Love is a powerful emotion. We all know the power of hearing a great love song, whether it be a ballad, a sad song of love lost or the yearning of unrequited love. I could create you a playlist of songs about love – but it’d take days or months to hear them all. 😉
While acknowledging the amazing powers of love, our exploration of love will be with the emphasis on healing – healing ourselves and healing the planet.
We’ll begin with a meditation on love, explore what love is and examine the healing powers of love here in Part 1. Then in Part 2, I’ll share with you some exercises that you can do to cultivate love, and then offer a mini Sound Bath to co-create love.
Cultivating Love Meditation
I’d actually like to start this post with a meditation to bring the energy of love into us and make it more tangible.
How was that? What sensations are you feeling in your body?
What is love?
I always feel that starting with the definition can make sure we’re on the same page, and the best place to start is with some myths about love.
myth #1 Love is only the fiery love with a new partner.
In my opinion, this is a complete and utter myth, that often causes people to get worried because they think that when that fire in us dies out or quietens down, it’s all over.
I think with a new partner, especially as you’re getting to know them, that love may or may not be there yet, but certainly there’s attraction and lust there, which can be a big part of that fire in us.
myth #2 Love can only be with another human.
And I think any of us who’ve got pets or have other animals in our lives – our companion animals, wildlife that we spend time with and so on, it’s extremely clear that it’s possible to experience unconditional love with the animals.
Many people have said to me over the years that they feel safer loving an animal than they do loving a human. Speaking as a huge dog lover, it’s clear that we can share unconditional love with our dogs. I am always fascinated how easy it is for us to love them so freely and also to receive love so readily.
I believe that place can be a source of love, too.
I’ve got a favourite place that I can just bring to mind and immediately my heart does a little leap and I feel this expansiveness inside because I love this place so much. It’s a place that I really would consider home, my soul home. Do you have a place like that, too?
Love can also be felt for food, music, and other activities. – I’m sure you can think of some other things as well.
And so today, we’re talking about love as something beyond romantic love.
We’re talking about love in general because love is love. There’s different forms of love and it is limitless.
I wanted to share a quote with you.
It’s a beautiful and very huge quote when you unpack all the different layers of it, we won’t go into all of that now, but I certainly think it’s a good one to ponder.
Here’s another quote from him as well, which I think is really valuable.
Again, I think it really points to the enormity of love and the power that love holds.
I believe that love is incredibly healing. In my opinion, love is about joy and freedom.
When I talk about freedom here, I mean freedom of expression, the free flow of love, so the more you give, the more comes into you.
To illustrate this, I wanted to invite you to imagine that you were at the beach. Imagine picking up a handful of dry sand, and because you really want to hold onto it, you squeeze it tight. But what ends up happening is, you don’t manage to grip it better, but instead lose a lot of it. When you open your hand, there’s, there’s almost nothing left.
Love’s the same, the tighter you grip, the less it flows.
Therefore, allowing it to flow freely, to love without feeling like you are giving, to have that sense of freedom with love, the purity of simply feeling love, allows it to flow to and through you with such abundance.
You’re not loving somebody so they’ll love you back or loving someone for a reason – you just love.
Love is a feeling that you experience – a very strong emotion with a lot of power.
Love and the Emotional Scale
Let’s look at Abraham Hicks’ Emotional Scale.
We start at the bottom with the black and move all the way up to pink – moving from lower level emotions to higher level emotions.
Things like fear and blame, discouragement, guilt, all of those tend to be lower level emotions and the higher level emotions, are things like joy, appreciation, feeling empowered, freedom, love, passion, enthusiasm.
If you sit with each of those emotions on the scale, you would feel, “downward” sense with the lower level emotions, there’s a heaviness to them. With the higher level ones, there’s a brightness or lightness to them.
Love and the Hierarchy of Needs
I often take concepts into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which you may or may not be familiar with – it’s a framework from psychology.
It’s a triangle, where the higher level emotions are at the top and the lower level ones are at the bottom. The bottom of the triangle is all about a sense of security and safety and having your basic physiological needs met – being fed, clothed and protected. That’s the baseline. Without that foundation in place, it’s not possible to move up to the higher levels.
I see this concept being replicated in lots of different models, but there are two examples for you.
