Love is a choice, not just a feeling.  Sometimes it is an easy choice and sometimes it is difficult, but it is always the right choice.  Whether it is romantic love, friendship or family love, how you treat yourself when you are less than your own ideal or how you respond to a frustrating or fearful situation; love is not just an emotional experience, it is a choice to stand in your truth and your power.

Mature love is unconditional love and it is an ideal we are discovering more and more as we collectively ascend into greater harmony with our true spiritual root in the Oneness of Life.  I could write all day about ascension and do in my soon to be released book Riding the Wave of Change – Hope, Healing and Spiritual Growth for our World.  So today, I will continue writing about love.

Within you is a core of unconditional love which is your personal facet of The All That Is, or God.  When you choose to respond to circumstances with love, even when the situation does the opposite of evoking a warm feeling within you, you are accessing your inner truth and strengthening it.  But you also need to embrace your less than loving feelings.  Stuffing negative feelings and acting nice is a recipe for self-destruction.  It causes your immune system to fight with you, rather than for you and can open the door to potentials for anxiety, depression, heart disease, candida overgrowth, cancer and other diseases.  Love others, but be equally loving of yourself.  Life is calling us to choose love across the board.

How do you act from love when you are not feeling love, without stuffing your feelings?  You access the love at your true core. Your inner love can join with the love which is an eternal presence within every aspect of life, regardless of how unloving life can appear.  Unconditional love doesn’t require cozy feelings; it is a way of respecting all of life, including yourself.  It allows for anger and hatred, doesn’t repress them, but requires you to take a moment to choose whether to act with love or not.  Taking time to make this choice before you act, allows you to open to the core of love within you.  You can allow love from your core to flow through and around the negative feelings, so you can express kindness and caring despite them.  In the process love softens the negative feelings so they can dissipate.  It will also allow you to apologize when you express in hurtful ways and to make a new choice.  

One potential effect that can be caused by stuffing your feelings is an overgrowth of candida.  Often called yeast, it not only creates bladder and vaginal infections, but can spread throughout a person’s body creating a myriad of confusing and debilitating physical symptoms.  Yeast and other toxic bacteria in our bodies also create toxins that stimulate negative, destructive feelings and behaviors.  Candida is part of the system for breaking down our bodies when we die.  It can get out of control when on some levels we strongly dislike our lives and would rather not be here.  Taking antibiotics can also create an overgrowth issue which in turn can create depression and a loss of pleasure in life.  You can improve your state of mind by improving your diet, diminishing your intake of sweets and simple carbohydrates and taking a good probiotic to replace the negative bacteria with beneficial bacteria in your digestive tract.  Pleasurable exercise is also important because it creates endorphins that lift your mood and stimulate your immunity.  You can improve your physical health and diminish candida and other immune diseases by choosing to actively love yourself and your life instead of stuffing your negative feelings with sweets and refined carbohydrates.  This may require some difficult choices and intensive personal empowerment, such as making yourself a priority and seeking out the core of truth and love within you.  

Unconditional love forgives you for having feelings of fear, hatred, anger, blame, judgment, impatience, frustration and even for acting on them.  It allows you to choose again; to heal and forgive yourself and the situations which are difficult for you.  It invites you to trust life in each present situation and moment; because trust is the beginning of unconditional love.  Life has a purpose for you in each circumstance, trust that.  When you do, unconditional love within you will carry you through difficulties to an experience of grace, where the most difficult things can work out optimally.

Unconditional love supports you to be very strong where needed; to say no, to disagree, to stand up to a situation where it feels necessary and true to do so.  It also allows you to back down and choose to walk away where you feel that it isn’t really your job to respond or try to correct the problems.  There is an intelligence in your inner core of truth which helps you to choose how to respond for the highest good.  Learn to listen to it and to trust yourself.  It won’t lead you wrong.

Mature, unconditional love is the most powerful force on the planet.  It is the essence of truth of God.   When we join the true core of love within us with the love of God within our circumstances it creates order and heals our lives.  When many of us choose love it heals our world.