Thank you for joining us for episode 453 of Live Happy Now.

As we approach February, our minds turn to love, and for the next few weeks,

we're going to talk about the many ways love shows up in our lives and how we can create more of it.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm talking with Maria

Baltazi. In her book, Take a Shot at Happiness, Maria outlines eight happiness essentials, and

not surprisingly, one of them is love. Today, she's here to talk about some of the different

types of love we may be overlooking and what practices we can use to build more love into our

lives. Let's have a listen. Maria, it is so wonderful to have you back on Live Happy Now.

Thank you for having me back. I'm so excited to have another conversation with you. As we're

getting ready to go into February, we have a lot of conversations around the

topic of love, around your heart, because February is also heart month, and everything becomes

heart-centered and all about love. And in your book, take a shot at happiness, where you map out

the happiness essentials, your number two happiness essential is love.

And so that makes you the perfect person to sit down and kind of set up the month that we're

walking into and talk about love.

But my very first question, as we talk about love, what are we talking about being loved,

loving others in terms of it being a happiness essential?

Yes, all of it. All of the above. All of the above, because it all factors in. I think that you start with self-love.

And when I talk about self-love, I don't mean the self-ease, narcissistic

tendencies that, you know, we have taken on in the social media world. I mean self-love

in terms of respecting yourself and caring for yourself. You know, we have, there's so much research that supports the importance of self-care.

And when you think about the analogy, and you probably have heard this, but it's a good one.

...