From the Green Velvet Couch | A Conversation with Dr. Raj
What if the power of first love never really leaves us? What if every relationship we build afterward is shaped, in ways we rarely notice, by that first spark that once rearranged our entire inner world?
On her podcast, From the Green Velvet Couch, Shelly sat down with Dr. Raj, a renowned physician, dear friend, and someone she describes as one of the most intensely present people she knows. Dr. Raj chose the topic of first love himself, and the conversation that followed moved through culture, spirituality, neurochemistry, and the kind of wisdom that only comes from someone who feels deeply and is not afraid to say so.
Here are the moments worth holding onto.
Why Love Deserves Its Own Conversation
Dr. Raj opened with a quiet declaration. He believes the entire world would be boring without love. For him, love is the heat in the fire, and without that heat, nothing in life has its full value. He described love as an ocean so deep and full of passion that the only way to cross it is to drown in it.
That kind of language is not accidental. Dr. Raj is from Punjab, a region of India often called the land of love, and he grew up surrounded by poetry, music, and spiritual traditions that treat romance as one of the most sacred experiences a person can have. He speaks Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi, and English, which means he can feel and express love in four different languages. As he told Shelly with a laugh, that is four times the love and four different ways to receive it.
His cultural perspective offers something many of us in the West rarely hear. In Punjabi tradition, the first thing you notice about someone is not their face or their body. It is their energy, their aura, their vibration. Physical beauty is the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. What you are really falling in love with is a soul.
The Soul Does Not Age
One of the most moving ideas in the conversation was Dr. Raj’s reflection on aging and love. We are all born to die, he said, which means we begin aging the moment we arrive. But the soul does not age. If you fall in love with someone’s soul rather than their body, the connection becomes untouchable by time. The fire stays lit even as everything else changes.
Shelly connected this beautifully to something she has witnessed in her therapy practice. When clients lose a longtime spouse and eventually find love again, they often describe the feeling as being a teenager all over again. The emotions are exactly the same as the first time. Love, as Dr. Raj put it, is ageless, and the soul recognizes it regardless of how many years the body has lived.
This kind of deep inner work, where clients reconnect with the emotional truth beneath their circumstances, is at the heart of Shelly’s wellness specialist practice for founders, executives, and high-profile clients, where the work is always about the whole person rather than the surface.
The Neurochemistry of Falling
Shelly added a fascinating layer from the science side of the conversation. New love produces bursts of dopamine that are significantly more powerful than the steady hum of a long-term committed relationship. Both states are valuable, but they are chemically different. The early fire is designed to light the whole forest, while the later warmth is designed to sustain life through every season.
Dr. Raj laughed and offered his own description. Love is like cocaine plus steroids. The brain lights up in ways it never has before. Multiple compartments seem to be arguing at once. Logic takes a back seat. Obsession becomes possible. This is why falling in love can feel like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole. You do not know which way is up, and for a while, you do not particularly care.
What matters is what happens next. Dr. Raj believes healthy love should elevate you over time. The initial drowning is only the beginning. True love should eventually nourish you, stabilize you, and help you emerge as a better version of yourself. If a relationship is not doing that, he said gently, it may be time to reconsider what you are calling love.
Imprinting and the Memory of First Love
Shelly shared something she has observed in decades of clinical work. The first love a person experiences often becomes the unconscious ruler by which every future partner is measured. When clients struggle to find the right partner, she often asks them to describe what they are looking for, and more often than not, the answer traces back to something they felt with their first significant love.
She mentioned a friend who always found herself drawn to men who worked with their hands, men who were capable, masculine, and resilient. On the surface, that looked like a physical preference. Underneath, it was really about feeling safe, protected, and cared for, echoes of a very early positive relationship.
Dr. Raj agreed wholeheartedly. First love, in his view, calibrates every cell of your body. It changes the vibration you carry for the rest of your life. He compared it to a tornado moving through a quiet river. After the tornado passes, the river flows differently. The direction of the current has changed. The water itself has been touched, and it will never be the same.
This is the kind of deep self-awareness that Shelly brings into her performance mentoring work with leaders and high performers, where understanding your own patterns is often the first step toward building a life that actually fits who you are.
“In Every Lifetime, I Will Find You”
Toward the middle of the episode, Dr. Raj offered a phrase that stopped Shelly in her tracks. In every lifetime, I will find you. He described love as an energy that cannot be created or destroyed, only continued. If two streams of energy have met before in some other form, in some other dimension, they will find each other again. Whether you call it karma, destiny, or kismet, the word for it in Hindi and Sanskrit, the truth is the same. Love does not obey the rules of time and space the way the rest of life does.
You do not have to share his spiritual framework to feel the beauty of the idea. The simple notion that love is something ancient, something that chooses you rather than something you control, can shift how you approach your relationships. It adds reverence to something most of us try to manage with logic and spreadsheets.
The Sweet Pain of Loving Deeply
Near the end of the conversation, Dr. Raj offered one of his most striking images. Love is like a knife, he said, and the cut is sweet. You become addicted to the burn because the burn itself feels like life. The hardest part is not the burning. It is the moment the fire goes out, because that is when you realize how fully alive the fire made you feel.
He quoted a phrase he loves. It takes seconds to like someone, minutes to fall in love, and years to forget. Shelly nodded in recognition. She has watched clients carry first loves in their memory for decades, not because those early relationships were perfect, but because they were formative. The shape of who we become is often written by the people we loved first.
A Gift at Every Age
The episode closed on a note both Shelly and Dr. Raj kept returning to. Love is a gift. It is a gift when you are young and falling for the first time. It is a gift when you are older and starting over after loss. It is a gift when it is romantic, and it is a gift when it is the love you feel for a child, a friend, or a community. Love does not diminish with age. It simply changes shape.
The deepest invitation of the conversation was this. Pay attention to the ways your first love still lives in you. Let it teach you something about what you value, what you need, and what you deserve in the people you let close. That kind of self-awareness, paired with a willingness to stay open, is how healthy love becomes possible at any stage of life.
This is exactly the kind of whole-person care Shelly builds into her wellness consulting work for organizations and leaders, where emotional health is recognized as the foundation everything else rests on.
🎧 Join the Conversation
If this post sparked something in you, the full episode is waiting with even more warmth and thoughtful insight.
✨ Listen to the full conversation on the From the Green Velvet Couch podcast. Visit the Podcast page to discover more episodes focused on resilience, leadership wellbeing, and holistic wellness.
Let this be your invitation to slow down, breathe deeply, and step into a well-grounded life full of growth and intention.
