What is Love

Do we really know what Love Is? February is Love month… the shortest month of the year and one we associate with LOVE due to Valentine’s Day. Every year I write an article on Love and how it relates to us. I’m always fascinated by where my mind wanders as I contemplate another article on Love. When I look at it based on the theme I want to write about in my next book – In Fear we Trust – it makes me wonder if we know what love is. We typically associate Love, especially Romantic Love, with perceptions and how our past patterns have established what we describe as ‘love’. In other words: due to our first 7 years, our media exposure, our past experiences and our perceptions of how those experiences played out, and our own needs and wants and how we believe those needs have been fulfilled in our loving relationships, we have created an image of what Love is. Does this sound a little pessimistic or depressing? It isn’t meant to be. However, it is unfortunately how most of us see love. To us love is more about what we want than who the other person is.

Nevertheless with more consciousness I believe we can shift our fears and open to Unconditional Love. The beginning steps are to be conscious of our responses to the first 7 years of our lives; how media portrays love; how our past experiences and our perceptions of our ‘broken hearts’; know what our needs and wants are in regard to love; and finally understand what Unconditional Love truly means.

• The first 7 years of our lives create the patterns and story that we hold onto most of our lives. If we were lucky we were able to feel the 100% unconditional love of our parents when we were born. However, that was, for most of us, short lived. And we had to try and understand the conditions of love that our parents began to place on their love. It was little things in the beginning like: if you don’t cry (because we have no idea why you are crying as a baby) we will love you and maybe even show you our love; if you embarrass us out in public with a temper tantrum or if when you are stubborn in sharing your toys (even though we thought it was funny at the beginning when you learned ‘mine’) then we have to ‘punish’ you to teach you how to be ‘better’ and when you are behaving ‘better’ then we will love you again. The conditions began early and our perceptions of what that meant developed. For some of us we may have never known unconditional love and have, instead, only our perceptions of the conditions placed on love. And therein lies the problem – it is our perceptions of these conditions that defined Love for us. Our emotions don’t fully develop until our early 20’s so we don’t understand what is happening and are only left with our perceptions which are created from our fears that are related to the conditions of love.

• Media portrayals of love are very skewed. Our first introduction to Love is through Fairytales – often dark tales that end with a hardship overcome and just a ‘happily ever after’. Yikes! Then we see countless movies and read books that are all about the ‘chase’ and finding love and rarely ever portray lasting love or what happens after we are ‘caught’. And now with online dating the ‘chase’ can become an ongoing game as infinite possibilities open up and the idea of settling down becomes less appealing. Media does us no favors when it comes to understanding Love.

• Typically by the time we reach our mid to late teens we have all experienced what we refer to as a ‘broken heart’. Our past experiences rear their ugly heads after our ‘patterns and story’ about Love becomes cemented and this happens as soon as our perceptions of what we have all heard as a ‘broken heart’ happens to us. The thing is – our Heart – is NEVER truly broken. This expression is interpreted by our brains as something surmisable and even real. Imagine if we were actually taught that our Hearts are the strongest part of us? And since this teaching doesn’t happen our experiences seem to trump the truth. We begin to attach our feelings of unworthiness, rejection, and being unlovable to our experiences with Love. Then our perceptions create the fears that block us from knowing what Love is. Another pattern and story persists.

• Our Needs and Wants begin from these patterns and Story. We learn easily what we don’t want. Our fears tweak our perceptions of what love is and all of a sudden all of the things we have learned from the first 7 years, from the Media, and from our Broken Heart all these begin to decide what we need and want in a relationship and these, unfortunately, are based on all our fears brought on by the conditional ‘love’ of our past and therefore have nothing to do with the real Love for which we yearn. Sure we have preferences like tall, dark and handsome – preferences that elicit physical reactions that indicate attraction. And beyond that we look for certain attributes and qualities like someone who is caring, faithful/loyal and who makes us laugh and these attributes are likely determined from our experiences that have taught us what we don’t want. We may look for someone who balances us out – or the opposite and are similar to who we are. Karma and the qualities of our parent(s) are also strong motivations when determining our needs. The problem is that none of this is about Love! If we need a partner to reflect back to us what we have decided we want or need in a relationship then this is all about our fears.

