Love from. love you. with love. So used, yet so intangible! I’ve thought often of how to describe love, a word that lives in us all and seems to have such differing expressions. I have come to see love as the truest expression of force behind it all, chi, the universe, God, and to align with love is to align with some higher version of ourselves. For many years though, I was living in the misunderstanding that the feeling of need in my body was the feeling of love. That yearning so beautifully depicted in many a Disney movie – from singing mice to mermaids, reinforced by pop music and power ballad classics. I lived most of my life in the reality that if I felt ‘attached’ or as if I ‘needed’ someone; that was love. From another perspective I was simply confusing approval with love. There’s something much deeper at play though, in this word love, than the transient and ultimately unsatisfying approval of others. Even playing in the field of ‘self-approval’ becomes sticky and unsatisfying if we are staying within the realm of our own ideas of what we are and what we aspire to. When we bring the idea of love back to the self though, what becomes apparent is to connect to a sense of love for ourselves we must accept first what we are. Then love becomes rooted more in acceptance rather than approval.

But for anyone who’s ever delighted in love with another being ‘acceptance’ does not come close to describing how we feel. Excited, enlivened, appreciative, in awe, these might be more aligned with how we feel, so perhaps acceptance is a requirement for love but not love itself. Individually and collectively, we seem to fall constantly for the idea that we ‘get’ our feelings from situations or other people when they are, in reality, created internally. We conjure our own feelings from our own meanings and then experience it as if it were happening to us, not in us. If love isn’t ‘done to us’ then it becomes a little more fascinating. In my explorations of this I discovered something unexpected. When I focused on things I loved, or on the beauty of the world, I could easily connect with my own sensation of love, beyond acceptance. The glow-y feeling of it. Maybe I am showing my age, but it feels like a Care Bear stare. Flowing and powerful. And to my horror I found it WAY easier to conjure this experience for myself in relation to beauty, nature or complete strangers more than my own family. Who - hang on a minute – am I not supposed to love them the most!! That’s when I noticed what was in the way of my love was my conditions, oh did I have a lot of conditions! Some of them were even historic. Standing in the way of me creating for myself a joyful and rich experience of loving my sister was that one time she stole my pencil case when we were kids. WTAF.

was getting in my own way; resisting being loving from fear. Fear of what? Judgement or some form of rejection, but all that fear just boils down to more internally created feelings. I recognised that we are the sole beneficiaries of our own emphasis. It became so clear that the hoops I was attempting have others jump through to ‘earn’ my love were only cutting myself off from feeling love. It wasn’t protection it was sabotage. It’s possible to lean into a sense of love first, before all the reasons, and live from there. Demanding less from others and the world is the beautiful outcome of this emphasis. One day it hit me; that ALL my feelings, everything, came from love. The sense of it, or the idea of disconnection from it. I felt every drop of grief I had experienced in the death of my mother rush through me as a profound expression of love. Something in me came into peace in that moment, seeing all ‘good’ and ‘bad’ flowing from the same source, love. The desire for it, the knowing of it and the sense of its absence. It made me unafraid to feel. Suddenly love was the fuel in the fire of every human belly. Connecting to love in this way, is deeply freeing. Actions and relationships become choiceful and infused with a rare sort of common sense. Love becomes an option, as does our authenticity. In love, Robyn