What Blocks the Flow of Love
Love is our most natural state. And yet, for so many of us, it is also the thing we struggle with the most - giving it freely, receiving it gracefully, letting it simply move through us without grabbing at it or shutting it out.
I have been sitting with this question for a long time now, on the mat and off it: what actually stops love from flowing? Not just self-love, but love in all its forms - the love between partners, the love between friends, the devotion of a parent, the quiet tenderness we can choose to bring to a total stranger. What creates the blockage? What builds the wall?
Because love is not the problem. Love is always there, underneath everything. The problem is the impedance - the resistance we have accumulated, layer by layer, over the course of our lives.
Love doesn't disappear. It just gets dammed up behind everything we are afraid to feel.
The Body Holds the Story
When we step onto the mat, we think we are here to stretch, to strengthen, to breathe. And we are. But we are also, whether we realise it or not, here to meet ourselves. All of ourselves , including the parts we have been carefully avoiding.
The body is honest in a way the mind is not. It carries every experience of love that was withheld, every moment we were taught that we had to earn affection, every time we made ourselves smaller to be more acceptable to someone else. That tension in the chest? The tight hips that won't soften? The shallow breath that never quite drops into the belly? These are not just physical patterns. These are the places where love got stuck. This is what somatic healing works with - not the story in your head, but the living record held in your tissues, your breath, your nervous system.
I know this in my own body. I spent years trying to be the perfect woman, wife, lover, friend, mother - whatever I thought was required of me in any given moment. And the cost of that was enormous. I lost myself in it. I forgot to listen to my own soul because I was so busy trying to meet everyone else's. On the mat, I discovered that my body had been holding the score of all of that - the grief of it, the exhaustion of it, and underneath that, a deep, persistent longing to just be loved as I was.
The Patterns That Block the Flow
If you have never truly experienced unconditional love - love that asked nothing of you in return, love that didn't come with conditions or consequences , then it is incredibly easy to absorb the lie that you are not worthy of it. That you have to do something, be something, achieve something, before you deserve to be loved.
This is one of the great impedances. The belief that love is transactional.
Another one is fear. Fear of being truly seen - because what if, once someone really sees you, they leave? So we perform. We armour up. We hold back the most tender, most vulnerable, most real parts of ourselves and offer instead a carefully curated version that we hope will be loveable. And then we wonder why we feel so alone even in the middle of connection.
And then there is the pattern I know most intimately: putting the love for another person so far above everything else that you essentially abandon yourself in the process. It feels like devotion. It can even look like devotion from the outside. But love that comes at the cost of your own soul is not sustainable - for you or for the people you love.
You cannot pour from an empty cup. And you cannot love freely when you have made yourself invisible.
On the Mat, We Practice
This is why I believe yoga is one of the most profound practices for the heart - not just the physical heart, but the energetic heart, the emotional heart, the one that has learned to be guarded.
Every time we breathe into a tight place, we are practicing letting love back in. Breath and movement for stress relief is not separate from the work of the heart, it is the work of the heart, made physical. Every time we hold a pose that is uncomfortable and choose to stay with a gentle curiosity rather than resistance or aggression, we are practicing compassion toward ourselves. Every time we release something - a breath, a grip, a held jaw - we are practicing the art of allowing.
Love flows when we stop fighting against ourselves. It flows when we soften our grip on who we think we should be. It flows when we allow the body to be exactly as it is in this moment - not the body we had five years ago, not the body we are working toward, this body, right now, worthy of tenderness.
This practice spills off the mat. It has to. Because the real yoga is not the poses , it is the willingness to stay open when everything in you wants to close. It is the practice of returning to yourself, again and again, no matter how far away you have wandered.
Love as a Practice, Not a Destination
Here is something I believe with my whole heart: love flows naturally when we feel safe. Not safe in the sense of everything being perfect or predictable, but safe in the sense of being seen without judgment. Safe enough to be imperfect. Safe enough to need. Safe enough to not have all the answers.
When that safety is absent, when it was never modelled for us, when it was taken away, when we learned that love came with conditions , the nervous system learns to brace. Nervous system regulation is not just a wellness buzzword; it is the foundation of everything. A regulated nervous system is a body that feels safe enough to open. And a body that feels safe enough to open is a body that can finally receive love - and give it freely, without the constant undercurrent of fear. This is why somatic movement for nervous system regulation can be such a profound path back to love: it works at the level where the patterns actually live.
And a braced body, a braced heart, cannot receive love freely. It can want love desperately, but it cannot let it all the way in. It is a protection. And like all protections that have outlived their original purpose, it is something we can -gently, gradually - begin to release.
That is what practice is. Not arriving at some perfect, permanently open, endlessly loving state. But noticing when you have closed down, and choosing - with kindness, without self-judgment- to open again. Creating safety, first within yourself, so that love has somewhere to land.
It is about recognising the impedance when it arises. The tightening in the chest. The held breath. The urge to shrink, or to perform, or to give yourself away entirely. And asking: what does love actually ask of me here? Not martyrdom. Not performance. Just presence. Just truth. Just the willingness to stay with yourself, and with another.
You are the one who is living your life. And love -real love -begins the moment you stop abandoning yourself to prove you deserve it.
So when you step onto your mat, I invite you to feel into the places that are holding. Notice them with curiosity rather than judgment. And let your practice be an act of love - not to become something better, but to come home to what you already are.
Whether you are joining me here in Byron Bay, across the Northern Rivers, on the Gold Coast, or practising from wherever you are in the world , this work is available to you. With the body-based healing practices we explore together we get to remember what has always been whole.
Because underneath all the impedance, underneath all the learned fears and the armour and the old stories, love is there. It was always there. Waiting for you to let it in.
With so much love <3
yoga byron bay · somatic healing byron bay · nervous system regulation · embodied yoga · body-based healing · northern rivers · lovefest