You Can’t Love Fully Until You Stop Abandoning Your Body

When Trying to Love Keeps You From It

We talk endlessly about love—how to give it, how to receive it, how to prove it.
But what if love isn’t a feeling to cultivate or something we need to show?
What if love is simply the capacity to be fully present—to ourselves, to another, to what’s real right now?

Many of us think we are present. I did too—until I realized how much I wasn’t. But here’s the truth: If we carry knots in our bodies—pockets of frozen fear holding the emotions we buried in childhood—we can’t truly be present, no matter how mindful or self-aware we appear.
Until we feel and release those contractions, our presence is partial. And when our presence is partial, we cannot fully connect with others either.

When Awareness Becomes Another Escape

Through years of practicing Emotional Repression Inquiry, my capacity for presence has deepened in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Presence isn’t just awareness of what arises in consciousness—it’s the ability to access and express what was buried.

Learning to sit with parts of myself that felt hopeless, lonely, or disconnected was only the first step on my journey. The deepest and most lasting shifts came when I learned to be present with the parts that never arise in awareness at all.

The only direct way I know to access these unseen, unfelt parts of ourselves is through skillfully executed emotional repression inquiry.

The result? Love. Freedom. Just being.

The Body Remembers What the Mind Denies

Those contractions in the body aren’t random—they are frozen fragments from childhood.

We carry so many ideas about love, yet ultimately, love is this:
being present with all of you, even the parts you once had to bury.

Repressed emotions don’t feel like emotions—they show up as tension, triggers, overwhelm, and pain.

When we grew up in environments with varying levels of unconsciousness, our nervous system learned to protect us by pulling away—isolating, numbing, distrusting, doubting.
It’s not a flaw; it’s how our body kept us safe.

But the same strategy that once protected us now makes it hard to feel connected, nourished, or fully alive.

You Can’t Love a Projection

“Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection, that you can truly love them. Otherwise, it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person…”
— Anthony De Mello, The Way to Love

This is the heart of emotional repression work: seeing what’s actually here, including what we buried and not what our defenses, fears, or projections allow us to see.

When Your Body Says No

To explore more deeply how to listen to your body’s no, sign up for my newsletter and receive your free copy of “The Body’s No.”

You’ll discover what your body’s ‘no’ is really protecting—and how following it can lead you back to freedom and connection.

Real Love Begins Where You Stop Running From Yourself

Your body holds the map.

Love isn’t something to chase—it’s what naturally arises when you stop abandoning your body, skillfully unravel emotional repression, and dare to feel what’s real.