I feel like I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends and family about love lately. I also see articles about love all the time. I get emails about how to find your soul mate, webinars on how to spice up your love life, tweets on foods that will amp up your sex drive, and so on.

Every cartoon fairy tale is based on a love story. Kids start out with that. Then they reach teen years and start watching chic flicks about love dramas in the halls of high school. We all get wrapped up in TV shows with love stories that seemingly never end, until the show ends. Every movie incorporates some sort of love story; otherwise it just seems dull.

 

I’ve always been the odd one, because the love story between a girl and boy is never the story that pulls on my heart strings. It’s always the friendship stories. In Friends, the partnership most likely to make me cry is Joey and Chandler. In LOST, my heart belonged to the friendship between Hurley and Charlie. In the movie Pearl Harbor, I actually hoped that Kate Beckinsale would die so Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett could be friends forever!

When my friends and health coaching clients talk to me about love, it’s always about how they want to find love, or they want to feel move loved by their partner. They are obsessed with love. They want more of it. That’s pretty much the gist of every conversation based on the topic of love.

I want to switch the gears in your mind right now and help you see love in a different way. The world is so obsessed with love, yet most people’s classification of love is so limited.

Love is everything. Love is everywhere. Love is what makes us human. To reach spiritual enlightenment is to feel unconditional love for everyone and everything around you, and yourself. You either live in love or you live in fear. There is nothing else. Everything stems from love or fear.

The fourth chakra in the body is the heart chakra, and this is based on unconditional and eternal love. But it isn’t the love of a partner that so many of us obsess over. It’s love, period. It’s unconditional love of oneself, of plants and trees and blades of grass, of our friends and our family, our job, our home, our water supply, our food, farmers who grow our food, strangers we meet on the streets and in the grocery store, the dirt on the bottom of our feet. It’s loving everything.

If you find yourself wanting to feel more loved, go out with your friends! Be there for your friends when they need you. Wrap your friends up in your arms and tell them how much they mean to you.

Spend time with your family. Go through old photo albums, talk through old grudges, take a vacation or a daycation together. Reminisce and laugh until you cry. Hug for no less than 20 seconds.

Volunteer. Help the homeless and hungry in the streets. Donate the overabundance of clothes in your closet to those who need it more. Cuddle, pet and walk the dogs at a shelter. Love the people you don’t even know by supporting them and helping them in any way you can. If nothing else, smile at people.

Love yourself. Spend time alone until you are comfortable with it. Wrap your arms around yourself and give your body a giant hug and thank it for housing you every day and giving you the breath that keeps you alive, the ears to hear, the eyes to see, the hands to feel, the nose to smell, and the heart to love.

Stop obsessing over this idea of romantic love that consumes so many of us, and open yourself up to loving everyone and everything in the world we live in. I guarantee you that the more love you give, the more love you’ll receive.

And yes, by doing so, you will probably attract a healthier romantic relationship into your life too, or improve the one you have. But don’t limit yourself to that. Love can be so much more.