What Is Love?

What is the truth about love?

You might ask, am I speaking about love as an energy? Love as a feeling? Or love as an emotion? What is love in its simplest form? The answer is somewhat complex. Let’s take these one by one.

Love first exists as a pure energy. This is its simplest form. And it’s a divine force. Meaning it is of God and it exists in everything and everywhere. It is available to everyone, all the time, whether or not you bring it into being in your life.

Next, as an energy it also has a vibration. It is this vibration that you feel in your body. By body, I mean the whole body, the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual self.

When you feel an energy, in its simplest form, this speaks to when the body actually registers the vibration. You feel it in your whole self whether you are conscious of it or not. So a feeling is the body’s response to experiencing an energy.

In regard to love, this feeling starts with a quickening within. Love is usually felt rather than seen; this is different from beauty which is often seen and then felt.

Generally when you are feeling the vibration of the energy of love, it is not a single feeling tone. These feelings get filtered through prior experiences. This can bring up a whole host of other feelings: warmth, cherishing, passion but could also include the icky-sticky feeling of controlling love, for instance.

What love feels like cannot be described in a word, or even a few words, for it feels different in different circumstances. There’s no single feeling of love.

So far, so good. Now, about emotions.

Out of the feeling tone, emotions are aroused. An emotion is your response to a feeling. The emotions that arise usually come from memories of prior experiences whether you are conscious of those memories or not.

Within the range of love, one might feel lighthearted, or preciousness, or compassion, or tenderness, or delight, or joy or any of a number of other feelings. However, if we are speaking of love as an emotion, these are all nuances of the emotion of love and all of this is within the overall vibration of love. Yet each has a slightly different feeling tone within the overall vibration; in other words the body senses each of these variations differently.

To illustrate this, if you asked a room full of people to feel love in their bodies, the feeling tone that would arise among them would likely be consistent, yet the emotions aroused could be vastly different. If one person was going through a bitter breakup you can mention love, but what they feel could be anger, betrayal, or the pain of loss. Another, in the throes of a new romance might feel elation, passion, and more.

So there’s a certain amount of complexity in speaking of the truth about love.

What is the truth about love practically?

In practical terms, I’m talking about the application of love. Love is a connector, a glue as it were. There are four levels of this connection. Let me go through them one by one.

The first level of the four love connections is between God and you. At this level you are connected wholly to your God Source from which all love pours into you and all love pours out through you to others.

On the second level, the love connection is between you and yourself. I am talking about self-love here. Without a healthy self-regard, the ability to love yourself, it is more difficult to love and to receive love.

On the third level, the connection is with others. This usually means the people you love, but can be your pets as well. It starts with the parent/child connection, then love of family members, then love of friends, romantic love and so forth. It’s a love that changes as you grow older. In the elder years, it’s an expansive love which extends outward to include the people in your community and beyond.

The fourth level is the love of all and that includes being able to love even the hard things in your life, even the things you may feel have gone wrong. When you are here, your love resides in those things too. This is the connection between the Self and the love for all that exists.

In practical terms, then, at the second and third levels love becomes more than just a connection. It is more like a glue. At the second level, that of self-love, you may not feel this glue very well. When you come to the third level, love of others, this is where love’s sticky factor is most evident and where it has the greatest practical application. However, I want to point out that when it comes to others, the glue of loving them can stick more readily when you also love yourself.

It is a precious gift to your loved ones when you love them. A great gift humans have to offer each other is to care for, cherish and be devoted to one another. Why a precious gift? The practicality is that when you love, you are connected wholly to God. It is a powerful way that the love of God is brought actively into the world. This may not seem to be practical, but I assure you it is.

Often though, love gets subverted early in a person’s life. So many people are never able to tap into what true loving is and can express love only in limited or subverted forms such as manipulation, obsession, control, co-dependence and so forth. These ways have a patina of love, but when you go underneath, it’s really a different energy entirely.

This might seem rather conceptual but it is truly practical; for when people are authentically being loved and loving, they are able to fully live and express their expanded, whole self. They are much less likely to be harmful to others in their actions and more likely to be fulfilled in their lives and to contribute to other’s fulfillment.

Appreciating love

Appreciation is the value in which you hold love. Appreciation amplifies the power of love. Appreciation holds love in place. And it just plain feels good.

There are specific purposes for appreciation. It’s practical, too, for it is something you can apply to your day to day living. When you appreciate the energy, you value it and express your value of it. So often in everyday life, you give or receive love, but you don’t take it in fully. It’s there in a moment but then it’s gone. Don’t just gloss over it. Instead, allow yourself to feel it and value it. When you do this, appreciation becomes a celebration. Celebration is an energy in itself and allows the resonance an open space to grow.

More truth about love

Let me pose a question: is love outside of you? An energy you tap into and drawn down to yourself? This question supposes love is external to you and that is a fallacy. The love that comes from God is like a wellspring within you. You do not exist without this energy coming into you at all moments, every day. Every individual facet of God has its own vibration. If your vibration is not attuned to love you will not feel it, even though it is the energy on which you exist.

Love is the very fabric of the cosmos; you are continually surrounded by it. You are always bathed in the greater existence of love that is beyond your own personal awareness. Love is always within, and always around you and accessible to you. Therefore, there is no need to tap into it as if you were reaching for something outside of you.

What it takes to experience love is to become still enough to know its presence. By still, I don’t mean physically quiet as in silence. I mean for you open up and grab hold of that energy that is within you. To wholly feel, know, and experience the beingness of love.

The experience most people have, particularly when they are connecting to God’s love, is that love is flowing into them. The actuality is that they are opening to love that was always there within them.

When you don’t feel your own love, that which is already inside you, you feel constricted. This creates the sense that love is flowing in from the outside.

The reality is this; it is flowing in and through you at all times. The love flows in from God, you expand, you recognize that love within you, and you express it back out into the world, you receive it in again, and it expands and flows into the All of love. And the cycle begins again. This is the natural flow of love.

This blog content was excerpted from Chapter 5 of the forthcoming book, Embracing Love and Beauty: The Goddess Venus Speaks.