Learning Self-Love is How You Deepen Love…Start with Self-Love!
That is what opens the doors to your spiritual growth. All spiritual teachers say love is the way but have you ever wondered why or how it works?
One reason love is confusing to understand is there are many forms of love and many levels of love. In fact, since everyone has unique experiences with love, each person’s definition of love is also unique.
The reason people experience so many levels of love is because everyone has filters on their experiences with love. Filters such as levels of worthiness and deserving, judgments like good and bad, and reactions like blame and guilt.
Just as there is a sliding scales on how you experience the filters, there are also degrees you are open to receiving and expressing love.
If you’ve ever been emotionally hurt in a love relationship, you know how it aches to your core and that can be an obstacle to you experiencing love again. On the other hand, when you deeply surrender and embrace love, you are healed, comforted, and supported. You’ll feel like you are home and safe.
You are created with the capacity to feel love, experience love, receive love, give love, express love, radiate love, and be love.
You are Closer to Love Than You Think
Experiencing love must start with loving yourself. In its unhealthy form it appears as being self-centered, egotistical, and narcissistic. In its healthy form it is related to being an open-hearted, caring, and compassionate person.
The foundation of Self-Love is Self-Acceptance. That means little or no self-judgment, self-criticism, or self-blame.
To feel love is to remember what you truly are for unfiltered love is your true essence and the nature of your soul. The gateway to that remembrance is through the heart center or soul center which is felt in the center of the chest.
The additional effects of self-acceptance are what enable you to feel safe, comfortable, and at home with yourself. From that platform you are more available to share that with others. You are able to give what you yourself have and that leads to greater happiness and fulfillment.
How to Have Self-Love
First, Look for the obstacles to self-love such as:
Feeling undeserving or unworthy of love
Thinking you can’t feel safe by loving because of mistreatment
Judging yourself as something is wrong with you
Feeling guilty or shameful about your past
Being resentful or hateful of someone
Holding fear-based heart-blocks
Secondly, utilize self-forgiveness and other self-healing and clearing techniques to directly address the obstacle. For instance,
“I forgive myself for feeling undeserving of love.”
“I open myself to receive divine healing love.”
I have a lot more on forgiveness in my free e-book titled: Freedom Through Forgiveness
Third, most of the time most people look for love outside of themselves and over time they usually end up disappointed.
By looking for love outside, you deny the love that already lies within you and miss feeling the connection with the living presence of your soul’s unconditional love.
Know that living in your head deprives you of feeling the soul presence in your heart, so you have only to shift your attention from your head to your heart.
Here’s How…
Place one had over the center of your chest, take a deep breath, wait a few seconds and then softly say to yourself:
“I surrender and release the need for the resistance I feel.”
“I open my heart deeply now to merge into Divine love.”
Repeat that several times for at least 3 minutes. When you set intentions like this, you increase your connection with the energy. Once you do that all you need to do is be open to receive.
An obstacle may arise as you start this practice. You may find that your mind resists such ideas as surrendering or opening your heart because your mind is trained to attain something through doing, effort, striving, planning, trying, forcing, pushing, control and making things happen….and surrendering is counter to what it has been trained to do.
So in the quest to heal your love related wounds and to reconnect with your deepest inner truth (soul), you do so by surrendering the resistance. Keep discovering what the obstacles are and surrendering them.
Most obstacles to self-love developed during childhood. My free e-book Heal Your Inner Child will help you with this.
