Nasrine Shah Abushakra, Ph.D.

“Only love is real and nothing else matters ” my grandmother said this to me when I was very young.  She would say this to me time and time again when she arrived in the United States from the old country I didn’t understand what she meant.  She always carried around her prayer beads and quickly recited phrases which didn’t make much sense to me at the time but I do clearly remember her kissing my forehead and telling me in her broken Indo British English that “only love is real, everything else is not real”.  I didn’t understand her at that tender age.

I finally learned the hard way, that indeed, only love is real.

The wonderful thing about learning something the hard way is that you actually learn it, or you will be given that lesson again and again, until you finally have that profound “A-ha” moment.  You must learn the lesson because the endless lessons are what life is all about.  One lesson after the other, some painful, some simply stunning however, the lessons that stick are astounding, it is the most meaningful way in which we as human beings evolve, develop and become whole.

My grandmother was right!  Only love IS real, this Valentines Day I remember that simple fact.  Nothing else is real, as the love that you have deep in your core.  During this Valentines Day holiday I would like to honor those that I love.  Those I love are continuous and bottomless for I love many effortlessly and abundantly these days, life is indeed too short for anything less.  As I learn to love more authentically the more I learn that love is in fact a science and it really is the only thing that is real within us and around us.  Love is that energy that is so powerful that is can change the global arena and I have the science to back it up.

For example, take the following scientific facts into consideration this Valentine’s Day, we all have these chemicals in our body, and when we are in love, well the following chemicals are at work in both a robust and magical way.

Adrenaline is found in your body, it is something that usually protects us during dangerous situations AND it’s something that we experience during the initial stages of falling in love.  This chemical activates your stress response, increasing your blood levels of adrenalin and cortisol. This has the charming effect that when you interact with your new love, your heart races, your mouth goes dry and your start to sweat.

Dopamine Helen Fisher (her video is included below) had newly ‘love struck’ couples brains examined.  She discovered they have high levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Fisher suggests “couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention and exquisite delight in smallest details of this novel relationship”.

Serotonin One of love’s most significant chemicals that may explain why when you’re falling in love, your new love keeps popping into your thoughts, which creates sensations of peace and happiness.

Oxytocin is a powerful hormone released by both men and women, who deepens the feelings of attachment and makes couples feel much closer to one another.  Oxytoicn is also released during childbirth or when a woman breast-feeds.

Looks like my grandmother, a child bride, from the old country was in fact right.  Love is real and it does live inside of all us.  Maybe this Valentines Day we can simply do our best to love each and ourselves a lil bit more, we would want to create a chemical imbalance now, would we?

Happy Valentine Day!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 11:55 am and is filed under Virtue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.