The light of love

Life is designed to make us fall in love. Over and over, with reckless abandon, we are led towards love. Resistance is futile, impossible and honestly, quite exhausting.

For far too long I tried to run away from love every time it showed up. Endlessly abandoning myself in hope of avoiding what I believed to be the scariest of scaries. I can’t do it anymore. My bones are weary from running a race I cannot win.

This year, my greatest lesson has been non-attachment. Non-attachment to material things, places, identities, people, myself and everything I believed to be truth. Lesson after lesson, the world has ripped me from being able to cling to anything. It has been brutal and destabilizing at times, but more than necessary.

Non-attachment is something that is not exactly fun to learn. I have intellectually understood it for years now. But intellectualizing something is nothing without integration. Apparently 2025 is the year where my body has decided it is safe enough to integrate so much of what I have learned, especially this tricky non-attachment.

One truth that I resist more than I realize is that I am worthy of love. I am more attached than I care to admit to a past version of myself. A version that feels broken and impossible to love. This past me, one that kept me safe and happy for so long, believes it is safest to stay invisible and quiet.

I thought I let this part of me go. I consciously know that past Jenna did her best to make sure I could operate in this world well enough. She believed love was a luxury and not a necessity. That love would make me too vulnerable to pain and heartbreak. And those are two things I felt I had experienced enough of to last a lifetime. Steering clear of love was the best option I had to avoid further pain and suffering.

I have been drawn to studying pain and suffering for far too long now. I know, without a doubt, that pain is a natural and necessary part of every life. Attempting to avoid pain is like attempting to survive without water; laughably impossible.

This means I know that love is as necessary to life as pain. I also know that every human is inherently worthy of love. But the existence of love does not negate pain and suffering in any way. They collide and intermingle more often than I care to admit. If we accept love into our life, we open the door to pain as well. This is the entire purpose of life; to hold the opposites gently and attach to nothing.

For me, consciously knowing this and fully integrating it has been quite the leap. It is funny how unaware I can be at times. I am constantly teaching others to compassionately love and trust themselves, yet here I am, full of judgement and doubt.

I have been clinging to the idea that I am not worthy of receiving love. I am fully capable of giving it freely, which is a beautiful step in a positive direction. But to be on the receiving end of love, makes me want to crawl out of my body in an uncomfortable way.

I wish this wasn’t part of me. I wish I always felt worthy of love. I wish I didn’t have to question my value and worth so often. I wish I never believed that love was something that needed to be earned.

And also, I do not want to wish away my past. It was a path that I needed to experience. I am a firm believer that each of us has a karmic role in every lifetime. I am destined to be on this exact path and I couldn’t be more grateful.

If I didn’t experience every moment of pain and heartbreak in my past, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to heal in the ways I have. The light can only get in through the cracks. The light is always love and the cracks are pain.

I did my best to shield every crack from the light of love, thinking darkness was equivalent to safety. But it is not easy to grow in darkness. Often, survival is the only option. Light is necessary to thrive, so is love.

It is no easy feat to allow yourself to take up space as a messy and broken human in this world. A world where perfection is praised and we are trained to earn our value and worth from the youngest of ages. Detaching from these narratives has not been a simple process. Again, I understand this but am only beginning to integrate it.

For me, the key has been to ease into the light of love. If darkness is all you know, light can be too overwhelming. If love feels foreign, our body will always resist it. Our body operates in the dichotomy of safety or danger. Anything foreign will be perceived as danger, no matter how benign it truly is.

Love has felt foreign to me for far too long. My past perception of love was that it led to pain and suffering. Of course my body would categorize love as a threat. How beautiful that my body is always doing its best to keep me safe and alive. How frustrating that I couldn’t out think my way from this perception.

Integration requires the body. It is not easy to shift perceptions without dropping out of the mind and into the body. However, the doorway to our body is only opened when we feel safe. What a confusing conflict to experience. We need our body to shift our attachment to a past belief but our mind must willingly participate.

Mind and body, connecting and collaborating, is how we allow the light to enter the cracks without running away. This is how we allow love to access the deepest parts of ourselves. To rewire our being into a new belief. That we are worthy and deserving of love, without condition or question. This is not an easy ask.

I am slowly exposing myself to more and more light. Allowing love to seep into the cracks and heal them in new ways. I’ve had to hold myself steady in this process. While also allowing myself to trust others to carry me when my own strength falters. The light of love is slowly helping my strength to return.

It is with an abundance of patience that I am detaching myself from this past version of myself. The version that feared the light of love. That feared the pain that exists parallel to it. Little by little, I am moving into the full light of the sun. It feels nourishing to my soul.

Because life is a portal towards love. This body is designed to be in the light, messy cracks and all. How else are we supposed to thrive in a world with so much darkness!?

Let yourself soak in the light of love, even for just a minute. Notice the nourishing warmth that arrives. It’s okay if part of you wants to return to the safety of the darkness. Be patient and compassionate. The light of love will find its way into each of us eventually.

Go slow. Be kind. And remember, love is not something to be earned. It is freely given by those filled with light.

It is okay to be grateful for past versions of yourself that didn’t trust the light but someday you have to let that version of yourself go. Non-attachment is not something you can think your way through, especially when it comes to love.

Welcome your body to participate in the conversation and it will lead you into the light every time.