UNDERSTANDING THE TRUE POWER OF LOVE

“The best love is the kind that awakens the soul; that makes us reach for more, that plants the fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds. That’s what I hope to give you forever.” – The Notebook

What is love really? I believe that love is an opportunity to experience the very vulnerable, lucid, open and truly emotional aspects of oneself. We can have the energy of love take us to places that are reserved for the divine. The beauty and purity of love is that it has the power to move around as it pleases sharing itself with many in many ways. We see it every day. Human beings falling in love. Men and women, men and men, women and women, boys and girls, young and old. Almost everyone has it in them. The desire to belong to someone special. We are born with it.

From the moment that our parents saw our little shining faces with our innocent eyes and our soft skin and our tiny, vulnerable bodies, they naturally wanted to love, protect, and nurture us. This is what it really is. The desire to want and be wanted, to need and be needed, to nurture and be nurtured. Love is sharing an unconditional, emotional experience and most of us have had that natural desire beating in our hearts at one time or another. Love brings with it the privilege or responsibility as often and as deep as we wish.

The dictionary describes love as “a strong affection for another, an attraction based on sexual desire, affection and tenderness felt by lovers, affection based on admiration and benevolence, a word used as a term of endearment, unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another, the object of attention or admiration”.

It is interesting how each of these descriptions although they are similar have very specific and somewhat different meanings. I would like to propose that we take all of these descriptions and come up with a new and more conscious composite of what love needs to be. Isn’t it fascinating that we say people “fall in love”. Does that mean that we have no control over why and how we love another? When we have a fall, when we take a fall, when we fall down, it is usually done accidentally. Could it mean that we are not paying attention?

I often ponder why we use the word “falling” to describe one of the most important events of our life. Could it be that this very loose terminology is the reason why so many of us can and do fall out of love so easily? Could it be that because we are not paying that much attention to the terms of our endearment or to how unselfishly loyal and benevolent we will need to be to our loved ones that they will end up becoming just an object of our attention and affection?

Love gone wrong creates anger, resentment and jealousy that is so powerful that some will even be willing to kill the object of their affection as the rest of the world looks on with shock and sadness when it is discovered that their love became so distorted that a fellow human being’s jealousy has taken them to a place of killing their loved one and even destroying the very body that they held close to their hearts. This is still shocking to me to hear stories of love “gone wrong”. Of hellish murders committed in the name of love. Men killing women, women killing men, children killing parents, parents killing children. Lovers so angry with each other that they kill the entire family. How awfully, awfully sad and disturbing.

Love needs right direction and positive and honest communication. We must be willing to have a certain amount of emotional intelligence to support the true meaning of love.
Love is a mysterious emotion. We write songs about it, we move mountains to find it and even change our lives completely to honor it. We do all that we can to support it and receive so much joy and happiness from it. It is an investment that has long range benefits. It continues to pay dividends for years and years to come. What we need to remember is that love is like a newborn child; innocent, soft, and vulnerable. It needs protection, it needs nurturing, and it needs to be fed every four hours until it becomes strong and mature.

This is the physical reaction when we meet someone that we are attracted to; there is an innocence that we feel. It is what initially turns us on and this is what we need to keep alive in our consciousness as we continue to explore and desire to share our love and life with another.

Exercise: Explore what love means to you. You may be surprised at what you discover about yourself.

(Note:  This essay is an excerpt from my new book coming out this Spring titled                 “Life is Good…When You Do the Work. 

Wishing for you all of the love that your spirit, heart, mind and body can accept.       Happy Valentine’s Day from Maria Francesca Triliegi

http://www.mariafrancescatriliegi.com