I recently attended a Soul Motion dance therapy weekend where the theme was love. It was a wonderful weekend, not just as an emotional experience, but also as a learning experience. It was fascinating to listen to 60 individuals offer a one-word explanation of love. Everything from trust, truth, light, support, calm, smiles, acceptance, me and now. Everyone had their own interpretation of love and every explanation was absolutely true for that person. From this experience, it was clear to see that there is no such thing as a fixed definition of love and that love is what you yourself have experienced it to be and feel it to be.

What I also realised was that I was the only person present whose understanding of love was from the experience of a healer, a massage therapist, a person in service. It is quite a different experience of love when the love you have in your heart during a massage treatment is not for you but for someone else; a love that is designed to pass through you without it making you feel emotionally good about yourself. A love that sometimes lasts for only a few minutes.

One of the things I love about love is that it doesn’t judge.

When I am giving someone a massage and the energy of love passes through me into the body of the person I am working with, the consciousness of that love is simply to love that person regardless of who they are or what they have done. Most people who come to me for massage are ordinary people, like you and me, who have become a little bit weighed down by the stresses and challenges of life. Some have been unloved or abused, some feel lost or unsupported, while others are disappointed, afraid or angry. In pain, some hate the people who hurt them. Yet when love comes to these people, love doesn’t judge that hatred. Nor does love judge the people who caused these people their hurt. Hate is not judged. Instead it is deeply understood. It is forgiven. It is loved. It is treated in the same way a loving mother tends her young unwell child. Unquestioningly. In the moment when love comes to heal, it is ok to hate. In the moment of healing, love doesn’t say ‚stop hating’, love simply says ‚i love you’. It is a subtle but enormous difference and it is a sublimely joyful moment.

Nor does it mean that the massage client is freed of hatred once they have been touched by love. They are still free to hate. And when love comes to touch that person again in a future massage, it still doesn’t judge. It doesn’t say ‚why didn’t you stop hating after the last massage’, it still just says ‚i love you’, as if the previous massage and the resulting behaviour of the client following that massage don’t matter. They don’t. Love will still love you even if you don’t believe in it and you continue to hate. That’s unconditionality.

If you are someone who hates or has been hated, in the end it won’t matter. In the end you won’t be judged. In the end, when you find love, that’s all there will be: love. No judgement. No punishment. No sending you to hell. It’s only while you haven’t found love that you attach importance to the concepts of guilt, judgement, retribution and punishment. And don’t worry if you haven’t yet found love along your path. At the end of your journey you will. Love will come to meet you and when it comes to shake your hand and smile into your face, it won’t judge you. The unbounded release you feel will make you burst into tears.