In honor of Valentines Day, I always like to talk about love. But how many of us really know what love is? Real love, that is…

As Hafiz says, “Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor; it holds us upside down and shakes out all the nonsense.” If you have ever truly been in love, you have experienced this total shake out. It can be cathartic as well as traumatic but regardless, it is always a necessary exchange along our path.

In our society we are so trained to see love as glamorous, romantic and perfect but what we fail to realize is that real love isn’t always all of that. If it is REAL love, it can be all of that and much more but that doesn’t mean it is always pretty nor is it always easy!

We only learn about who we are IN RELATIONSHIP to another human being. That is why our significant other generally tends to be the perfect mirror to us. They mirror back to us all the qualities in ourselves that we both like and do not like. This is natural and very common. It is also very common to get angry when what we see being projected back is not exactly what we were hoping to see!

As Hafiz says, love does us a favor and helps to shake out all the nonsense. It is that mirror that helps us to recognize what is going on with our own emotional wellbeing. It cuts to the chase and helps to eradicate unconscious behaviors. Relationships are battlegrounds for our own issues. We each instigate the issues out of the other allowing them to come to the surface for battle. We then have the choice as to whether we will allow ourselves to be taken down by those same issues or if we will choose to acknowledge them, do the work on them and allow them to heal.

Once you experience real love, it changes you forever. It helps you to grow into the being that you were meant to. Even if the relationship doesn’t last, it was a significant gift that helped to transform you along your path. That is the definition of real love.

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