Dear quarter lives,

Perhaps one of the most important experiences of living is falling in love. How we embrace love can tell us a lot about how we embrace so many other blessings coming our way. How much we trust ourselves to open up to love can tell us a lot about how much trust we have in other people and how safe we feel in the world. For those of us who went through a difficult early life, allowing ourselves to fall in love can be a serious challenge. We feel our hearts are already too fragile, too broken to handle any more breaking so we avoid love because we believe it is inevitable that pain should accompany love, that eventually we would lose those we love, whether to another person, to another lifestyle, or to death. And perhaps that is true to a certain extent, but it is also true that this love that we’ve been avoiding might be exactly what we need to mend and strengthen our hearts.

The pain we felt has unfortunately blurred all our memories of what love can do, but thankfully for us, our body always remembers. Our body still remembers the power of love to heal and that’s why it craves what it craves. Somehow along the way we have forgotten that as much as love has the power to cause pain, it too has the same power to heal. Love does indeed heal all wounds. And I am not just talking about falling in love with someone else here. I am talking first about allowing ourselves to fall in love with ourselves, to truly feel cherished by ourselves, to feel so lucky that we are who we are, that we are in the body we are in. And falling in love with ourselves might not be as easy as it can seem like it is with another. There perhaps isn’t a love at first sight thing that happens. Falling in love with ourselves requires a lot of hardwork, a lot of self-awareness, and most of all a lot of faith so that even when we struggle to feel loved, we let our faith in life carry us through and it is ultimately this belief that we are loved by life that supports our living. That faith is what carries me everyday through my self-doubt. It is what I choose to believe even when it makes no rational sense to put my faith there. Because the way I used to see the world and the proof that came so easy to me was not life affirming at all. I used to believe that the world is a scary and dangerous place and that belief made me constantly feel like I didn’t want to be alive, so I began this beautiful thing of choosing to believe differently and choosing to believe in life without demanding proof of its beauty or safety beforehand. I just made a choice to lend my faith to life. And I love that everyday I choose to love life. And I know if I want to I can choose to hate it. But I don’t because I want to love it. They don’t tell us this when we are younger, but love IS a choice. We choose to love our friends. We choose to love our work. We choose to love our bodies. It doesn’t just happen.

Love, at the end of the day, is energy and attention, so be mindful of where you put your love. Be conscious of who you give your love to, and be conscious what kind of love you are giving and attracting into your life. Love like our bodies comes in all shapes, colours, and sizes so find what vibes with you. Find your love language, your love tune and dance to it.

Love is always scarier to our minds that it is to our hearts. Our minds rely on a certain kind of rationality and when love breaks all those rules, our mind freaks out because it is no longer in control. And in that process of freaking out, be kind to your mind, treat it like a child looking up at a rollercoaster for the first time, not all children get excited by the prospect of danger equally not all minds get excited by the prospect of losing control, so always reassure your mind that it will survive the experience, it will even want to go again. 

With so much love and always for peace, 

S.A.