What’s Love Got to Do With it?

Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got to Do with It? became a cultural anthem because it captured something universal, many people have felt cynical, weary, and distrusting of love. Love, for so many, has been spoken but not truly given. It has been promised but not upheld. It has been used as a shield for harm, as a justification for mistreatment, and as a performance rather than a lived experience.

This world has co-opted, distorted, and diluted love’s true meaning. It gets tossed around loosely, losing its power, becoming an empty word rather than an active force. Love has been twisted, weaponized, and misunderstood. Too often, what is called love is not love at all…it is trauma parading in love’s name. 

And yet, love is power. Love is the essence that binds the broken. Love is the thread that mends the fractures within us.

Love is not just something we feel; it is something our hearts know on a physiological level. Love is more than poetry, more than longing, more than a dream. Love’s got everything to do with it. It is written in our bodies. Science tells us that love isn’t just an emotion, it’s a biological state that shapes our well-being. When we experience love through deep presence, self-compassion, or connection, our heart rate synchronizes into a harmonious rhythm. This rhythm, known as heart coherence, signals safety to the brain, regulates the nervous system, and fosters clarity, resilience, and peace.

But when we are disconnected from ourselves, from others, from love, we experience heart incoherence. Our rhythms become erratic, mirroring inner fragmentation, stress, and survival mode. In this state, we struggle to trust, to soften, to receive. Prolonged heart incoherence impacts our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health.

The medicine? Love. Not just romantic love, but love in all its forms—

Love: the word of the day.

Love as the balm. The equalizer. The peacemaker. The North Star. Salvation. Reckoning. Love sets all things free.

Love remembers your divinity by teaching me about mine. It has been both poison and elixir, heaven and hell, joy and pain. Love is the unifying force of the universe, moving in ways seen and unseen, felt in its quiet power and undeniable presence.

“Love covers a multitude of sins,” and now, more than ever, love is what will save us from ourselves. Not just any love, but unconditional, universal love. Love of self, love for others, love for the Earth. The love that heals. The love that is patient and kind. Redemptive love. The kind of love deeply rooted in justice.

This is what lifts us.
This is what liberates us.
This is how we are made whole.

The first step toward wholeness is remembering love not as something lost, but as something always present, waiting to be embodied. This is the ethos of Whole with Joy. Love, in its purest essence, brings us back into balance. Love, in its true power, restores harmony within, and from that harmony, we heal outward. So the real question isn’t What’s love got to do with it…it’s how will we reclaim love and let it transform us?

Reference:

https://www.heartmath.org/


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