Love Begins With Awareness

Author: Bianca Moeschinger

January 2026

Love is difficult to define.

It is not one tangible feeling, nor does it live in a single emotional register.
It feels different to everyone — and even within one life, it takes many forms.

What feels certain is this:
love is felt deeply in the heart.

We often recognise love most clearly in its disruption —
in grief and loss,
in betrayal,
in that unmistakable pull when someone or something begins to move away.

In these moments, love becomes undeniable.
It announces itself through the body before the mind can make sense of it.

Yet when love is growing — bonding quietly over time — it is not always as apparent.
In fact, we often take it for granted.
It becomes woven into the fabric of daily life, easily overlooked, and sometimes confused with need, dependency, or attachment.

Are We Born Knowing Love, or Do We Learn It?

Gillian and I have often found ourselves in conversation about this question:
Are we born understanding what love is — or is love something cultivated, something learned?

Perhaps it is both.

From a psychosomatic perspective, love is not just an idea or emotion.
It is a lived experience — shaped through the body, the nervous system, and our relational history.

Before we have language, the heart and body are already learning.
Learning what feels safe.
What feels available.
What feels consistent — or not.

Love, then, is not only something we feel —
it is something we embody.

The Many Faces of Love

For me, love feels like an extension of life itself —
a current that moves through me and animates me.

With my children, love is fierce and unconditional.
It is instinctual, protective, and immediate.
There is no negotiation in it.

With my partner, love has a different texture.
It is a deep bond — one that continues to grow as we grow.
A love shaped by forgiveness, compassion, space, care, and boundaries.

This kind of love matures.
It evolves.
It asks something of us.

It is not sustained by intensity alone —
but by awareness.

Relationships as Mirrors

Relationships reflect the way we treat ourselves.

Not because they are meant to expose us —
but because they reveal how we have learned to relate internally.

How we breathe when we feel close.
How we tighten when we feel misunderstood.
How the heart opens — or protects — based on what it has known before.

In psychosomatic therapy, we understand that we do not bring only our thoughts into relationship.
We bring our breath.
Our posture.
Our emotional memory.
Our heart’s defences and longings.

The body often speaks before words are formed.

The Heart as an Emotional and Energetic Centre

The heart is more than an organ.
It is a centre of perception, emotional intelligence, and energetic communication.

It senses safety and threat, connection and rupture, long before the mind understands what is happening.

When the heart feels unsupported or unheard internally, it often closes externally.
When it is met with presence and compassion, it naturally softens.

This is why love does not begin in the relationship.
It begins in awareness.

Healing Begins Within

Psychosomatic therapy does not aim to fix relationships.
It supports us to listen beneath them.

As we bring awareness to the heart, the breath, and the nervous system, patterns begin to soften.
Reactivity eases.
Presence increases.

We stop asking, What is wrong with me or them?
And begin asking, What is being remembered here?

From this place, love becomes less about effort —
and more about embodiment.

Boundaries become clearer without hardening.
Connection becomes safer.
Relationships deepen — not because they are forced to change, but because we do.

Love, then, is not something to define once and for all.
It is something to meet again and again —
with awareness, compassion, and the willingness to stay present as it grows, changes, and asks us to grow too.

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