You may or may not have heard of Vitamin L. But it has some incredible benefits. Studies have shown that it can improve your immune system, increase longevity, reduce stress, enhance feelings of peace and joy. Pretty amazing, right? So, what is Vitamin L?

It is Love. And, if Love is capable of producing all these amazing benefits, how about experiencing more of it? I have yet to meet a person who doesn’t want to experience more Love. Let’s be honest, Vitamin L is probably the only daily vitamin for which there is no limit to the amount recommended.

So, what if you were able to learn how to tap into an endless supply of this wondrous resource? If that idea interests you, then keep reading…

What is Vitamin L and What is it NOT?

You’ve just learned that Vitamin L is love. Well, in this article, I want to dig into two common misconceptions about what Love is and how you can experience more of it.

The first misconception about Vitamin L

Many people think that Love is an emotion. It is not. It is actually a state of being. Emotions are something quite different. They are actually Energy in Motion. And no, that is not me trying to be clever with my words. Emotions are designed to act as signals from the body to guide the mind to act in ways that keep you safe. Anger is a signal that your boundaries are being attacked and need defending. Grief is a signal to allow the process of letting go. Shame is a signal that your behaviour is not serving you.

All of these different emotions are present within your body’s Energy field (the invisible field that both surrounds and permeates your physical body). They are present all the time, in a constant flow – Energy in motion. You only become aware of each one when it steps forward to deliver its message. In other words, the “volume” of that emotion temporarily increases to prompt you to take action. Once you have taken the appropriate action, it subsides back to its normal flow.

The problem arises when you don’t understand what action to take. If that leaves you constantly experiencing an emotion that feels unpleasant, you will likely look for a way to disconnect from that. You might distract (find a behaviour to mask the feeling) or numb out (stop feeling it). But that doesn’t make it go away. Instead, it sits, out of balance, in your field and will be constantly triggered by smaller and smaller things in an effort to try and prompt you to remedy whatever issue caused the emotion to make itself felt.

As I said, love is a state of being. It is not an emotion that comes and goes. More on that in a moment…

The second misconception about Vitamin L

The second big problem comes from believing that Love comes from outside yourself. In actual fact, this state of being that is Love is always available for you to experience.

So, what gets in the way of that? Ironically, it’s your stuck emotions. You see, those emotions can have a tendency to rear their heads at the most inconvenient time, and sometimes prompt you to perform actions of which you aren’t particularly proud. That, in turn, leads you to tell yourself stories about yourself. For example, “I’m a bad person for getting angry”. Which, in turn, leads to more unpleasant emotions – shame at “being a bad person”. Some of this may come from inside yourself and some of it may come from outside you. For example, another person criticising you for getting angry. And these behaviours and their results may also reinforce your original beliefs about yourself.

Before you know it, your personal Energy field is awash with challenging feelings. If you allow yourself to be aware of that, how can you love that, you begin to ask yourself?

Perhaps you then reason that maybe you’re not seeing yourself correctly, and begin using your relationships with other people as a barometer of how loveable you are. As someone recently said to me, “I can’t love myself until other people love me.” In other words, you don’t feel loveable, so you would like someone else to give you permission to love yourself.

The problem with this is two-fold. First, it gives your power away. You become reliant on others for a state of being that you can actually generate for yourself. Second, even if other people do express love for you, it will fall on deaf ears (yours) until you have some inner belief in your loveability. What is the solution?

How to begin experiencing more Vitamin L

To understand the solution, I want to give you an analogy. So, I’m going to share a personal story with you.

A little story

When I was growing up in the UK, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to travel a lot. My dad’s job meant that he was constantly travelling back and forth between the UK and the USA. He accumulated a LOT of air miles doing that. And once a year, as a family, we would use those air miles to take an amazing road trip around a part of the USA. We got to enjoy many of the National Parks and see a huge amount of the country on these trips.

