Why Love?
June 12, 2024 / Michael Wayne Regier Ph.D. / MichaelRegier.com / Relational Excellence Articles
Why love? Love has legs. It has extraordinary power to move us. To take us on a journey. It has the power to change us from the inside out. To give us eyes to see. And ears to hear what we cannot perceive without it.
Love gives us the strength to endure through unimaginable hardship. It gives us the capacity for compassion. It encourages us to continue to sacrifice ourselves as parents or caregivers when we feel that we have nothing left. Love has extraordinary power.
A deep encounter with love can reorganize our entire motivation for life. It is indeed a higher power that gives us the capacity to turn our backs on addictive forces. Addictions that have held us captive for years of our lives. Love can motivate us to donate our organs. To give our money to causes that deeply move us. Money we have spent a lifetime earning. Love motivates and inspires us to spend years donating time working in organizations we care about. And even put our self in harms way for those who are sick and dying and need a helping hand.
Overcoming Limitations
Love gifts us with the capacity to overcome limitations. As a couples therapist, I have sat with hundreds of struggling souls as they have fought for the capacity to stay with their partner. Love, even if unfelt, empowers them to go the distance. It compensates for a lack of skills or incapacity to emotionally attune. It shines through eyes and expresses intention even in the midst of desperation.
Learning communication skills provides couples with the capacity to make sense of the patterns that cause hurt and separation. However, as they are, skills do not attract us to each other. They do not soften our egos. And they do not motivate us to endure hardship and go the distance that It takes to be together for life.
Healing, Inspiration and Energy
Love heals. It relaxes and resets the nervous system. The ancient wisdom that “love casts out fear” is true. It replaces fear with renewed hope. It reduces stress and decreases depression. Love breaks through our anxiety and heals the grief of loss too painful to bear. It sets straight human relationships that are entangled in hostel confusion.
Love inspires. It is the muse that the mystics and artists spend a lifetime pursuing. It opens the creative brain and the soul to give expression to things of beauty that we behold as representations of ultimate reality. This is the truth we know, and is greater than what we have the capacity to understand or give concrete form to.
Love is energy. Pure and simple. It is the fuel that propels us to do, think and give in ways that eclipse our human capacity. Singers sing, poets pen, philosophers speculate. Theologians make sense and preachers convince us about this force. This thing that is often hard to define. Yet is more real than any other reason to be alive.
Deep within the human psyche there is no arguing about the reality or the reason to love. Life and our propensities or fixations can lead us to be motivated by many things other than love. We’re motivated by money, fame, success, knowledge, adventure, power, perfection, or creativity. Without love, every one of these motivations lead us down an empty dark alley, alone and disconnected from the goodness of the souls that surround us.
The Energy Leading Love
The energy of love moves us. It propels us to keep taking next steps when our human strength is low. It speaks to us when we want to give up. Love reminds us about what is good about the sacrifices we are making. It gives us a kind of strength David had when he took on Goliath.
Love Is a kind of GPS that leads us to our destination. A destination that all souls share. Every unique soul lives out a life and calling completely unique from others. The gifts and inherent limitations we all possess require us to walk different paths. And to create different expressions of love on our life journeys. Love guides us along the path we are each created to walk. Gently moving us back on tract every time we are lost. Encouraging us to keep growing and evolving.
Love leads us to be united with the essence of love itself. Astronomers look in wonder at the stars. Physicists feel small as they observe the reality of how light and matter interact with an intelligence that defies human comprehension. They encounter this force or fabric that weaves the universe together and holds it as a mother cradles a child to her chest. It is love that gives the stars, matter and the soul reason for existence.
And that, my fellow sojourners, is love!
I’m Michael W. Regier, Ph.D. I provide Emotionally Focused and Psychospiritual therapy. For 30+ years I’ve helped individuals and couples learn how to love self, others and the divine within each of us. Along with my wife Paula, I’ve co-authored Emotional Connection: The Story & Science of Preventing Conflict & Creating Lifetime Love.
