This is my favorite line from the movie Forrest Gump. Love really doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence, at least not in the way we are conditioned to think of intelligence. Love is an experience. Love must be experienced to be known. We all, to a certain degree, have experienced love, without it, we would not be alive. However, the degree to which we can give the experience of love to another, is the degree to which we have received love for ourselves. Love cannot be intellectually learned, for that matter, none of the emotions that keep us mentally and physically healthy can be learned through our reasoning brain. Could this be the reason that such a simple and pure concept, as love, is SO very complicated and the source of SO much struggle? If it were as easy as teaching someone what love is, then we would likely all want a Phd in love and we would want it to be from a prestigious institution. Even the Dali Lama and the great sages couldn’t really impart upon their followers the ability to love. Their teachings may have been experienced by their followers as love, and therefore granted them the ability to know more love, but love can not be taught in the traditional way we teach a subject. Love is not something that can be taught and therefore is not something you can intellectually learn or even explain to anyone else in an effort to school them in love. One does not become capable of love through the act of reading about love. Love must be received in order to be known and it cannot be given if it hasn’t been both received and experienced.
In somatic therapy, we can go back and re-write the moments in our lives where love was not given and we can experience that love in spite of the limitations of our caregivers, friends and lovers. The body only needs to use the mind’s ability to imagine in order for us to experience, feel and know what love is. Please don’t confuse ‘pretending’ with the powerful somatic healing brought about by ‘imagining’. When we are pretending we are outside ourselves watching ourselves in a scene. When we are imagining, we are immersed in a way that our minds are one with the scene. We are only in the scene, not in the scene and observing it too. When we are imagining, our bodies are experiencing whatever we are imagining, as if it were real.
Once our bodies know love, we can have the courage to provide to others the 3 aspects of love: courage, strength and softness. It’s the only emotion that requires equal parts strength and softness, and the knowledge of when to use which one. Love has dimensions and layers, and the capacity for understanding goes far beyond the capabilities of our rational, knowing brain. Like all of our pure emotions, our rational brain has very little to do with it. Emotions are pure energy connected to the source of creation. When we connect to pure emotion, we are able to connect to our own self, to others, and to the source of life itself.
This Emotional Life 
Perfect explanation of a simple, but not easy, way to live our best lives.
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