#experiencelove

I’m not sure if many of you follow Rachel Brathen or her blogs or instagram? I do, and for a long time Rachel (@yoga_girl) and many other people I follow have been reminding everyone to show love, experience love every single day. I read their stuff and agree, love is powerful so long as it is directed in the right way, in a pure way but it was only recently that I myself experienced the power of love to it’s full extent.

Some of you may have seen that in August I got engaged (yay!!!), and whilst I’ve been very lucky to fall in love with a handsome, amazing, caring and present man it feels like a while since I’ve experienced the full potency of love as I did when he proposed to me.

It’s a weird thing love, it’s always there, it sits at the core of our very beings and yet it so easily blocked by everything external. I know myself, when I am stressed, anxious, worried – any of those things, my capacity to show myself and those around me love is pretty much zero. I know it. And yet I struggle to do anything about it. Instead I welcome distractions until I am able to let go of whatever that stressful thing was and then I move on, not making up for the love that has been lost and if anything re-routing my brain and training it to use that same pathway next time. The harder option would be to choose love in those moments, to stop and pause and work on a way to not be stressed about those things. And rather than distract myself, to show myself some love and then channel that love to everyone and everything else around me. This I have not mastered yet.

Its potency however is extraordinary, I don’t even know if I can describe in words. At Bestival over the weekend I was listening to a Happiness Workshop run by Rachel from The Reset Button Retreats, she said something along the lines of ‘happiness is not something, it is something that you simply experience” and I’m starting to believe that love is the same thing.

You can say “I love you” or “I’m in love with you” all you want to your significant other, friends or family (for the first version anyway) but that don’t adequately describe those times when you have a love burst, or where your heart get’s fluttery and your breath shorter and your vision hones in on that one person who brings this feeling to the forefront. Saying I love you can’t describe the electricity, the chemistry, the flood of hormones that rush through your body when you are with that person, or where something like getting engaged happens and suddenly your whole world is presented to you, in the form of a person who you are just so unbelievably happy to spend the rest of your life with.

But you don’t have to have a significant other who you are in love with to experience that feeling. The outpour of love and support that we experienced from our friends and family, from all over the world was absolutely mind blowing. Everyone was experiencing the same level of happiness as we were, the kind of excitement, buzz and rush of energy where all you can think about is how happy you are for someone else.

I liken it to the time when I found out my best friend was pregnant, I was so filled with love and felt so much happiness for her and her husband that I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I had a smile from ear to ear and I felt so energetic and alive. The same happened when my close friend I grew up with sent me a message letting me know she too was pregnant, the joy and love and overwhelming happiness lighted my heart for weeks on end. In fact thinking of these two moments makes my heart flutter all over again, I can’t help but smile from ear to ear!