Love – we all want it, we all crave it. But what actually is love? This is a big question where our feelings and thoughts around love often come loaded by our past experiences in addition to what we have been told love is. In this article we would like to go there and explore what love is.

Exploring what love is may require breaking down some common ideals and beliefs that we have around love that are fed to us from a very young age, starting with fairy tale stories such as Cinderella and continuing on as we grow up through books, magazines, movies, advertising, TV and social media.

Rarely are we ever offered a true reflection of what love is so we grow up believing in love, wanting love and desperately seeking it from all the wrong places.

There is a simple and often missed truth about love and that is that Love is and always has been there and it also resides inside us. Love doesn’t come from another – rather it lives and comes from within and we can feel the love of another if they are first of all holding themselves in love.

We are born with and in love.

You only have to hold a newborn baby to feel his or her essence and to feel the glory that is there within your arms – the beauty, the gorgeousness, the preciousness. There is love right there emanating.

So if we are born love and are love, why is it that many of us lose this feeling, this connection to true love as we grow up?

From an early age the world feeds us the illusion that love is outside of ourselves rather than meets us from the place that we are love. That love is and comes from within. Love resides in our inner-heart and when we choose to stop and be with ourselves in stillness, we can access the feeling of love.

But instead of holding ourselves in this love, the world tells us that we are not enough, that we need to be more, strive for more, that we need to do things to improve ourselves, that we need to be better than what we already are – ie. better looking (like the models that we see in magazines), better academically, better at sport etc and the list could go on.

Rarely are we celebrated for the beauty of our being, which is innate and in which we are born. Therefore we start from an early age to look outside of ourselves to fill our cup, always looking for that something more.

When we look outside of ourselves, we lose the connection to the loveliness that we are. This vain and futile seeking in itself stops us from feeling the grandness that we truly are. The grandness of the fact that our particles belong and come from the Universe, that our being is already whole regardless of what we look like or do. We can’t change the fact that in our essence each and everyone one of us is already complete.

When we look outside of ourselves the innate love that we are born with gradually becomes a distant memory, if a memory at all and we lose the connection to the essence that we are. By the time we reach adulthood we can be so full of ideals and beliefs of what we should be that we have forgotten that we have been love all along. To be in love, to feel love, we need to know that we are love.

So could it be that to find true love our first port of call is our reconnection back to self?

Till our next article and our further exploration around the topic of love and how to reclaim it in our body, in our life, enjoy pondering on what love is and means to you.

Donna Nolan and Alexandra Plane offer Esoteric therapies, Massage therapies, Yoga/Yoga Therapy and Meditation at their clinics in Balmain, Cammeray and Balgowlah. Contact them for enquiries or bookings.