mom, a Love First Atheist, and a Love First Software Engineer, all at the same time. You can put that in your bio, on your LinkedIn, wherever and however you see fit. And what it means is simply this:

I practice living the values and principles of Love First and apply them in everything I do as <my identity>.

So a Love First Atheist practices the Love First teachings in their atheism, which looks like using the latest scientific research to understand the spiritual nature of the universe and applying the framework as an ethical compass in how they look at religion, and their own lack of it. Similarly, a Love First Christian would practice their Christian faith through the lens of Love First, and because both individuals have this common ground of the Love First teachings and philosophy, it gives them a shared identity even though previously their identities might have given them reason for separation. In this way, the prefix doesn’t just work to help us overcome our differences and the ‘us-vs-them’ mentality; it actively can serve as…

An Olive Branch

Love First is a spiritual way of life and philosophy. Its mission is to heal what’s broken in our world, and what we need for that is olive branches. Given the amount of conflict, hate, fear and anger in the world, it’s safe to say that we need a lot of olive branches.

But I believe in the inherent goodness in people’s hearts. I believe that people who cause harm have forgotten who they are: luminous beings that have a higher purpose on this Earth than to extract, exploit, and oppress others. We are here to steward our planet through the universe and build our society up long enough that we can take our destined place among the stars, the human race of Planet Earth among the countless species in this vast cosmic ‘verse. We have to be at peace with ourselves so that we can be at peace with each other, and we have to be at peace with each other so that we can be peaceful in the cosmos.

No one wants to be friends with the self-destructive neighbor who took a dump in every room and then set their own house on fire.

Let’s not be that kind of species. Let us define, together as a loving collective, what the destiny of humanity is supposed to be. Let us write our future history together. To do that, we need the unifying Vision of Love First, and to implement that vision we need…

A Social Contract

Love First aims to codify and technologize all of its teachings and integrate them in this website as a platform for your inner world transformation. It will help you get transparency into your values and offer ways to put those values into practice in an aligned manner, for any number of circumstances. And because we’re all working on this together, we’ll be able to crowdsource the most universally loving and beloved ways of being in alignment with our values.

Codifying all of this looks like creating an explicit social contract. Right now, our social contracts are implicit, and there is no way of knowing if or how someone may agree to any given piece of it. Social contracts are cultural, and so they differ between communities and cultures, let alone nations and societies. But fundamental to the study of philosophy, ethics, morality, religion, and law, is that the building of our civilization involves the creation of ever-more loving social contract pieces.

Today, memes are a common form of spreading new social contract ideas, but unfortunately, they are as ephemeral as memes generally are. If you share a meme that recommends a certain best practice, you might embody it, and the people who saw your share might embody it, but after that, it is gone. You have to keep re-sharing it to people in hopes of everyone adopting the best practice, let alone agreeing or committing to it.

Love First aims to offer a technical solution to this (in the future—we’re not there yet!) by creating a platform to explicitly capture every piece of social contract theory that we deem universally loving. Meaning, any way of being in the world and relating to or interacting with other people that would be loved by others no matter their background, creed, or beliefs.

Ultimately, creating the foundations of Love to build a new society and civilization on top of means having explicit agreements about everything—including what it means to be loving. And each one of us is a unique expert on what we love, and what love means to us and how it feels. But as much as we have 8.5 billion uniquely different definitions of love to work with, there is a Universal Love that connects all of our hearts together, and it is through that heart-felt connection that we can create…

A Movement

Love First is a movement to change the world. To reimagine the world anew in its entirety, with Love as the foundational pillar behind every piece of our society, behind every aspect of our civilization. It is a movement to bring together all of the hundreds of millions, even billions of people perhaps, who are already strongly desiring a different world. And it’s a movement to equip each of those people with a shared identity to rally behind, and the tools and knowledge to navigate this world more effectively, change their inner lives and improve their outer realities. It’s a movement to empower you and those like you with access to the magic and the mystery that this universe offers us. This is not wishful thinking: this is a science.

We are much, much more powerful than we realize, both as individuals and especially as a collective. We have the power to change the world, to change reality for the better.

Love First is the hand extended from the universe directly to you, warming your heart with its loving glow while whispering gently into your ears:

Your time to shine is now.
The new world begins in your heart.
You are needed.
You belong here.
Join the movement.