We all Think That We Know What Love is. If I Asked You During a Coaching Session "What is Love?", What Would You Say? Here Are my Thoughts on Love. Until You Know Real Love, Your Work, Relationships, and Your Whole Life Will Be Very Limited. It’s Not by Chance that the Word Evolve Contains the Word Love in it. With Real Love, You Are Unstoppable...
Love
When I meditate on the simple and short word love, this is what comes up for me:
Love is a mind free of all negativity. My core values are love, authenticity, compassion, creativity and service. What are yours? It's important to know what your core values are as it allows you to come from BEing. Then doing follows as naturally as a flower grows from a seed. The having comes then without effort.
My mantra is "I am love, authenticity, compassion, creativity and service". This could be abbreviated to "I am loving awareness."
Love is the only reality. The ego is who we think we are and the soul is who we really are. When I dive into my deepest consciousness I realise these three truths:
"I AM" my soul
"Love"is real
"I am consciousness"
Only love will change the world. And only love is real. Fear is merely the absence of love.
To love is to listen. People feel truly valued when listened to. We all need an Enlightened Witness. This is why I love Transformative Life Coaching (TLC) so much.
Love, the soul and consciousness are inseparable. None of these can be measured, but they are all deep Truth. Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it, and it can move mountains. Truly. But what is real love?
I remember reading that the word love comes either from the Indo-European root leubh, meaning "to care" or "to desire," or from the Latin lubet, "it pleases". Love is far, far more than all these and will be the most powerful tool that you will ever harness...
Spirituality (and by this I don't mean religion) is about becoming love. In Corinthians 16:14 “Let everything you do be in love.” Rumi wrote “In every religion there is love. Yet love has no religion.” St Francis of Assisi (well it wasn't actually him, but it's something he might have said) wrote “Lord, grant that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love.”
Osho said “If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others. In relationships with others, it is only you, mirrored.” I have found this to be so true. Haters really hate themselves, and masquerade hate as love.
Lord Byron wrote “There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.”
Love is emotional musculature.
Love is Truth
Love is true wisdom and takes up where knowledge leaves off. You know that your highest intuitive thoughts and decisions are right when you think with joy, speak with Truth, and feel love in awareness. This is the 'seat of your soul' and the only place that you should ever come from to succeed in every area of your life. Your heart tells you how to respond, whereas your mind shouts "React!"There is no need to get up from your seat and fight the world. Why go from being an observer to being a suspect? Every choice that you will make that will lead you to true success comes from this place, your heart: A loving heart is the truest wisdom. Love has reasons which even reason cannot understand. Real love is never wrong and love always conquers all. Love is the only true transcendent experience of Truth. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth. Truth cannot be put into words: It can only be felt and that feeling is love, which is the inward experience of your highest Self. Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up with loving wisdom as the monkey mind (as the Buddhists call it) empties. Love is the energy of the heart. To feel it you need to open and unblock your heart, drop out of your mind and into your heart: It always knows best. The giving of love is an education in itself. Only 'divine' love bestows the keys of wisdom: That is soul love. The feeling of love may be more true than the words of Truth.
“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
Love is the most powerful force in the Universe.
Emmet Fox, the author of the book 'The Sermon on the Mount' wrote “There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer: no dis-ease that love will not heal: no door that enough love will not open... It makes no difference how deep set the trouble: How hopeless the outlook: How muddled the tangle: How great the mistake. A sufficient realisation of love will dissolve it all. If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world... Love is God and is therefore absolutely all-powerful. This is the scientific application of love, against which nothing evil can stand. It destroys the evil condition and, if a person is concerned, it sets him as well as you free. But to return hate for hate, curse for curse, or fear for aggression, has the effect of amplifying the trouble, much as a feeble sound is multiplied in volume by an amplifier. Meeting hatred with Love in the scientific way is the Royal Christ Road to freedom. This is the perfect method of Self-defence in all circumstances. It renders you absolutely invulnerable to any kind of attack.”
Love is the unseen but very real energy that underpins the entire Universe. Poets, philosophers and even many scientists like Einstein would agree. It is what can't be seen or identified by science, but that is a failure of science, not of love. Love is the ultimately powerful Universal force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomena operating in the Universe. I truly believe that it is what a unified theory of the Universe would look like: The power of Love. Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the sun, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Love is light: It enlightens those who give and receive it.
