A Forgiving Grandmother Chapter 2 - What is Love?

Chapter 2 – What Is Love?

Written on: 2 November 2025 final version on 3^rd Nov. 2025

This chapter began as a Facebook conversation between me and Regina Sën, a member of my sacred storytelling circle Lighting from Within – Sustaining Heart-Centered Living Together.

Regina had shared a post filled with drawings about love — hearts bordered by spirals, turtles, and flowers. Her art grew out of years of living with chronic Lyme disease and learning to heal a deeply dysregulated nervous system. She is now beginning a group to advocate for her patients’ right to pain medicine, a cause close to her heart.

In her post, she asked: “Have you ever experienced a dysregulated nervous system for a long period of time? How hard has it been to heal your nervous system?
What was your path?”

She described how love, for her, had become the power that helped her transcend the spiral of human reactions — the fight, flight, or freeze that arises when life feels unbearable. Each time she found her way back to peace, she drew a flower inside the border of a heart — a symbol of transformation.

Regina wrote:

“Love is transcending the spiral — the messy part of our humanity blindsiding us: irritability, fleeing, fighting, confusion, or emotional intensity out of proportion to what’s happening.
Love is the power behind being able to transcend the human spiral — accessing our higher self over the lower self, connecting to love’s Source.”

Beneath her post, I responded with an emoji and a question that has followed me for years:

“What is love? Complete acceptance of another? Not trying to change the other? Not to judge? To feel safe together? To accept each other’s life path?”

Her reply touched me deeply.

“I can only beckon, encourage the all-in jump into the journey of the heart to find out,” she said. “It is worth the leap. No treasure of any kind on this earth compares to it.”

I sat with her words for a long time. I realised I had been approaching love from the outside — through relationships, safety, and acceptance — while Regina spoke from the inside, from the body’s direct experience of returning to regulation and peace.

Perhaps both views are true. Love may be the force that calms the storm within and also the field where two hearts can meet without fear. It is at once the healing power and the relational presence.

When I picture Regina’s spirals and flowers inside the heart, I see each flower as a moment of awakening — when the human spiral is transcended and something softer, wiser, and more spacious takes its place.

Some time later, I wrote to her again:

“Dear Regina, while navigating these spirals you described, what truly matters is whether we do it with kindness — toward ourselves or another. That is love! Yet the crux of the matter is this: who is in the driver’s seat — the selfish ego personality or the Higher Self? On 27 August 2025, I wrote in my journal that self-mastery is something I have been trying to understand for many years. The first aspect of self-mastery was learning to master my emotions, not to allow them to trigger me in ways that harm me. More recently, self-mastery has come to mean being able to hold others’ life choices and patterns — conscious or unconscious — without judgment, and especially without the need to heal their wounds.”

Even after writing those words, life keeps testing their truth.
There are moments when the energy of misunderstanding returns — not as drama, but as a quiet pulse asking to be seen.

After our sisters’ reunion in April 2025, my sister Linda wrote that she had “lost her cool” but felt it was necessary to say what she felt deeply and honestly. Her message carried both affection and unrest, and I have read it many times.

I created and have often repeated a Forgiveness Ceremony for my sisters, yet the residue of that night sometimes still stirs. Especially since the passing of Linda’s eldest daughter, Jaime, I sense how unspoken pain travels through generations like a current seeking resolution.

Lillian once advised me, “Please let it go.” I understand her wish for peace. Yet love sometimes asks us not to push away what returns, but to sit beside it until its message is heard.

Perhaps this, too, is part of self-mastery: to hold what is unresolved without flinching — to sense the energy moving beneath words, transforming slowly into understanding.

As I sat with this, I began to see that forgiveness itself is a form of love’s alchemy. It does not erase the past; it changes the vibration of how the past lives in us.

One evening, I lit a candle and spoke these words aloud:

Spirit of Life, witness my heart now.

I see the pain that lived between a mother and a daughter.
I see my own pain watching them.

I release Linda from my expectation that she should have seen differently.
I release myself from the judgment that rose when she did not.

I bless Jaime’s soul as free, whole, and held in light.
May the healing that could not happen in life unfold now in spirit.

May compassion flow where blame once stood,
and understanding rise where silence settled.

I choose peace — not because all is clear,
but because love is larger than what was.

When I finished, the room felt still — no resolution, only a soft expansion.
I understood then that love’s deepest work happens at the energetic level, often without words or witnesses.

Forgiveness is not forgetting. It is the slow unwinding of resistance until only presence remains.
Perhaps this, too, is self-mastery: the moment when we no longer flinch before the shadows, because we have remembered the light within them.

For Regina, the journey of the heart has unfolded through illness and recovery.
For me, it has unfolded through writing — through listening, forgiving, and transforming experience into story.

Each book — My Bumpy Ride to Inner Peace, A Listening Grandmother, and now A Forgiving Grandmother – My Path of Alchemy — has invited me to live more truthfully and tenderly.

Perhaps every path that asks us to move beyond fear and self-sabotage toward compassion is a form of the same leap.

Maybe that is what love is — not a feeling, not even an act, but a movement:
from contraction toward wholeness,
from judgment toward understanding,
from fear toward truth.

And in that moment, I understood that love had been teaching me all along — through friendship, family, forgiveness — how to return to my own heart as the only true home.