In seeking to address your question about what love means, I would like to suggest that love is a state of being more than an emotion. I believe that what love means is being in total connection with the fullness of who we are as divine source energy in human bodies. What love means in the deepest sense is being so in tune with our inner perfection that we are only able to see what is good and right in ourselves and others and this includes all the ‘imperfections’ that we often perceive. While it is highly unlikely that we will continuously attain and maintain this perfect state of connection at all times, most of us have had at least glimpses of the blissful way it feels, not just to be in love, or to feel love, or to be loved, but to allow ourselves to be that which we truly are – pure positive energy aka LOVE. The opposite of love is not hate, it is disconnection.

As well as asking what love means, you ask about expressing love. Rather than trying to produce feelings of love towards others or ourselves, we can encourage the experience of love by focusing on the things that help us to align with our own inner beings. One of the best ways of doing this is to look for things to appreciate. Appreciation is a state of being that is very close to love, and feeling appreciation is something that we can do deliberately, thereby allowing ourselves to align with the love that is the essence of who we are.

Another way of becoming more and more in tune with this pure loving energy within us is to work at finding ways of thinking and feeling that allow us to align with the perspective that our inner beings hold of us and others. When we think negative thoughts and feel negative emotion, we are creating internal conflict, as the larger non-physical part of us does not join us in our negativity. This results in the feelings of inner turmoil that we often describe as hate, anger, or even depression. By practicing retraining our thoughts through the use of affirmations or other techniques, we can experience the feeling of being at one with ourselves and the universe more and more often, and this oneness is truly what love means.

As far as showing love to those around us, I do not believe we need to try too hard. When we are trying to express love, our actions are often coming from a place of not really feeling it. When we focus first on allowing ourselves to become, or rather realign, with the love that we are, our own experience of that love will naturally flow from us to all around.

In seeking to understand what love means, you ask about other words that mean love. The kind of love that I am talking about comes closest to words such as oneness, alignment, completeness, appreciation, belonging, rightness, openness, fullness. In experiencing love in this deepest form, it becomes a natural progression to also experience all the variations of human love and the feelings that go with these, such as romantic love and passion, friendship, and familial love.

Many people look for love in all the wrong places; the place that true love must begin is in the relationship between you as a physical being, and the eternal part of who you are that is pure love. What love means on a core level is allowing yourself to be who you really are. Anything else is trying to build a house without foundations, so get strong foundations in place, and there is no limit to the beautiful architecture of loving relationships that you can create in your life.

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