What is love?
The return from fear to expansion
1. The Real Polarity: Not Courage vs Fear, but Love vs Fear
Sometimes life feels like a constant dance between contraction and expansion. And if you look closely enough, contraction always smells like fear, while expansion feels like love.
We often confuse courage with the opposite of fear. But courage is only the bridge. The leap of faith that moves us from contraction into expansion. The real opposite of fear is love. Not love as sentimentality, but love as movement, as energy, as the quiet force that connects everything living and dying.
Love is something divinely human and humanly divine. It is not just an emotion. It is a compass. A way of relating to the world inside you and the world around you. Everything in existence mirrors this rhythm. The Big Bang. The breath. The pulse of the universe. The way a sunflower turns toward the sun simply so it can bloom. Even death belongs to this movement. The body returning to earth. The soul returning to source.
Love moves the world while fear moves everything that feels like its absence.
2. Love as Connection: The Architecture of Life
Have you ever seen a flock of birds migrating together toward the same horizon? And if so, how did that experience feel in your body?
That moment of recognition in another’s soul. A friend who feels like family. Someone who sees you through. That vulnerable, warm instant when you know the other knows you and accepts you exactly as you are. Doesn’t something expand inside you then? Love is the way a tree grows toward the light without questioning whether it deserves to exist.
Love can also be the disintegration of form. The gentle collapse of what we were, so something truer can emerge, therefore love is transformation as well.
There is a golden thread running through everything alive. Some call it God. Others consciousness. Others intuition. For me, it has always been a voice in my chest. A quiet, persistent, eternal light I tried to silence so many times just to fit in. But now that I finally allow it, it grows louder. Clearer. More certain, even when I doubt it. Because I do. After all, I am human.
That voice is love being expressed through me. It is how I connect to life itself. And I am no longer afraid to show it. So what if I cry while watching the sky, or while seeing leaves fall from trees? So what if I smile when I see children, elders, authentic people, humans feeling instead of performing?
All of these experiences mirror my inner world projected outward. Through them, I allow myself to feel fully, to be swept along by life. And through that openness, connection happens. Even when contraction appears, the instinct is no longer to close, but to expand. To meet each other there.
That, too, is love.
3. Presence Is the Shape Love Takes in the Body
In my previous article on authenticity and presence, something remained unsaid because it belongs here.
Presence is love.
And love is the most honest form of presence. When you stop betraying yourself and return to your inner rhythm, what arises is not discipline or alignment. It is love. Not the romantic love of old films. Not tragic, Shakespearean love. And not the trendy, spiritualized love used to bypass discomfort. But love as the state that appears when you finally stop abandoning yourself. Acceptance. Compassion. And at the same time, grit. Movement. Purpose. The moment you choose truth over performance. When you allow your emotional depth instead of fearing it. And your body, after years of unsafety, whispers quietly: this is safe.
Presence is the way love lives inside your body.
4. Manifestation Beyond the Ego: When You Stop Trying to Become
When love becomes an inner orientation rather than a concept, the way we create our lives inevitably changes.
Manifestation has quietly become another fear-based industry. And yes, I bought into it too, at some point. The problem once again is not the intention, but the rigid rules. The idea that there is one formula that should work for everyone, despite the fact that no two humans are the same. Mainstream manifestation has turned into scripts, routines, steps designed to make you become someone else. A better you, a more you. But don’t you see it already? You were designed this way for a reason. Why are you trying so hard to be someone else?
Here is what I’ve learned: when you stop trying to become, manifestation stops being a task. It becomes a side effect. You don’t manifest from effort. You manifest from coherence. From living in the frequency of who you already are beneath everything you were told to be. When the need to impress, perform, or prove dissolves, life begins to flow toward you. Not because you did something right, but because you stopped resisting your own essence. Creation is not something you do. It is what moves through you when you stop getting in the way.
Manifestation is not a technique. It is what happens when you return to the love you already are.
5. The Collapse of the Old World: Why Love Feels Like Rebellion
Living from love instead of fear inevitably puts you in friction with the structures built to contain you. From the outside, through the eyes of the old paradigm, my life probably looks like a mess.
I am a 34-year-old woman who has worked in education, hospitality, real estate, marketing, and customer service. I have lived in several countries. Loved deeply. Lost deeply. Healed generational wounds. Struggled with mental health. Descended into shadow and risen again. I currently live at my mother’s house, with a one-way ticket to East Asia in January and a newly born, soul-led business rooted in shadow work, human design, and embodiment. I paint. I write. I dance my truth. I feel everything everywhere all at once. I cut through illusions with precision and still choose my body as the compass for every important decision.
I also have lost myself many times trying to fit into society, family expectations, relationships, fake friendships, unfulfilling jobs, soulless interactions and scenarios. Until one moment, like lightning, I could finally see the endless spirals I was meant to learn from, not just suffer through.
Seen through the old paradigm, this might look chaotic. Messy. And don’t get me wrong, it might be at times. And so, the reflex reaction might be: “she needs help”. Or “another woman with trauma refusing to get on with life”. But remember, your first reaction says far more about your relationship with yourself than about me.
And the fact that I can express this thought, and you are reading it, is proof that the old paradigm is dying. Look around. The obsession with 9-to-5 identities. The addiction to control. The culture of masks. Productivity worship. Loneliness disguised as independence. Boxes, categories, standards. I don’t know about you but I can clearly see, in my mind’s eye, the little dwarfs from Snow White rushing into the woods, singing their way to work. The conditioning… None of this was born from love. It was born from fear.
6. Love as Self-Liberation
When you peel away the layers of conditioning and finally meet yourself as you are, something subtle but profound happens. You stop relating to yourself as a problem to fix or a project to optimize, and you begin to recognize yourself. That recognition changes everything. And that is when the real game begins. The game of life.
It’s not about self-obsession or self-improvement. It’s about seeing yourself clearly and staying. About allowing your own presence to be enough. From that place, life starts to respond differently. The more awareness you cultivate, the more you reconnect with an inner sense of love, with God, with source, with whatever name feels honest to you.
And life answers that alignment by bringing new energies into your field. New reflections. New mirrors. Not as salvation and not as fantasy, but as resonance. You might notice how doors that once felt heavy close quietly, and how something new appears almost immediately. Not randomly, but in direct relationship with the state you are inhabiting. Life meets you where you are.
And then the analytical mind interrupts, asking for proof. For studies. For certainty. But isn’t that just another attempt to grasp what was never meant to be fully understood? Your soul doesn’t judge that impulse. She waits patiently. Because life was never meant to be solved. It was meant to be felt. Suddenly, love becomes your natural language. Not because someone arrives to give it to you, but because you finally arrive to recognize it within yourself.
7. The Only Question That Matters
Everything you live, create, repeat, and sustain eventually traces back to the same place. You are always choosing between love and fear, between expansion and contraction, whether you are aware of it or not.
So the question is simple, even if the answer isn’t.
What are you choosing right now? And more importantly, who would you be if love stopped being the exception and became the inner law guiding your life?
With love always,
Maria Luisa.
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