A few weeks ago, I spent the weekend with my coach and mentor Mary Morrissey in LA in wonderful, life-changing workshops. Monday morning, I caught the airport shuttle bright and early for my flight back to Nashville. We stopped at another hotel where a family of four kids, both parents and the grandmother got on the shuttle. They were a beautiful family. The children had full heads of hair and the youngest had curls all over his head. They all had that sleepy look to them. The mother and the grandmother took the seats on either side of me, and I commented to the mother about how gorgeous her children were. The oldest daughter sat next to her father and turned to bury her forehead into the father’s arm. In response, he leaned down and kissed her on the top of the head in an act reserved only for fathers and daughters. The mother said something to them in a melodic, unfamiliar language and the entire family laughed making comments back and forth to each other. I sat there in the midst of them relishing the gift of being witness to the easy intimacy of a family traveling together.

This month we celebrate Valentine’s Day, a day set aside for love. So often, we think of love as something reserved only for those special people in our lives, and it is right that we shower those closes to us with abandoned affection.

Equally important, is to remember how we are in relationship with everyone we meet. The more we treat every meeting as a holy encounter and greet each person as if he/she were God’s beloved, the closer we get to what Jesus called the Kingdom Heaven.

The master teacher from the Christian tradition, Jesus, gave only two commandments. He told us that we are to love God with all of our hearts, our souls and our minds. He then told us to love one another as ourselves. Many have interpreted this to say that we are to love ourselves first. But upon closer examination, the word “as” suggests that there is no separation between ourselves and another. It implies that we are one and the same. The way we treat another is the way we treat ourselves and vice versa.

The Buddhist tradition offers us the powerful loving-kindness practice. They instruct us to send thoughts of well-being and peace to those closes to us, to those that we have labeled as our enemies and to all sentient beings in the world. It is a powerful act that brings well-being to those who practice it on a regular basis. It is impossible to hurt someone and wish them well at the same time.

We cultivate our relationship to one another by recognizing our common humanity. We see that we all have the same joys, dreams and pains. When the family on the shuttle started laughing I realized that laughter sounds the same in any language. The youngest boy who was about three or four years old asked his father a question with that same inflection that denotes curiosity in all languages. We all share the same creator called by different names, understood and experienced differently. Nevertheless, we are all created from the same sacred material. When we touch our commonalities and our shared essential self, it is easier to treat one another with reverence.

I forever carry that family with me as they are etched into the fabric of my being. Even though our meeting was fleeting, I am now in relationship with them. I send them thoughts of love and appreciation for sharing their love and deep commitment to each other with everyone on the van. They represent all of humanity and our inseparable relationship to one another.

So, this month, as we celebrate love, honor everyone who crosses your path. Look at your doctor, the cashier, the person in the car next to you as if they were the beloved. Treat them as if they were the sacred made manifest and watch what happens in all of your relationships.