That Crazy Thing Called Love

Ask anyone what a February blog should focus on and there’s one clear, obvious, unavoidable answer… Groundhog Day!

Just kidding… With all due respect to the poor rodents whose peaceful hibernation we annually interrupt to prognosticate the demise of another dreary winter, February belongs to the celebration of love… and chocolate… (but then I always believe in celebrating chocolate).

Silliness aside, I do want to take this month’s blog to talk about love – but, if you’ll permit me, I’m going to take us on an academic-lite exploration of the importance of love:

The Quantum of Love

When we look at the world through a ‘quantum lens’ we start with the premise that everything is Energy. Everything around us exists as particles in motion, i.e. everything around us is vibrating. And our ability to recognize the rate (frequency) of that vibration allows us to identify what we’re perceiving. If we look at it from a well-being perspective, what we’re perceiving and taking in from our environment either brings us closer (in resonance) with our health goals or adds-negatively (drives us out of resonance) to them. Even emotions are vibrations. Positive emotions – those that energize us, uplift us, draw us in – are high vibration (think of the vibe {oooh, that’s another indication that we intuitively know this, look at how language already encodes what I’m talking about in the word ‘vibe’/vibration} of a great party or inspirational speech), while negative emotions – those that drain us, isolate and stymie us – are low vibration (think of walking into the heavy atmosphere of a just-occurred fight, or the visceral feeling of receiving/giving a ‘cold shoulder’). Our goal then is to look for/create opportunities to immerse ourselves in high-vibration – not only because it feels good, but because it eases our way towards being well. Love, followed closely by thankfulness and gratitude is the grand-daddy of high vibration emotions. It, if you will, is the universal-solvent of vibrations. It is the first medicine to apply to all wounds (which we also know intuitively – how many of us have given or received the magical ‘kiss it better’ for all sorts of ‘booboos’?), the biggest gift you can give friends/family/self, and a goal we should be focusing on each day if we strive towards health and abundance. Notice, appreciate, cultivate and share the vibration of love and watch what a powerful difference it can make.

The Hormones of Love

Love – both Valentines Day ‘partner’ love and family/friend/community love – releases a veritable alphabet soup of neurotransmitters and hormones in our bodies. Let’s look at just one of them: Oxytocin- known as the ‘bliss’ or ‘love’ hormone – is upregulated when we feel love or support. Health and well-being wise, it is associated with feelings of trust, optimism and even self-esteem; on a purely physiological level, it shows positive effects on digestive tract inflammation, auto-immune disorders and even systemic infections.

The Location of Love

Does love reside in the brain or in the heart? Is there any doubt that the answer isn’t either/or but both/and? I couldn’t resist using the dramatic subject of Love to reflect on the importance of monitoring both what we think and what we feel. And to accentuate the importance of balance those two things. Today’s society places so much importance on logic, analytical evaluation, and cold-hard-facts that we’re devaluing the input we naturally receive from our ‘gut’ and our heart. This unbalanced utilization of our nature-given resources was once explained by one of my teachers, Dr. Sue Morter, as showing up to the ‘party of life’, crossing the threshold only from the neck up, and leaving the rest of your body in the car. Could you fully enjoy and absorb the experience without bringing your full self ‘to the party’? It seems not!  Our gut and our logic, our heart and our mind are meant to integrate in order to give us a full sense of our world and all the experiences in it. Just like it’s important to make sure there are no barriers from brain to nerves to cells when we’re seeking to optimize communication of all body functions (the root goal of all chiropractic treatment), it’s important to likewise ensure that we’re receiving messages from gut instinct, heart feeling and brain logic as we coordinate our interaction with our environment.