• This is where we become conscious of what Unconditional Love means – whether romantic, self, friends and/or family – Unconditional Love means there are no conditions placed on our Love, the Love that flows out from us. It means that if we Love someone then we continue to love them regardless of whether they are wrong, unfaithful, or even have left us. We Love them even when we recognize their fears and don’t try and change them. We are happy for them regardless of what they do or don’t do for us. Because if we need them or want them to change or meet our needs then we don’t really love them we instead ‘need or want’ them – and our ‘love’ is conditional upon them meeting our needs. Becoming more conscious of our fears allows us to understand how we have been conditioned to fear instead of Love. We begin to know that Love is without fear. We see possibilities of Love and Let Go of all the fears we have learned throughout our lives. We value Love over all else.

So this Love Month let’s understand our fears and begin to unravel them so that the Love that permeates all of life – can support and nurture us. Let’s support one another on this journey towards Growing Up. Let’s Open our Hearts to the Infinite Possibilities of LOVE. Let’s surrender and BE LOVE!

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged Happy Valentine's Day, In Fear We Trust, Laurie Huston, Love month, Unconditional Love and Acceptance, What is Love

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The Question of Love

February is Love month on Intuitive Soul and as I pondered what I wanted to write this year, two very important signs came into my awareness. I watched “Arrival” and I prepared for my second interview with Linda Howe. Why are these important? In some ways they don’t have anything to do with love and in other ways they can shift your awareness of love completely.

In the movie “Arrival” I was completely enthralled with the last question Louise asks Ian: “If you could see the whole story of your life from start to finish would you change things?” Without giving away the movie this is the perfect question for all of us. If you knew your whole life story would you make different choices? Would you live life to the fullest, knowing that things will happen, but we can choose how we want to respond to them? We don’t have to Love differently just because we know that someone will leave or die! We can choose to embrace all the beauty and perfection that exists in this moment.

It made me think: just because someone is going to leave does it mean it was less significant or that it was a failure? We have a tendency to protect our heart believing our heart can be broken. We also tend to create addictions so that we don’t have to feel our discomfort. What if that wasn’t really why we were here? That it isn’t about the love we are able to hold onto but rather the capacity to love. What if everyone in our lives are here to assist us to expand our ability to open our hearts, to Love unconditionally and to know we are loved? This is what we all want anyway, to love and be loved. So why would we love less or feel less loved just because someone leaves? And why do we believe that once they leave we have to throw out everything that reminds us of that relationship?

This pondering led me to my second sign. I was preparing for Linda Howe’s interview about her book “Healing through the Akashic Records: Using the Power of Your Sacred Wounds to Discover Your Soul’s Perfection”. She talks about the purpose of people in our lives triggering our Sacred Wounds and that the role of the offender is to teach us to love unconditionally! Does it get more powerful than that?

So if we can see our whole life from start to finish and we knew about all the relationships in our life and we knew from our Soul’s Purpose it is about learning to love unconditionally would we change anything? Or could we just stop worrying about the length or whether this relationship becomes ‘the one’? Could we just enJOY every moment we have and LOVE?

To me this changes everything. I personally have gotten all caught up in my relationships: from friends to the friends who leave, to my romantic relationships or the lack thereof, to whether once I begin dating thinking of where this will go instead of just enjoying the time I get to spend with them. My ‘Sacred Wound’ is abandonment and although I have learned to stop taking things so personally it is still my Sacred Wound and it is still the primary concern I have when people stop communication with me. I still wonder what have I done wrong. Knowing that my Sacred Wound is really what I have chosen to help me love unconditionally definitely adds a new dimension to my life. Knowing that the friends and lovers in my life are here to help me love unconditionally is a very profound thought! Even the ones who appeared to betray or hurt me are actually still here to show me how to love unconditionally.

Think about the implications of this and the question of love. Love is! Love isn’t attached to a person, place or thing. It is the expression of our Soul. It is the expression of Source. If every encounter and every trigger of our Sacred Wound is really an opportunity to Love unconditionally what would that look like? And would we, could we, change each opportunity if we knew our lives from start to finish? Or is it a matter of how we choose to experience each moment and relationship? In “Arrival” the question was quite a bit more intense however and my questions arose because of how powerful this one question is.

Things will continue to ‘happen’ around us, relationships will come and go, but our capacity to love is unlimited. The question of love isn’t “Will it happen?”; it is “Can I love unconditionally?”

Love month isn’t just about romantic love, friendship or family love, it isn’t about the confusion around self-love, it is: can I love unconditionally? Can I release the need to only love when the right circumstances occur? Can I love knowing that this person can leave or die? Can I love without judgment? Can I look into another’s eyes and see the unconditional love they have within them? Can I know that they are in my life, whether for a long time or short time, to teach me about unconditional love?