Going back to the Emotional Scale, it’s in the presence of those lower level emotions that the higher level ones can’t be felt.
Stress, times of uncertainty, hurt and grief can all cause those higher level emotions such as love to either be absent or not experienced fully.
Thus, it’s somewhat of a continuum where you can’t be at both extremes at the same time.
Love Heals…
Love –
- Overrides separation, bringing a sense of wholeness, togetherness.
- Creates cohesiveness to us as humans.
- Can bring self-acceptance, which plays a very powerful role for us to recognise and do the work we’re here to do.
- Is a massive part of loving kindness. Kind acts are fuelled by love – giving and being kind for the sake of it.
The Frequency of Love
The fact that everything’s got a frequency is something that drew me to Sound Healing.
In my previous work, the focus was on the negative health effects of frequency and coherence. Of course, on the flip side, there are positive healing effects of frequency, too!
528 Hertz is said to be the frequency of love.
Research has found that when rats are exposed to 528 Hertz, their anxiety levels reduce (Babayi Daylari, Riazi, Sh Pooyan, Fathi, Hedayati Katouli, 2019). This is an exciting finding assuming it can be extrapolated to humans.
Thus the frequency at which love is resonating is so powerfully healing it can actually reduce anxiety.
Love Can Entrain
Going back to the Emotional Scale, we’ve established that love will bring emotions up the scale, causing the lower level emotions to drop away. And thus a frequency can entrain.
“Entrain” may be an unfamiliar word, so let me explain what I mean.
A frequency can affect a cell, causing it to vibrate at a different frequency to what it was, for example 528 Hz. This cell can then alter the cells around it causing them to vibrate at 528 Hz as well. The result is something like a ripple effect.
A great visual for this is a meme I once saw which encapsulates this beautifully. On the meme, there were a lot of sad faces. Then suddenly, the one in the middle started to smile. One by one, the surroundings ones did, ultimately ending up in them all smiling.
These are examples of entraining – where the frequency spreads from one out to the others, creating change.
Love & Water Crystals
This leads me to the work of Japanese researcher Masuru Emoto. In his work, he looked at the way the frequencies of words, phrases, and music, effected water. What he did was he took a vial of water and he wrote a word or a phrase on a piece of paper and then taped it around the vial, and then put the vial of water into the freezer.
As it started to freeze, he took it out of the freezer and looked at the crystals that were forming under the microscope. He found that the frequencies of the messages on the vials altered the structures of the crystals. Here’s a sample of what he found.
What I’d like you to focus on here is the structure.
You can see that the first two “love” and “thank you” have got a real beauty about them, they’re symmetrical, balanced, intricate and detailed. You can look at those and actually feel good. They are uplifting in their own way, but there’s that symmetry, there’s the structure, there’s the, the beauty, the geometry in them.
When you look at the third one, which is a much lower level emotion you can see really, there’s no form. Compared to the beauty of the first two, it is a long way off. There’s no structure, symmetry or intricacy. It also doesn’t uplift you just by looking at it.
Taking this work to another level, our bodies are made up of 50-75% water. With this in mind, it becomes clear that the frequencies of words can affect our very beings.
Love and Hormones
I wanted to touch briefly on hormones and their role in love.
Dopamine and norepinephrine (a.k.a. noradrenaline) are part of the reward pathways. According to Wu (2017) they are both released with attraction and love. These hormones lead to a giddy, euphoria, a decreased appetite, and also a bit of insomnia.
Serotonin is also one that’s released with love (Wu, 2017). Serotonin is one of the well-known “feel good” hormones. and it’s speculated to underlie infatuation.
Oxytocin is associated with the first stages of romantic love (Biggers & Santos-Longhurst, 2018). Oxytocin triggers trust, empathy, positive communication, and the processing of bonding cues. You might have heard of oxytocin in the context of breastfeeding, and it plays an important role with bonding there, too.
In Part 2, we’ll got through exercises to cultivate love and immerse in a Sound Bath to co-create love. Click here to keep reading
What else can you do to experience more higher level emotions?
- Check out The Changing Times Roadmap
- Follow me on Instagram (my handle is @lucindaearthmother)
- Join the Earth Mother Community (free group on Facebook)
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel
