Accepting Love

One of the biggest lessons of my life was learning to stop fighting love.

I think many of us unknowingly build walls around our hearts when we are young. Not just because of romantic heartbreak, but because of life itself.

Friendships ending. Adults we trusted disappointing us. The death of loved ones. Loss in all its different forms. In my case, it even included the destruction of a forest where I spent much of my childhood, surrounded by trees I considered friends.

At some point, closing the heart feels like the safest option. If I do not love, I cannot get hurt.

At least that is what we tell ourselves.

Fear has a way of making us contract. Like a flower closing its petals during a storm and forgetting to open them again when the sun returns.

For a long time, I thought strength meant keeping my heart protected…

…life had other plans.

The love that eventually became one of my greatest teachers looked nothing like I expected it to look like. I spent a great deal of energy trying to outrun it, reason with it, deny it, fix it, move on from it, and explain it away.

I genuinely tried. Until I became exhausted.

What is difficult to admit is that the struggle was never really with another person.

The struggle was with my own heart. Because every time I fought what I felt, I was fighting myself. Every time I rejected my own emotions, I was rejecting a part of myself.

That does not mean we should chase people, force outcomes, or build our lives around another person.

It simply means we stop arguing with our own experience.

We allow ourselves to feel what is already there. Without shame. Without judgement. Without trying to make it disappear.

There is a difference between being attached to someone and accepting that you love them.

For a long time, I confused the two.

Acceptance is quiet. Attachment is restless. One seeks peace. The other seeks an outcome.

As I slowly let go of expectations, attachments, and the need for things to look a certain way, something unexpected happened.

The walls around my heart began to come down. Toward everyone. Friends. Family. Colleagues. Life itself.

The love I had spent so much energy resisting became the very thing that softened me back into my own life.

Looking back, I can see that when I was running from my feelings, I was also running from myself.

At the time, I did not understand that.

I thought I was emotionally aware because I could sit with difficult emotions. I thought I had become independent because I no longer needed someone else to regulate how I felt.

Yet there was still one thing I was refusing to acknowledge: My own heart. And it had been trying to get my attention for quite some time.

What finally brought freedom was not getting what I wanted. It was letting go of the idea that I needed anything to happen at all.

The love remained. The attachment did not. The expectations did not. The suffering gradually began to dissolve.

That was the surprising part. Freedom did not arrive because love disappeared. Freedom arrived because I stopped resisting it.

Because I stopped demanding that it become something.

It became simply what it was. A feeling. A truth within my own experience. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There is something deeply peaceful about that.

When we stop fighting what is inside us, we stop turning our own hearts into prisons.

The emotions themselves are rarely the problem. The resistance to them often is.

Whether it is love, grief, anger, sadness, or joy, there is a certain freedom that comes from allowing ourselves to feel what we feel without immediately trying to change it.

Life seems to teach this lesson over and over again, through experience.

The more we run from ourselves, the more life gently turns us back toward ourselves.

Eventually, we realise there is nowhere else to go.

I thought freedom meant becoming free from love. I thought it meant forgetting. Moving on. Feeling nothing.

Now I see it differently.

Freedom is not the absence of love. Freedom is the absence of suffering around love.

It is being able to let the feeling exist without needing to control it.

Without needing it to become a relationship. Without needing it to become a story. Without needing it to become anything at all.

Just love. Simple as that.

Funny enough, this lesson appears throughout David Hawkins’ book Letting Go, a book that crossed my path for years before I ever opened it.

By the time I finally received a copy, life had already taught me much of what was written inside.

The long way. Through trial and error. Through resistance and surrender. Through holding on and eventually letting go.

Perhaps some lessons can be learned from books. Others seem determined to become lived experience.

Either way, love remains one of life’s greatest teachers.

And sometimes it arrives in forms we never would have chosen for ourselves. Perhaps that is part of the gift.

Because the life waiting on the other side of surrender rarely looks like the one we originally imagined.