Valentines day can feel really money orientated and geared towards an ideal of romantic love, that is rarely very real. Many of us wont have someone to ‘do’ Valentines with and for those who do, it is often not a meaningful mirror of love, as it does or doesn’t show up in our real life relationships.
The pressure on people to be in relationships and for those in them, to be feeling and behaving in perhaps, not so meaningful ways, on this one day per year, can feel huge.
I feel like it can be really useful to release some of this pressure if we are able, to put down unhelpful and idealised concepts of relationship and of love.
This isn’t always easy, but one way we can start is just by asking ourselves what we feel love is? What it feels like to love, a person, animal or even a place in nature?
Try to really get into the detail, you could ask, how does my body feel? What sorts of thoughts, ideas and expectations are around when I feel love? Does this connect up with my intellectual ideas of what love is?
Sometimes exploring experiences of loving, of what being loving means to us, can help us to take our focus away from ideals of romantic love and allow a little movement towards more connecting experiences of love.
I really like the intention setting of the Buddhist metta bhavana ~ love cultivation meditation. Where simple phrases are repeated to bring our minds to focus on what we hope to grow in ourselves. I also really like staying regulated and grounded, so I decided to mix two practices and create a short somatic self love meditation which you can find linked below.
I love the idea in metta bhavana that we need to first know what love is, then to cultivate this feeling towards ourselves, allowing us to better share our love with others.
For me, offering our love and compassion to ourselves and to others is always best done in ways we can actually sustain, that feel true, real, meaningful and without a demand for others to do it back.
Just some ideas to ponder maybe:)
Listen to Somatic self love meditation on Soundcloud, here.
Stay regulated!!