So…what’s love got to do with it?
Everything actually.
[pause]
Really. Put any word in place of It, and to me love has everything to do with it. And I’d like to explain why. To do that I invite you to join me in a place of beginner’s mind. Where for a moment we set aside everything we know and look at things as if we are seeing or hearing them for the first time. Let’s look at something with childlike wonder and curiosity.
The first question is what is love? Have you ever considered how you, not a dictionary, define love? Not the romantic, lovey-dovey attraction. Not words casually thrown around without much thought. I mean what does love really mean to you?
About 18 years ago I took several months to do a deep dive, meditating and journaling about what love means to me. And if you have never done this, I invite you to take several hours/ days/ weeks or like me months and explore with meditation, journaling, quiet contemplation your definition of love.
I began by thinking… when do I feel loved? And then I explored all of the ways I use the word and see the word being used and lived. After a number of months, I arrived at a definition that has become the basis for how I live my life, how I form relationships and interact with others and the earth, it is the perspective I use to interpret experiences in my life. And as I have lived a life of intentionally considering love, I have come to believe that at the core for each of us is a definition that we use in creating and nurturing all relationships and in determining how we see and interpret our life experiences. And becoming aware of this would give us another tool for living with greater ease and intentionality.
I also have begun to realize that when I peel back the layers that keep us from living and expressing our full selves and the layers of the ism’s and hate dividing our nation, what I find is a lack of knowledge of what love is and more specifically a lack of knowledge about, and practice of, self-love. For me growing up, self-love was often equated with selfish. In recent years self-love has become known as self-care. I believe that self-care is important, however, for me it is only a part of true self-love. So… what is love and loving ourselves, really... and how do we do this?