Love has been everywhere this week: Valentine’s cards and gifts in every shop window, love posts all over social media, it would be hard not to notice that love is all around.
Funny thing love, it’s something we all say we want, it’s often something we don’t think we have, it’s often something we are not very good at giving to others, and in particularly, it’s something we are pretty hopeless at giving to ourselves.
If we stop and think about LOVE, it truly is a feeling. It is hard to describe in words what that feeling is, but when we feel love, we feel it in our soul – it’s that deep sense of knowing. So why do we have such a problem with it? Why do we struggle to love ourselves? What could possibly be so wrong with us that we don’t deserve this elusive love? Why do we feel like love is lacking in our lives?
The essence of love, to me, means that it has to be unconditional – if love becomes conditional, e.g. we love our children more when they get fantastic grades or when they do want we want, we love our partner more when they behave in a way that we think is right (and so on), it surely stops being love and becomes something different, perhaps judgement, frustration, anger?
So I suppose the question is as human beings are we capable of unconditional love? Now, I realise we would all like to think that we are, myself included, but if we are honest, are we really loving ourselves and others unconditionally? Do we love ourselves when we eat that extra biscuit, drink that extra glass of wine, not loose the weight we feel we should? Do we love others when they do things that we don’t approve of, make choices we think are wrong? Do we love our partners no matter what they do??
So, it brings me back to the question can we as human beings love unconditionally?
Maybe we are setting the bar so high that we will always fall short, maybe our heads are so full of ‘being in love’, being in love with our partners, being in love with our children, our friends, our family, our pets, our life, that when we don’t feel we are ‘in love’, we feel that something is wrong, that we are in some way failing.
Maybe if we changed out thoughts from ‘being in love’ to ‘being love’
…….the judgement would fade away and the frustration end as ‘being love’ is such a simple, wonderful, achievable thing we can all be 🙂