Love as Verb: What Cancer, Psychedelics and Religion Teach About Embodied Love

The word "love" is both too much and not enough. The most transcendent moments of my life can only be described as “love”. The quiet moments with my children when realizing I would give everything for their wellbeing. The recognition during cancer treatment when people come to sit with you in the infusion center. That feeling during psychedelic journeys when boundaries dissolve and I’m connected with everything. 

But "love" is also the most overused word in the English language. Especially in religious contexts, where it gets repeated until it becomes white noise. God is love. Love thy neighbor. Love is patient, love is kind. The word gets stretched so thin it barely means anything. We have one inadequate word for everything from cosmic connection to greeting card sentiment.

This linguistic inadequacy creates a problem: how do we talk about something so essential when the language fails to capture? My recent podcast conversation with Ryan Meeks forced me to reckon with this tension. And what I discovered is that maybe the word doesn't matter as much as what we do with it.

Standing at the Intersection

Ryan occupies a unique position to speak about love. He spent decades as a Christian pastor, building a church that grew to eight locations before he systematically deconstructed his faith and walked away from ministry. He's a cancer survivor, diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2017, who experienced the embodied care required to survive aggressive treatment. And he's now a psychedelic facilitator, sitting with vulnerable people through profound experiences. The title of his recent book tells you everything about his philosophy: "Life is a Gift. Love is the Point."

Through Christianity, cancer, and psychedelics, Ryan learned something essential about what love actually means. Love is the point. And it starts with actions, not just emotions.

Christianity's Gift: Love as Action

Ryan grew up in church. His father was a minister. Church was home. And whatever critiques he now has of Christianity, he acknowledges what it got right: love as verb. "Love, joy and peace, patience, kindness, long suffering," he told me, describing Christianity’s values. "All of the beautiful values of any decent human meaning system, regardless of its roots."

Christianity taught him that love isn't primarily a feeling. It's visiting the sick, welcoming strangers, caring for the poor. Showing up and doing the work. This foundation, planted in childhood and reinforced through years of ministry, shaped everything that came after. Even now, having left the faith entirely, Ryan carries this understanding: love is something you do, something that moves through the material world.

Cancer's Lesson: Love Shows Up

Ryan's cancer diagnosis came in 2017, during one of the most painful periods of his religious deconstruction. He'd been losing church members for years, exhausted from conflict over his evolving beliefs, tired of arguing about dogma. When the scan came back showing a large mass around his heart and lungs, his first thought shocked him: "It’s cancer. Thank God."

He could finally stop. People would understand. The relief of having a socially acceptable reason to take a break was almost overwhelming.

But cancer didn't just give him permission to leave ministry. It taught him what love looks like when everything else falls away.

"Love was my wife holding the puke bucket during chemo and rubbing my balding head and telling me that I'm hers and that she loved me so much," Ryan said. "To me, that's love. It’s not the false, aspartame, saccharin."

This wasn't abstract love. This wasn't intellectual love. This was love that showed up every day, held the bucket, rubbed the head, stayed through the nausea and fear and uncertainty. Love that didn't require theological justification.

He described looking into his kids' eyes, holding their hands, cuddling them while he could. The miracle of presence. The gift of touch. Simple things that became everything when facing mortality.

Cancer stripped away complexity and revealed the essential: love is what holds you together when your body is failing.

The Critique: Aspartame Love

After leaving Christianity, Ryan encountered different spiritual spaces. Particularly in what he calls "new age" circles, he found a version of love that felt hollow.

"New Agey love was just that soft, ‘we're a community for a day’," Ryan said. "And that's love because we did a loving meditation together. I'm not interested in the sort of hippie dippy, new age, neat version of ‘we're all one.’"

He's not subtle about this critique, and I appreciate his bluntness. There's something profoundly artificial about spaces where people feel intensely connected for a weekend, exchange phone numbers, promise to stay in touch, and then never speak again. Feeling connected isn't the same as being committed. Temporary emotional intimacy isn't the same as sustained love.

"The only love I'm interested in is love that shows up," Ryan told me. "Love that says this kid I just brought into the world, I'm going to give my life to see them flourish. And I'm going to put myself now second to that and live a life of daily self-sacrifice for the wellbeing of this child in my care."

Both the emotion and the action are necessary. The feeling matters. It's real. It's powerful. But emotion without action is not love. It's just a feeling that came and went.

Integration: What Do You Do Now?

This brings me to what I've been thinking about since our conversation. In psychedelic journeys, we often encounter experiences that can only be called “love”. Oceanic connection. Unconditional acceptance. Profound empathy that dissolves boundaries between self and other. These experiences are real and important. But the question isn't just: how did you feel during the journey? The real question is: what do you do afterward?

How does that feeling translate to action when you're back in ordinary reality? Do you call the parent you've been avoiding? Show up for the friend going through treatment? Say the hard thing to your partner? Choose presence over distraction when your kid needs you? Integration means bringing those profound experiences into embodied daily reality. Taking the emotion and converting it into action. The emotion fuels the action. The action proves the emotion. Both emotion and action are necessary. But we too often stop at the emotion.

The work is in the follow-through. That's what Ryan learned through Christianity, what cancer reinforced, and what his psychedelic facilitation practice now embodies. Creating a container where people can feel safe during vulnerable experiences. Showing up physically, staying present, not abandoning people when things get difficult. Both emotion and action are necessary, but only action makes love real.

"Life is a Gift. Love is the Point," Ryan titled his book. But that point requires action. The point isn't just recognizing that love matters. The point is doing the loving.

What Love Looks Like

At the end of our conversation, Ryan described love simply: "Embodied compassion. Something that you can look at."

The word "love" might be inadequate. It might be overused. It might mean too many things to too many people. But the thing itself is simple.

Did you show up? Did you hold space? Did you give yourself to care for another? Did you stay when it was hard? Did you follow through on the feeling with action?

Cancer teaches love through necessity. You can't survive aggressive treatment without people who love you in verb form. People who drive you to appointments, hold your hand during scans, bring meals when you can't cook, sit with you when you're scared.

Psychedelics can teach love through revelation. They show you what love feels like when all your defenses are down. They give you direct experience of connection and compassion. But then they send you back to your life and ask: now what?

Christianity taught Ryan that love is action. Cancer showed him what that looks like when everything else falls away. Psychedelics revealed the emotional truth underneath. But all three pointed to the same thing.

Love is the point. But only if you do something with it.

Let's journey together.