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How Can I Tell if I Feel Love?

© Dr. Neil Friedman

Q. I do not know what love feels like. How can I tell if I feel love?

A. There is an experience called "the opening of the heart". It is the experience of love. It can be romantic love or love of person-kind. It is a feeling in the area of the heart chakra. There is a warmth or an expansiveness or an excitement in the heart area. That is the feeling of love.

Of course, you have to be in touch with yourself to feel it! Otherwise, love is but a concept, an abstraction. People cannot live on concepts or abstractions. "Thinking" love is not the same as "feeling" love. It is the difference between thinking about chicken soup and tasting chicken soup.

So how does one get in touch with one's heartfelt feelings?

Many different practices lead in this direction. The best I have ever experienced are the workshops called Opening the Heart and Awakening the Heart. Opening the heart takes place at Kripalu Center and Omega. Awakening the Heart takes place at the Kindred Spirits Camp at Rowe Conference Center. Contact me for more details at neilheart@attbi.com

These workshops help one through cathartic techniques actually feel one's own bodily-felt feelings. So many of us walk around in our heads. We are too heady. we are ungrounded. We cannot feel our feelings.

These workshops will help us feel what we really feel and thus know ourselves that much better.

Many blessings
Dr. Neil

About the Author
Relationship questions? Everyone has them. Most are afraid to ask them. Thus is the beauty of the Internet. With complete anonymity, both men and women can ask everything they ever wanted to know about sex, dating, marriage, divorce, or relationships-but were always too afraid to ask. But who is there to answer?

Luckily, therapist, lecturer, and author Dr. Neil Friedman has answered over 1,000 of these probing relationship questions in his popular "Ask Dr. Neil" column at www.Relationship-Talk.com. Handling everything from sex to communication to endings and affairs, Dr. Neil responds sensitively and knowledgeably to his devoted fans and newbies alike.