What is love?

Love is perhaps the single most common emotion humans want to experience. We seek to give love to others, to experience the strength of that emotion and everything it brings us. That being so, can we even begin to imagine what might transpire for us if we direct our ability to feel love for others at our own selves? Self-love is perhaps the most important gift we can give ourselves. Loving ourselves is perhaps the most important work of our lifetime. Self-love means self-acceptance. We cannot love those parts of ourselves we hate. Once we accept ourselves and look at those bits of ourselves we have been trying not to, then we can begin to heal ourselves. You will no doubt have heard the saying “what you resist, persists.” Loving ourselves means accepting the pain we feel, acknowledging the pain we feel, accepting that we experienced that. Pushing it away achieves nothing except to keep us miserable. Once

ADULT GAME

we bring our pain into our awareness, then we can pour the love that we so easily give others into ourselves. This feels good. Instead of beating ourselves up for our perceived shortcomings, we feel compassion for ourselves just as we would for a hurt or upset child. Thus, we release our pain leaving us freer to respond to life in more affirming ways. As we release our pains one by one, so we become more ourselves. As we release our pains, so we experience more joy. Being kind and loving to ourselves means that we are more able to be kind and loving to others. Thus we develop the capacity to give and receive love. Then we radiate love. Isn’t that what we all want? Falling in Love