Typically, we would be travelling in late July and August. If you know anything about the weather in the UK at that time of year, you may know that it’s often wet and dreary (or it was, back in the 1980s when I was growing up). By contrast, in my memory, those epic road trips always seemed to be blessed with sunshine and warmth for us in the USA.

So, I have fond memories of flying back into London Heathrow Airport. In my memory, as we were at cruising altitude, we were enjoying views of clear blue sky and wall-to-wall sunshine from every plane window. Invariably, the pilot would announce that we were commencing our descent into London Heathrow, where the weather was cloudy, drizzly and about sixteen degrees Celsius. Sure enough, the plane would descend through thick cloud and we would find ourselves back on English soil with nothing but grey skies and cool conditions. Not terribly appealing.

I remember looking up to the clouds and musing that the blue sky and sun was up there somewhere. I knew that because I had just been enjoying it. But everyone around me, who hadn’t been up in a plane must be thinking the sun had disappeared.

What has that got to do with Vitamin L?

At the beginning, I told you that Love is a state of being. I then went on to say that it is a state of being to which you have constant access through the medium of self-love. And we considered that your awareness of all your flaws, can make it difficult to access that state of being.

Well, here’s the thing. The blue skies and sunshine represent the state of being of Love. The clouds represent the beliefs and emotions that lead you to believe you are unloveable. And, when those clouds become very thick and heavy, it is tempting to believe that the sun no longer exists. In truth, it is still there, just obscured by the cloud.

What happens on a day that begins cloudy and ends up sunny? The sun has burned through the thick cloud cover, making the clouds disappear.

How does that relate to self-love? If you can begin to bring yourself into a space where you can safely witness and process your heavy, stuck emotions, those dark emotions will also disappear, like clouds. It sounds very simple – it is very simple – apart from one teeny, tiny problem. As soon as you begin to really feel the massive quantity of anger or fear sitting in your Energy field, you feel deeply uncomfortable.

It only takes ninety seconds!

Dr Joan I. Rosenberg wrote a book, entitled, Ninety Seconds to a Life You Love. In there, she shared her research into how we experience emotions. Astonishingly, any given emotion will only last for around ninety seconds, if we allow ourselves to feel it. The trouble is, we don’t allow ourselves to feel many emotions. So, they get stuck, out of balance in our Energy field.

If you could trust that your unpleasant emotion will disappear in ninety seconds, you might be able to tolerate that. And, if you could allow that Energy to complete its flow of motion, you could spend more time being Love. But what if that isn’t possible for you?

The unexpected links between Vitamin L and your nervous system

Over the last two blog posts, we’ve been looking at how your nervous system is set up. It is designed to constantly monitor your environment and warn your cells when you stumble into danger. The environment it monitors is both external and internal. So, when your internal environment becomes flooded with an unpleasant emotion, like shame, say, that can feel every bit as threatening as someone holding a gun to your head.

This will trigger your nervous system to sound the danger signal and that creates a rush of biological impulses designed to respond to danger. As we covered in this post, that can escalate into a form of shutdown or Freeze response.

In that state, you are going to struggle to experience your field of Love because you simply shut down to everything. Long term, this can also have biological implications that lead to chronic disease. So, when I began by telling you that Vitamin L is capable of strengthening your immune system, increasing longevity, and so on, it was no word of a lie.

A tool to support you

Given how important all of that is, how do you manage to create the sense of safety that even allows you to access the state of Love to experience and burn through the trapped emotions? That is the million-dollar question that multiple therapies seek to address. So, I’m going to give you some home-play now. Follow this link to my Yoga Therapist’s video on a breathing technique for calming your system. Learn that technique, and begin using it whenever you feel yourself losing your sense of calm.

If you feel that you are never in a state of calm, then set aside a few five-minute slots every day, at the beginning, end and in the middle of the day. Find a quite spot, set a timer for five minutes and practice this breathing technique.

There is more to come on this important topic of Vitamin L. So, if you don’t want to miss it, please make sure you join my mailing list and I’ll drop the next blog post into your inbox when it’s ready.