The Healing Power of Love

What does love mean to you?

Love can often be an ambiguous and etherical human experience open to subjectivity and personal interpretation.

But I think we can all agree on one thing:

Love is essential to our overall well-being.

With love in our lives, studies have shown that we live longer, are happier, and live healthier with less disease.

More importantly – we FEEL better about ourselves and the world we live in.

And without love, our lives are less meaningful, often filled with more pain, sickness and emotional suffering.

The ACEs studies from the 90’s which looked at childhood adverse events like absent parents, addiction, mental and physical abuse, molestation, trauma, divorce; physically and emotionally damaging experiences; discovered that the more adverse events a person had in their youth, the more likely they are to have physical disease, depression, suicide, and early death.

If someone was shown to have 6 ACEs in their childhood, they lived 20 years less than people who didn’t.

20 years is a massive reduction in lifespan!

But before longevity of life is of value, quality of life must come first. Nobody I’ve ever interviewed wanted to live a long life, as long as they were going to be unhappy and unhealthy.

The good news in all of this is childhood adverse events, as well as adult adverse events, can be healed, health can improve, and we can improve our quality of life at any age.

How?

With love.

So what is love and how is it healing?

I define love like this; love is an expression of divine human experience in the form of feelings – these feelings are called emotions.

Emotions like compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, kindness, generosity, acceptance, appreciation, and joy.

Studies have shown that the more often we experience these emotions of love, the more our adverse events heal, our immune system is up-regulated, and our bodies heal from disease.

The beauty is, we don’t have to wait around for some external event to trigger these healing emotions.

We can control the expression of these emotions simply by practice.

There are many ways to practice:

1. Morning and evening gratitude – think about the things and people you are grateful for upon waking up, and again while going to sleep.
2. Meditation – learn to quiet your mind daily, be with yourself and your thoughts without judgment, and take back control of your inner dimensions to understand your own self more clearly and open up your higher potential.
3. Qigong – energy mindfulness practices like Qigong have not only shown to eliminate cancer cells in Petri dishes, but have shown to active the parasympathetic nervous system, release dopamine, and improve overall mental and physical wellbeing.
4. Forgiveness practices – think about the people who have wronged you, and send them thoughts of forgiveness and blessings. I’ve heard it best said that holing onto resentments is like wishing to poison someone else, but instead, you drink the poison yourself – that’s exactly what holding onto resentments does, it doesn’t harm them, it only harms yourself. We must learn to let resentments go, and the only way to do that is through deep, profound, freeing forgiveness.

There are many other practices I’ve discovered and personally love, but these 4 are some of my favorites that I do daily and are backed in science.

I had many ACEs growing up, my score is high, up in the 20 year life-span reduction area, but through daily meditation, hypnotherapy, personal introspection, Qigong, gratitude and forgiveness practices I’ve been able to heal and let go of many of these childhood adverse events.

And you can too!

Love is a practice, and if we want to live free, vibrant, healthy and joyful lives then we need to practice loving experiences daily.

It’s a process, and takes time, but it’s well worth it!

What are some of your favorite “love” based practices?

Wishing you health and happiness,

Nathan Crane

Award winning author, speaker, natural health research and holistic cancer coach.

https://nathancrane.com/