What is Love?

I have just visited a blog and the question asked was "What is Love?" I answered the question, which I will summarise here: Love is an emotion as well as an action and we have the choice whether or not to be open to give and receive love. How much we are able to do this will impact on how much we enjoy our life. It made me wonder if anyone else gives this question much thought, so I rushed over to jot down some thoughts.

I have spent many years experiencing and researching love in all its many guises, and now have set up a company that delivers workshops to help people to learn about love and relationship skills. I believe that love is something that can't be measured and many don't understand.

The evolution of the human being has gone from being incredibly inhumane to a society that is incredibly outraged when hearing injustices against children, and rightly so. This transformation is succinctly documented in Robin Grille's book "Parenting for a Peaceful World" The beginning chapters I found rather gruesome, however, I felt compelled to continue reading and glad that I did. Grille uncovers a world that has been changing over time towards an increasingly conscientious approach to child rearing which is becoming more nurturing. There are more "positive parenting" programmes available now than there have ever been, more and more parents are signing up to these programmes and I am glad to be involved in this development.

As a parent myself, I have spent a great deal of time trawling book shops and having conversations with friends to find out the best parenting practices, I felt I wanted to be the best parent I could and yet I felt I didn't have a clue as to how to go about it. The information wasn't readily available as the magazines I could purchase were mostly focused on the early years, and once your child had reached a certain age, the information was no longer forthcoming.

I decided I would throw myself into studying about child development and child psycholgy so I decided to become a nursery nurse. The two year training gave me various insights into the brain, physical, emotional and mental development of young children. This whetted my appetite to learn more. I spent the next few years volunteering in my son's primary school to experience working with young children who needed social skills support and to be given the opportunity to learn how to share and communicate, skills which are still unfortunately lacking in many, although I have great faith in humankind and am sure this is on the upturn!

I spent several years working with children with additional needs and learnt a great deal about children whilst also learning a great deal about myself. Those young people provided me with many opportunities to reflect and grow. I then decided to study Education at university as I really wanted to develop my knowledge and understanding of how the education system had developed since its introduction.

I have been involved in Education for many years now and am beginning to hear and see patterns emergin. There is a great deal of discussion about how schools impact on young people and I wonder often are they the best environments for the nurturing of young peoples' emotional development?

So getting back to my original question, which was taken from the blog I visited at www.partnersinloveandcrime.com/blog What is Love? If this was a subject that was taken seriously enough, valued and honoured enough to be given space at school to discuss and reflect, perhaps I wouldn't need to be asking this question now! I would dearly love to hear your comments about this particular blog.