Love is gravity, because it forms the strongest attraction between souls. You can't blame gravity for falling in love.
Love is power, because it multiplies the best that we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in our blind selfishness, lack of compassion and dysfunctionality. There is no limit to the power of love. Mahatma Gandhi said “Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.”
Love unfolds and reveals. Love strengthens and gives courage. Love knows not distance; it has no continent; its eyes are for the stars. Love is space and time measured by the heart. Love is how we glimpse the present moment and eternity at the same time. In every living thing there is the desire for love. Nobody has ever measured, not even poets or scientists, how much the heart can hold.
The Dalai Lama said “The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless your action will be.” Mahatma Gandhi wrote “Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment.”
Rumi wrote “Love is the bridge between you and everything.” Love is the walkway over the chaotic chasm that is life.
Real love
For me real love is when one cares only for the happiness of another, and that is unconditional - it does not require anything in return. So there is something real and unconditional about love. When we feel real love we don't need anything else: When we don't feel real love nothing else is enough. I truly believe that this underlies many physical and mental illnesses. Love is the only real medicine. Love is the great miracle cure. There is no remedy for love but to love more and love is love's reward. I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love. Loving ourselves and others works miracles in our lives. As with all Karma, the love we give away is the only love that we keep. As Ram Dass says "If you identify with your soul, then you see other people as souls, and souls love one another. It's easy as a soul to love everybody."
Ram Dass with East Forest - We Are Truth
There is a part of one's brain that detects and and allows us to feel unconditional maternal love. No reason is needed for loving. One is loved because one is loved. This is the foundation of joy, peace and bliss. The true unconditional love of another can produce the same feeling, as the feeling of love from our own highest Self in unconditional self-regard. People who become substance addicts say that their drug of choice temporarily replicates this feeling, but it is fleeting and it is insatiable: It creates 'hungry ghosts' who hide in the shadows. Feeling true unconditional love is enough. You cannot feel real love until someone loves you unconditionally. This is why those who didn't experience unconditional love as children struggle to love themselves and resort to 'imitation love'.
Love is the beauty of the soul. Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in Self-recovery and Self-discovery. True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: It is seen with white hairs and wrinkles and is always young at heart. True love is an irresistible desire to irresistibly desire one's own becoming.
To love another is to manifest joy in them. Being loved has been described as seeing the face of God. You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. Love is reparenting your Self with unconditional Self-regard. Regard comes from old French meaning 'to see'. Being truly seen for our authentic selves and still loved is the greatest feeling in the world. 'Romantic' love is an illusion: An ephemeral dopamine hit. Real love is an ethereal other-worldly energy that transmutes any pain into bliss. Real love is when someone gives you a piece of your soul, that you never knew was missing.
You can search throughout the entire Universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection. Love gives meaning to life. Love can be felt and the highest feeling is the experience of unconditional real love. Real love is true beauty and it makes you whole.
Imitation love and the ego create transactional connection - that which is based on "What can I get from this?" Real love is not transactional. The purpose of all relationships is to decide and BE who you are and to allow the other to grow into who they are.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate, wrote "Love is the only gold."
Real love connects: Plato said "Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature." The wound of human nature is separation and disconnection. This is the domain of the ego. Souls love each other.
Osho says that "Love is our deepest longing. Just as the body needs food the soul needs love - it is nourishment, spiritual nourishment. Without the food, air and water, the body will deteriorate; without love the soul starts shrinking."
Love or fear
Every human thought, feeling, decision, choice, action and consequence is either based on love or fear. Anthony De Mello echoed “There are only two things in the world - fear and love. There is only one evil in the world - fear. There is only one good in the world - love. It is also called joy, peace, serenity, spirituality, freedom, awareness.” Fear is contraction, whereas love is expansive and moves you. Love is choosing to be your true Self, with openness, integrity and authenticity and standing in that Truth regardless of attacks by one's own ego or that of others. Fear hides behind a mask of shame. That is a potentially fatal and doomed way to live. The closer you get to becoming your true authentic Self, the more the ego attacks as it senses its own impending death. Many books have been written on this subject and I certainly felt it during my transformative journey and so will you.
