I have often come across this phrase "is love enough" in many different parts of my life. With romantic relationships, friends, family even material things. When you feel like someone or something has let you down in a way you may never be able to forgive this can often become a question in mind. For me I felt like saying "I love you" would heal all wounds. I felt that although shitty things may have happened to me that if I was told I was still loved that those issues would go away. Man was I wrong though. Yes in a bad situation it is needed to know you are still loved, from something as small as scraping your knee to finding out your marriage is over. Our world doesn't work without emotions. In times of distress we need to know there is more then just negativity surrounding us. That brings me back to my question, is love enough? 

Is it? When you are betrayed by a loved one is the love between you enough to mend it? Maybe it isn't. Maybe the betrayal was so deep that it severed all chances to let love heal it. For me, my entire life my family surrounded me with love. Regardless of any situation my mother was always there as my safe haven to let me know I was in a loved place. As I grew up my view on life changed. I started to have romantic relationships and learned what it meant to love someone other than your family members. I learned what it was like to feel those butterflies in your stomach from another person and get all giddy when they walked into the room. But I also learned what it felt like the be hurt. I learned that not everyone is honest and pure. I learned that not all love is true meaningful love. As badly as I wanted to believe that love was truly like Disney fairytales it wasn't. I'm not sure if that was more heartbreaking than actually enduring the pain. 

Being where I am today, I look back on sometimes that I was hurt by others. I see where I was in that moment and who I was. I see how I would fight till the death and use love as my choice of weapon to keep a man around. Little did I realize that my love couldn't fix what he had done, or fix him at all. You see we all to a degree want to fix other people. One of my mother's famous one liners "you can't change anyone but yourself" and isn't that the damn truth. We all know it to be so, yet we all try to do it anyway. For me, I realized that if I loved someone to the fullest of my being that it would make him a better person. That my love would make him stop cheating or my love would make him want to spend more time together or that my love would fix his dark spots from his own struggles. WRONG! I knew I couldn't change anyone yet I was exhausting myself trying to.

This thought recently popped into my mind when I had an issue with someone in my life that is not my romantic partner. I had been hurt and burned so many times, I genuinely thought is love enough? Is love enough to mend such a battered relationship? Is love enough when everything else is lacking? Do I have enough love to oversee all the shortcomings and lies and move forward with my life? My answer became clear as day though. After doing a bit of reading in my go to book Mastering Your Mean Girl I came to one startling realization. Love is enough. Love is enough to mend my soul. I didn't need to be bursting with love to fix my relationship with this person or to fix them. I needed to be bursting with love to help myself! Love is that emotion that you can never have too much of. Melissa (author of Mastering Your Mean Girl) talks about visualizing sending love to those who have hurt you. When I first attempted this exercise I thought I don't want to send them anything other then a good kick in the ass. But! I attempted it a few times to try to see where she was coming from. To my own surprise I had tears running down my face picturing myself sending love to someone who has caused me so much pain over the years. For me seeing through all the bad stuff and just for a moment sending pure love was my way of letting my pain go. Because truly thats what it's all about. Letting go of the bad and letting in the good. 

Back to my question of, is love enough? Love is enough. You are enough. 

Fitness models are amazing to look at and even better to get motivated by, but the coolest part about them? (In my opinion that is) They are real people just like us! They have stories and struggles and journeys to share on how they got to where they are. Listen to Heidi's story below, to know you're not alone in your struggles!