Stepping Back Into The Known

The word ‘love’, although steeped in romance, has also become synonymous with commitment, responsibility, expectation, a loss of freedom and divorce. We grow up believing it is something beautiful, but for many it turns into something painful. When this happens, we shut down to ensure we don’t feel pain again. We protect our hearts.

Yet it is innate to express ourselves as love. Without expression of it or receptivity to it, we are strangled of life. And so we constantly attract to ourselves situations that offer us the opportunity to open up once more to our essential loving nature. The trouble is, part of us yearns for this and part of us is petrified of it, so we end up being at war with ourselves.

The simple words ‘I love you’ have such fear attached to them that often, when we feel the presence of love, we fail to express it physically or verbally in case it opens up a whole can of worms. Consequently emotions become stifled, deep feelings remain unshared and the opportunity to form new bonds or grow closer to our partner is lost.

And who suffers most? We do! When we don’t express our truth it creates an energetic block that will in all likelihood ultimately manifest as dis-ease in the physical body. Love is life. To express and receive it is to exhale and inhale. To deny it is to choke.

However, the freedom our hearts long for is within us. Nobody else can give it to us. We have only to recognize where we have shut down, honour our defences for the protection they have offered, and start acting from the one place that fear fears to go – love. By going back into love we allow our hearts to breathe again, we allow them to live again. By allowing ourselves to open up to the possibility of further pain we actually transcend fear altogether. Allowing yourself the chance to love is the greatest gift of all - self love … it will set you free.

Love is relentless. It knows no boundaries, it is limitless, it is you! As long as you are here, love will be here. No matter where you go or what you do, you can’t run away from yourself. You have no place to hide. Even if you lose sight of yourself from time to time, perhaps for long periods, nothing changes. Try as you might, you are what you are and fear can only postpone this understanding.

Staying in fear is staying in the unknown. Fear is always fearful because it has no clue what it is doing or where it is going, it perpetuates the unknown. Love, which is the absence of fear, can not therefore by definition be the unknown. It feels known, safe, solid, real, inviting. When we feel it, we feel our true selves and nothing is more real than that. We recognize what we really are and immediately feel peace.

So the choice is simple. Be a slave to fear or be free in love. The next time it comes to expressing yourself as love, don’t think of it as taking a step into the unknown but instead of taking a step back into the known. For when you take that step it feels extraordinarily comfortable, as if you belong, as if you have come home and you can’t quite believe that it took you so long so muster the courage to get here.

And remember, the person you are ‘loving’ will sense you. Whether they embrace or reject you, it has nothing to do with who you are, but only with their own internal mechanisms. Be ‘you’ regardless, and whether they act positively or negatively in that moment, you can be sure that they will have felt something. You will have reminded them of their true nature and as such you will have been a catalyst for something beautiful to unfold. Being your truth will set you free – them being theirs will do the same. You can only lead the way.