I choose to say ‘YES’ but my Sacred Wound is still there and it may always be there but at least now I am knowing that it is there in the first place to help me Love Unconditionally. When can we let go of this need to change, fix, or heal our Sacred Wound and just BE … and loving unconditionally ourselves and others? And enJOYing the ever present moment regardless of how long it will last or whether or not it will hurt us later. I choose to see Love differently now. I choose to see my Sacred Wound differently now. I choose LOVE! How about you?

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged #Arrival-movie, #self-love, Authentic Love, Divine Love, Intuitive Counseling, intuitive counselor, Laurie Huston, Linda Howe, Love is, Love month, Sacred Wounds, The Question of Love.

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Love is…

I like to term February as Love Month, but what happens more often than not is that we think about what is Not Love. What do I mean by this? We think about love in February because of Valentine’s Day, which means we are thinking about ‘romantic love’. And most of our definitions of romantic love are constructs of love dictated to us through the use of media and our experiences from our childhood that defined love. Both of these ‘ideals’ are inaccurate and often have nothing to do with love at all, but are rather a reflection of our needs and wants in a relationship. Which is to say; that ‘love’ is what we feel we need reflected back to us through our significant ‘other’ or from any intimate relationship. We are actually ‘in love’ with an ideal of what we believe we can receive from another.

We tend to search for ‘love’ to be reflected back to us in all the wrong places hoping for our ‘ideal’ and then settling for not being alone. But what are we actually searching for?

We are searching for someone to meet our ‘needs’, our conditional expectations that we have set and we have often come with a list of these needs. Yet the only way we can actually have these needs met would be if we met them ourselves.

We ask for physical descriptions, romantic notions, and worse: we ask for the very things we are lacking within ourselves. An example of this would be after experiencing a long list of men who had commitment phobias we want someone who is committed to us. A worthy goal. However, if we have had a pattern of men (or women) who couldn’t commit to us, it is more likely that we have the commitment issue and our partners are just mirroring it back to us. And why would we do this to ourselves?  It may be that we do not feel safe in relationships and therefore choose men who can’t commit!

However, this doesn’t mean that our mirrors are exact replicas; rather it means if someone lacks commitment we attracted them or requested a ‘soul’ contract so that we can learn something about our Soul’s path. When we don’t learn it, we get more opportunities to open us up to the learning our Soul’s choice for us. It may not be commitment that is our issue. It may be self-confidence or it may be that we are learning to love ourselves and in both of these cases having someone with a commitment phobia would be perfect. And something as ‘big’ as self-confidence or self-love would take life times to learn.

The point I’m making is that our definition of “love” is often based on an unreliable source, whether it is [1] a romantic sentiment created through our media culture that is an imaginary ideal that has no truth or authenticity as it is a fantasy that has nothing to do with love; or [2] our definition comes from our experiences of love, often based on our childhood and the patterns we have been repeating since then.

Love isn’t about meeting our ideals or giving us what we need or believe we need, like more romance, safety, commitment or “characteristics” that we often desire in a mate. Love is our ability to share, to give unconditionally, to accept a person for who they are and to take our needs out of the picture. Love is about the other person. Love is about letting go of all of our fears, beliefs and idiosyncrasies that we often blame ‘others’ for and about taking responsibility for all of who we are so that we can love others as well as ourselves. Love is knowing who we are and expressing this to another. Love is infinite without conditions, judgments, fear or resistance. Love is!

And lastly, our search for love has a motivation that we need to identify and understand so that we know what we are attracting and what our Soul’s purpose is. Our Soul in its infinite wisdom chose this life and all the circumstances that have occurred in our life to assist us to know love. All of our relationships are steering us towards our purpose. As I have said many times, relationships are what help us grow the most on this journey. Since we are moving towards love our relationships are all teaching us something about our purpose. So if we could view all of our relationships as a message instead of failure and look at what they are showing us from a ‘bigger picture’ we would be able to have a glimpse of this purpose.

What is our motivation for desiring a healthy relationship (either new or getting a current one back on track)? What are the fears that motivate us to desire love? What hasn’t worked in the past? And what do we feel we have learned through all of our relationships? These are all messages our Soul has designed to move us towards who we are and for the quest for Love to take us to all the right places.

I invite you to take some time this month and examine your choices and desires towards love. Know that everything is perfect for you to grow towards who you are and to express Love in its infinite wisdom. Love is something you share and give to the world. Find a way to express it and Love will find you!

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