Human beings can only meet you as deeply as they have met themselves. Sadly the vast majority of people are asleep and replete with hate and fear to the point of overflowing, but they are only one thought away from waking up to awareness and Truth, which is love. Love is Truth lived. Real love is abundant and limitless. Real love does not require approval from others. Love is the great unveiling of illusion based on fear. Love is a journey inwards to your own soul and outwards, connecting with other souls, that gives you perception through new eyes. Love is seeing, hearing and valuing without judgement. Love is compassion.
The first duty of love is to listen. The second duty is to see. The third duty is to value. Love is the only true adventure: The true Hero's Journey. This is why we need an Enlightened Witness to guide us. We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end. Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live. There is only one joy in this life, to love and be loved. Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey. Love allows you not only to brave the wilderness, but also to become it. Love allows you to see that the wolves were just puppies all along.
The reason that we live in fear and not love is that we weren't unconditionally loved as children, however much our parents thought that they loved us. The only thing they did wrong was that they didn't love us unconditionally for who we really are.This is why we don't believe in, and can't feel unconditional love, and therefore can't believe in the love of a Higher Power that guides the Universe. If our parents had loved us unconditionally then we would all believe in the Universal force that creates everything: This force, love, which is the essence of what some people call God. It's real name is love. If we were to believe this it would disrupt all of theology. There is no punishing God. You create your negative reality as you don’t believe that God’s love is unconditional. So you don’t allow yourself to be vulnerable. As you can never know God until you are vulnerable and you believe that his love is conditional. It is only when one feels loved, becomes open, authentic and vulnerable that one sees the beauty of human connection and of existence itself. One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.
Every decision is made based on fear throughout all society. Every conflict is the result of an egoic boxing match. From internal conflict all the way through to World Wars. The great duality is love and fear. Fear lies, contracts, attacks, runs, hoards, hides, and harms. Love expands, stays, reveals, shares, and heals. Love allows us to stand naked before God. Love gives all we have away. Love lets go. Love soothes. Love amends. There is no person that love cannot heal; there is no soul that love cannot save. You have free choice to choose love or fear. Why do we always choose fear? Because we have been taught to live in fear by our parents, teachers, guardians and by society. We always feel that we have to strive to be the best. Because we think we are less than. We come from scarcity. You need to change your mindset from fear to love. From negativity to positivity. From scarcity to abundance. When you choose love then you will more than win, succeed, and experience the full glory of who you are and who you can be. Ignore religion: Listen to spirituality. Love is the answer. Love is what makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place and take its place in the sun.
Love is the antidote to fear. Love and fear cannot co-exist. This because love is the only reality. Fear is merely the absence of love. Fear is a veil of illusion. Love is the blazing sun. The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity, all lie in the one word 'love'. It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life.
Fear is harnessed by mankind, or rather manunkind, as we live based on fear, and fear lies to us that we should be afraid of love. It is clear that fear has failed as a guiding beacon. That is why I no longer listen to the news, follow social media or read the papers. Truth is the only safe path, and that Truth is love. If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer. Love is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.
Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare. They should not be mistaken for love: That was our mistake as wounded children as we could not know otherwise. In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. As Maya Angelou said "I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt." If you want to be loved, be lovable. As Martin Luther King Jr said "I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.... Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. " The most powerful weapon on Earth is the human soul on fire.
With our love, we could save the world. But as humans we love to destroy. The Universe always ensures that love has the final word. Love always wins.
Hatred is merely an expression of fear. Fear is merely an absence of love. Only love is real. Mother Theresa said this prayer every morning "Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love."
Imitation love
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.' Imitation love comes in the form of money, power, sex, possessions, cosmetic surgery, social media followers and likes, addictions, and fame. In of itself imitation love can never satiate the soul. Only real love can do that. Love is the only real gold. There is only one kind of real love, but there are a thousand imitations. To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind. The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
Without real love we are always alone. With real love we are never alone. Love is a necessity. Love is a human need and a soul need. We cannot live without real love. True love cannot be found where it does not exist, nor can it be denied where it does. Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them - we can only love others as much as we love ourselves. We are mirrors for each other. Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense. Sorën Kierkegaard wrote "To love human beings is still the only thing worth living for, without that you really do not live." Words connect souls.
