What is Love?

Very often I read and hear this question. I will try to answer and share my thought. Is not from long time that I realized some things about love, things that I did not know before, or that I was not ready to know, or I did not want to know.

I understand that love is not a complicated thing, is inside each of us in its pure form, but because of the intervention of thought and ideologies, of social constraints and irrational fears, even simple things become confused and difficult, so we can not hear the voice of natural love.

What we commonly call love in fact often is not true love but a tangle of confused feelings, fears and prejudices, constructed by ourselves, that smothering the true love.

To find true love we must first look within ourselves, where nestle the pure feelings. We must to be able to listen to our perceptions, that are the voice of our truth.

I noticed that many people avoid loneliness as if it is an illness and in love they looking for an anchor that save them from what scares: the loneliness and themselves. They forced themselves to live relationships that can be not satisfactory, or flat, or problematic, but that cover the empty: they cover it, do not fill it, and for this kind of weakly and thin cover some people are willing to betray themselves, but the empty persists, and perhaps is becoming deeper.

I understand that no one can love us enough to make us truly happy unless we love ourselves, because when we seek love in our empty, we can find only emptiness, but an empty can not fill us, can not make us grow, an empty is not love .

To learn to love we must learn to be alone, listen and know ourselves. Alone : without superficial distractions, without victimhood and impatience, without fear and desire of escape.

When we take refuge in the social life to distract us from our thoughts, we become slaves of ourselves and of our fears, whenever we escape we become more slaves.

To free ourselves we must simply learn to be alone and in silence, a silence that can be full of voices, voices that we hear without our ears because they come not from outside, voices that are not confused noise, such as the external voices, but pure and clear music. In this sense, be able to being alone means listen, understand, accept, love and respect ourselves.

Means removing the bandage that prevented us from seeing, remove the caps that prevented us from listening, stretch our hands and tap our own self, the real own self, to grow our love.

When a person has learned to be alone in this way is independent, he learned to accept and to love himself, the others and the environment. So it is a being alone for being with others.

This is a way of being natural, healthy and happy. A person who has learned to be alone in this way can also renounce the loving affection, because for him is not very important be loved, but his own love. For love I mean a generally love, not necessarily directed to a person, and never to only one person, but to all mankind, to animals and to nature.

When we love of a true love a person, the feeling of love expands to everything around us: love is not selfish and do not close us in a cage, even if seemingly golden.

Who loves feel happy and sensitive and overcomes his fears. Who loves enhances the best part of himself, the most true and healthy part, and the most constructive and intuitive. We can not live without fear, but who love knows how to recognize his fears, accept and deal them with the power of his love that makes him stronger and safer.

When we love we see the world in a new light. More radiant, more positive. We feel more free, enthusiastic, open and we are grateful for this experience.

This is a pure love, that not hiding behind its insecurities and fears.

To love in this way we learn something else of difficult, how difficult is learning to be alone: love without being reciprocated.

When I write "difficult" I mean that for many people may be easier to pretend to ignore that their love is not a true love, because discover this can be very painful and disrupt their lives.

The hard thing is deciding to want to know true love, everything else will follow this decision will be of one disarming simplicity and naturalness. Now I wonder how I could have had the presumption to want to live love without knowing it.

True love does not need a reward and not dependent on another person.

Very often we are concerned to understand how much the other loves us, how much the other does for us, in what way the other helps us, how much he respects and values us. Who loves, first of all, love. He do not love for have something in return, because it is from his love that finds happiness, not from love of another.

For this we should not have expectations and we should not build up an image of how we would that is the other person, of what the other person should do to make us happy.

Only when we learn to be happy without expectations and without that our happiness depends on their realization, we can be happy and we can truly love: the freedom and the courage to see reality with no expectations and lies, to see what really exists, not what we would like to see, is an experience that generates a great feeling of happiness, a self-confidence that not stands on weak legs of an illusion.

The true love leaves us free and independent, indeed makes us more free and independent than before, because it makes us grow and develop our potential.

The premise is accept ourselves, be accepted and accept: we must love the other as he really is, not how we want or expect him to be when we look him through the eyes of a blind. Be accepted and accept is the precondition for a free and true love.

Also the child who feels accepted by his parents without limitations can become strong and self-conscious, become truly free to be himself without afraid of losing parental love. Even we adults must seek this kind of love, a love that starts from within us, and extends to the whole world, a love that makes us free and that fills the emptiness that was there with pure and total love.

"Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract"
Hermann Hesse