Choosing love over fear

If eyes saw souls before bodies and every being chose to live from a place of love and understanding, our world would certainly look and feel very different. 

It is often said that the more we act out of love, the more love grows and spreads in and around us. 

When we value love, we know that choosing to respond from love rather than react from fear matters tremendously: it is our chance not only to heal ourselves and bring more joy into our lives but also to break generational cycles of trauma and pain by pouring light onto the hearts of those who have for long been denied that love. 

But choosing to operate from love takes consciousness and enormous courage.

Living from love is not some romantic, wishy-washy ideal to aspire to when we are smitten. It is a practical choice, a moment-by-moment intentional decision to conquer fear with an open, compassionate heart even when it seems impossible to do so. 

It is a readiness to consistently face our monsters, to feel the sting and choose not to spread the hurt, to roll up our sleeves and do the inner work until we are able to turn our deepest hurt into an opportunity for healing and growth. 

Daring to choose love is a way of being in the world, a willingness to live wholeheartedly, to double down on love even when we have been wounded. 

It is an extraordinary possibility to pour kindness and forgiveness onto the world, consistently risking to expose ourselves emotionally by taking off the protective armor we lug around. 

It is the capacity to constantly show up and make ourselves be seen no matter how hard that may seem; the willingness to stand naked in our most authentic, vulnerable self, and the braveness to sow love into the way we live, parent, and lead.

Offering love to the world in the face of fear is the audacity to turn our words into deeds, to embody the values many proclaim and deem important but few decide to relentlessly act upon and put into everyday practice. 

To choose love is to let go of our obsession with power and control, to release our fixation with self-righteousness and surrender our beliefs, opinions, and positionality to let the amazing energy of the human heart tenderly triumph.