Written by Maeve Belshaw - Co-founder of Soulful Soundwaves

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, we've been seeing all the usual love quotes, red hearts and advertisements for special gifts to give your partner. Is that what love is all about? Do you have to have a partner to experience love? Do you need to have a loved one to buy a valentines present for? In our view no, and here's why...

Love starts with the individual. We all experience and show love in different ways, and in order to love deeply, compassionately and without any resistance, we need to understand how to love ourselves first. This simply means nurturing a deep connection with our inner self. I know that may sound a little cliché, but before to start rolling your eyes to the sky, keep reading. 

For years, as a result of incidences and consequent traumas that happened to me as a kid and a young teenager, I kept building barriers to protect myself. These same barriers made me unable to fully express my feelings or address my issues. At the time I didn't know to what extent our mind can interfere with our heart, I just tried to forget those episodes by burying them deep inside. But they never go away, as long as you try to hide them they stay with you and contribute to create the person you become. In fact, the insecurities I was left with would often creep into my relationship with new partners. Not only this was not fair for them, but also a sign I hadn't addressed these problems for years. 

Removing these blockages requires a basic understanding of how energy flows through our body. 

Our energetic system consists of seven main centres, the fourth of which is the heart chakra, located in the centre of the sternum - just to the right of your heart. Emotions such as grief, hatred, jealousy, shame, pride, guilt, mistrust and embarrassment feed our ego and emphasise the separation between our inner self and the image of us visible to others. The wider the gap, the more we believe we are what people can see. And our imbalance can get worse and worse, to the point where our condition might lead to physical issues related to the heart, lungs and circulatory system just to name a few. 

If you find it hard to love, forgive and trust yourself or your partner, you may have an energetic imbalance. My advice is to unblock that emotion as soon as you can. There are a number of ways to do it, but it's important to find the right way for you. Some suggestions that work for me include meditation and listening regularly to binaural beats. These two techniques can be combined, for more effective results, with a bit of self-analysis. I ask myself why I feel the way I feel when I react in a certain way. If you dig deep enough and you refuse to accept answers such as "I don't know", or "it's just the way it is" you'll get to the source of the problem. And when this happens, you can finally forgive yourself and let go. 

For all of you who think there is more to celebrate than just Valentine's Day, we've created a music track specifically tailored to the heart chakra. You can listen to it by yourself or share it with your loved ones. Appropriately called Anahata (the Sanskrit name for this energetic centre), it has an entrainment of 10.5Hz and specific frequencies for love and mind-soul communication.

Here's a little sneak peak below, or you can download the full track here.