No amount of imitation love will be enough if you didn’t get real love as a child. If your primal needs of love are not met as a child you cannot get substitute gratification as an adult. This results in endless cycle of insatiable cravings and disappointment. Adult cravings can never satisfy infantile needs and our experience of childhood and adolescence creates a false identity, the ego. Instead of primal needs being satisfied we experience primal pain. This makes us scream silently. To experience a rebirth we must feel our initial pain.
Love and purpose
Success is not the key to joy: Joy is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, if you have found a purpose that aligns with your highest inner purpose, then you will be successful beyond measure and if you do what you love, you'll never need to work a day in your life. Success will become effortless. Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. Let love guide everything that you do - that is alignment and authenticity. When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece, expect a miracle.
Love is a holy collaboration or communion through God. It is the ultimate desire of creation in the realisation of Self. Love is seeing another’s Highest Self until they see it in themselves and accepting that feeling as Truth and not expecting anything in return for that gift. Creation through your purpose is the most powerful driving force known to man or God. Love is God and God is Love. Love has no limits.
You are a powerful creation machine. You are creating out of pure consciousness. This is how you manifest your desires: The Universe will always create your intentions. It’s all about who you are in regard to them: Love or fear. I choose to love!
Love and authenticity
We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable, authentic and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honour the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection. If you wish to be loved, love.
Love is a choice
Love is the daily choice of living from your Highest Self. Love is the combined forces of all the angels lifting your life into the highest vision of you. To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
Jesus was simply a man who had only love. He always chose love. And yet he has been the most influential man of all time. He said "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you... A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." Remove every thought that is not of your highest vision of your Self. Surrender to the highest thoughts of you. That is your becoming, and your path to joy, peace and true lasting success. Love is my religion. Love in its essence is spiritual fire.
Intuition occurs during meditation and is the still quiet voice of love, of your highest or deepest Self. The first tool then is the voice within. It is what tells you what is right and is the radar that guides the journey if you let it. If the words are not of love then they are not of God. Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love.
Your soul's sole purpose is to experience the full glory of love. Love is never ending. There is no limit. The more you are the more you can become. Life is a process of creation. You are creating your self anew. Who do you want to be? It’s a choice. Why are we here? To remember who we are. That’s all. If you don’t recreate your Self as who you are then that you cannot BE. We are not here to learn lessons. Your soul knows all there is to know. Knowing is not enough. The soul seeks to experience through feeling: Through love. From head to heart: That’s the journey. A short journey if you take it with an Enlightened Witness, but a miraculous one. A miracle is simply a shift in perception from fear to love. Hallelujah!
Heaven or Hell - it's your choice
Hell is the opposite of joy: It is knowing, but not experiencing who you are. Heaven is love - it is becoming who you were meant to be. Who so loves believes the impossible. Keep love in your heart: A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love. Where there is love there is life. Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
The only real sin is to allow others to define who you are and keep you small (as your aggressive ego). Our Self-doubt comes from doubting in the Universe to manifest our highest intention as we didn’t believe in our parents as they loved us conditionally.
Lord Byron wrote “Yes, love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire with angels shared, by Allah given to lift from Earth our low desire.”
Love has to grow
Love is a flower, you've got to let it grow. Life is the flower for which love is the honey. One day a day will come when the risk to remain tight in a bud will be more painful than the risk it will take you to blossom. Life and success are the process of becoming. I believe in the compelling power of love. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence. Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.
Summary
Plato wrote “Love is in the one who loves, not in the one who is loved.”
Faith makes all things possible... love makes all things easy. Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.
This has been my journey of transformation. My transformation is my value. My transformation is your transformation. When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible. He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. Any time not spent on love is wasted. Choose love and love your choice. Only do what your heart tells you. To love is to take action, which is the highest form of creativity and brings you closer to your true Self. Love is, above all, the gift of one's Self. Be love, then you will do all things with love, and love will grow all around you. After all, who, being loved, is poor? How may I serve you?
” Ram Dass said “The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving its in the BEing.” Martin Luther King has the final word “I believe that unarmed Truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.” And so it is.
Sending you love, light, and blessings.
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Olly Alexander Branford MD, MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
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I am very pleased to meet you. Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my website for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching. I am here to serve you.
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Olly Alexander Branford MD, MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.