What It Means To Love

on living from the heart and leading with love

Love is not something in your mind, it’s not something you control, and it’s not something that ever goes away.

Love is something divinely bestowed, it’s something you pass on to those who have inspired its creation within you, and it’s something that exists within your heart — regardless of your awareness to it, or your propensity to listen.

Love is wisdom. Wisdom we often assume unwise in the cruel world we’ve built around us. Wisdom that we teach ourselves to distrust because it so often leads to pain in a society so ill-suited for nurturing love and compassion.

Modern civilization is a veritable playland for the mind — obsessions untold available in countless forms — while remaining a prison for the heart.

To lead with love, and live by its truth, is a brave thing to do. To shine the light you hold within its walls can frighten those who operate in darkness. It can attract great attention to you. It can lure people in who would do you harm. It can be too much for those who would otherwise be the most special to you.

Living life from the heart can lead to much foolishness. It can cause you to act in ways that you immediately regret. It can push you to take care of yourself by means that are naive and foolhardy. It can encourage you to trust deeply in feelings that your mind has misinterpreted, and act against your own best interest in a rational and practical sense, causing yourself great pain in the short term.

It’s here in this hurt where we have the choice — broken by our false interpretations of feeling, and the projections of trauma we wrought in our lives by living from our sometimes-faulty expressions of love — to abandon ourselves and our heart’s wisdom for perceived safety, or to see our way through the pain and find a purer truth beyond the wreckage.

If the world around were different. If all of us hadn’t been trained since birth to subscribe to cultural ideals which limit and confuse our ability to communicate with the wisdom of our hearts. If structures in our society weren’t emplaced to reward those who are cold and calculating. If we didn’t collectively treat those who operate from love with indifference. Leading with the heart would not be such a painful endeavor.

Still, we must acknowledge reality as it is. We must admit how it asks of us to set aside our heart’s desires and serve masters of control; the faceless autocracy high-above the false demagogues paraded before us as political distraction. We must decide for ourselves if we will live in the false comfort of this cold world by becoming closed off and calloused ourselves, or courageously step forward as the powerful beings of love our hearts know we are.

I make bold mistakes. I say things I regret. I fall deeply in love with people and place the utmost trust in their and the universe’s hands to take care of me. I am let down constantly. My own trust and love called into doubt. My own ability to thrive and survive in the face of this onslaught of heartful suffering the question which begs me to consider alternatives.

Still, when I look most honestly at the options before me after another heart crushing defeat in love. After speaking the truth of my heart to later regret so much of what came out. After becoming a villain in another person who I love’s story. I ask myself — should I change how I operate from the heart? Should I operate with more caution? Should I erect more barriers between myself and others to protect from this trauma recurring in the future? Should I finally accept what the world around me has been saying over and over and over — that my heart is foolish and I should learn to be more rational and calculating?

In the face of these questions, I’m met with a nuanced truth. Layers of awareness within me emerge and show how I have much to learn, how the hurts of old are lessons I still have work to integrate, how the growth from those lessons will lead me where I need to go, and how I can and will do better for myself and others in the future.

That does not mean I must emplace barriers. That does not mean I must become cold and over-rational and hardened. It does not mean I should close myself off from the unbelievable opportunities that love has to afford me in this world out of caution. It only means that I might follow the lead of my heart with a tad more discernment. That I might pause for a moment before acting so boldly from the heart, when I know my heart is broken, and I know distortion is carried so deeply within it.

I am a beautiful and whole person when I live from the heart, when I shine my love freely. I will do that until I die — people whom I love but scare away be damned — it’s who I am.

Never will I betray my heart by learning false lessons which tell of protecting myself by being cold and reserved.

My heart has been broken over and over. These last years of moving quickly through a strange, feminine, second adolescence — while simultaneously being initiated into parenthood — have been fraught with lessons taught by pain. Lessons carved into my awareness through suffering and trauma. I’ve broken my own heart mercilessly by acting in the spirit of truth as best I can embody it, and at the behest of my spiritual guidance.

This experience is one I assume would raise much doubt in others. It’s definitely sparked serious introspection in myself.

However, what I’ve discovered through that inner exploration, is that I feel entirely whole and complete when I embrace my openheartedness. By fearlessly facing the pain that’s been injected into my life by these challenges of love, I discover myself in ways I never have before, I find my voice infinitely more vibrant than when I’m floundering in doubt of my heart’s truths. I find myself ascending through layers of hurt stored within me from childhood to reach new heights of healing.

I believe deeply that when we follow our hearts with abandon, they lead us towards our own heaven here on earth. Surely, the path to get there is riddled with thorny vines of poisonous fruits. There are innumerable fates of cruelty that can befall us on this path — all born of this sick world around us, and the traumas we’ve endured to get this far — but in the end, if we stick with it, if we can walk through the painful wounding barbs and allow ourselves to heal from the sicknesses taken into our body, we will truly be free.

Our hearts know the way. Following that path it lays before us, finding the people who light us up, and giving them all we have to give, as best we can — that’s what it means to love.

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