By Dr. Bradley Nelson and Jean Nelson
Love is essential to life. Babies need it for growth hormones to function so they can survive and thrive. We all sense the safety, warmth, and security of love. It is sustenance for us. Love is the very foundation of life. Our first conscious memories of love come from our nurturing mothers and fathers in healthy family relationships. As we grow older and move beyond the boundaries of home and family, we treasure the love of friends. Life would seem empty and meaningless without connections built with the energy of love.
Many of us dream of the perfect love — of having someone special to love and love us back. Disney and Hollywood both support our hopes and desires for true love from our youth, and we love the dream. Romantic love is highly valued and sought by nearly everyone. It’s the most demanding, the most tempestuous, and also so very endearing.
Ideals of love include someone who’s perfect in every way — which none of us is. We look for someone who is beautiful in body and soul, trustworthy, adoring, kind, thoughtful, strong, courageous, genuine, loyal, devoted, committed, hard-working, and fun. Ideally, this person will have common interests, values, goals, and many other wonderful things. Everyone’s list is a little different.
Love is about being of service. As newlyweds, we were so focused on each other and loved being together. Living the dream made it easy to feel the fruits of love — happiness, warmth, and contentment.
Love is more than simply falling in love. Feelings of love require loving actions if love is to last. Making the joyful effort to be loving is what creates the magic. Relationships require sustained loving, or there is the risk of falling out of love.
Love brings an ongoing choice: To feel the fruits of love, you need to continue to choose to love by doing what it takes. There is a common saying that you have to work at love, and it is true. You need to keep doing loving things day after day to keep love alive.
Love takes many forms in daily life: cherishing, caring, honoring, supporting, listening, sharing, appreciating, helping, planning, playing, dreaming, creating, celebrating, and more. For love to stick, you need to practice them all.
Love is always a choice. We can do or not do what creates loving feelings each day. We can look for ways to demonstrate our love, or we can ignore the little promptings we feel to show love. And we have the consequences of the choices we make. For a relationship to continue in love, we must constantly choose to practice loving. Making the decision to love is a commitment and brings with it trust, safety, and a sense of belonging.
Love is communicated through kind and thoughtful deeds; meaningful time spent together, genuine words were spoken, thoughts and sentiments expressed and felt, thoughtful gifts, and human touch. Relationships are ever-changing and evolving and need nurturing so love can grow strong. If you know how love is best received and felt by the person you love, you are wise to use those avenues to express your love.
It’s essential to act in loving ways if love is what you want more of in your life. Love is worth creating, embracing fearlessly, and cherishing. The energy of love multiplies and expands, as every parent is sure to find out with the birth of each new child.
Likewise, every time you open your heart to others to serve them, you grow in compassion and love. Conversely, when you refuse to listen to the inner knowing that tells you to help, love, and serve another, you reject the light and truth that is speaking through your heart. This diminishes your joy and possibly theirs.
Sometimes painful memories of traumatic events can prevent us from freely giving and receiving love. Trapped Emotions, unresolved feelings can lodge in our physical and energetic bodies. Multiple Trapped Emotions can form Heart-Walls, energetic barriers that can interfere with our ability to love. A protective mechanism designed to shield the heart from further hurt, a Heart-Wall can block you from experiencing good feelings. Your love, desire, and happiness may get trapped behind that Heart-Wall, harming not only you but those who need your love.
If you have been hurt by someone you’ve loved or by someone who you thought should have loved you, it’s important to realize that it wasn’t love that hurt you, but rather, the lack of it. None of us perfectly loves all of the time. We’re human, and humans make mistakes. We can get deeply hurt by those we open our hearts to who betray themselves by betraying love itself. When people are untrue to love, they cheat themselves and others of its beauty.
You may have experienced deep hurt at some point in your own life. The silver lining about being hurt is that you are taught how it feels to be hurt. You learn empathy. Then you can decide to be kind and loving regardless, so you won’t cause deep hurt in others. You can strive to be your best and truest self. The greatness that we all admire in another person is to see him or her become victorious over tremendous odds and come out on top with a dynamic spirit and a loving heart. If we keep love alive through our trials, we are allowing God to create greatness in us. Love is a power. Love heals us. Even broken hearts can heal with love.
When your heart, the very core of you, is threatened and feels vulnerable, you might put up a wall to protect yourself. Most of us do this. It’s a subconscious coping mechanism of a sort, an attempt to disconnect from your own heart’s ability to feel the pain. Heart-Walls isolate, insulate and disconnect you from some of the pain, but they also numb much of the love and joy you long for and need to feel to be happy. They cause you to live more out of your head instead of from your heart. Unfortunately, this allows you to be unloving and feel okay about it because you lose empathy and short-circuit your relationships. Having a Heart-Wall will prevent you from being connected to people in a loving way. It’ll keep you from being truly and deeply happy.
There’s hope if you have a Heart-Wall. That’s what The Emotion Code will teach you so that you can have love in your life! It’s possible to heal, and really love how you feel! We invite you to experience the healing and embrace the joy that comes from having an open heart. Join us and be Heart-Wall free! You can be more open to love, joy, and charity for all people. You might even experience a little more romance, too.
