What is love?

Love has so many colors, so many flavors and can be pure or marbled with many other energies. Humans, have many experiences which we draw upon to help us define love and life in general. Many times we will draw conclusions about things which makes sense at the time and later does not work. For example, as a child we love our parents. As we grow up we can see that actually we needed our parents to survive. You can see how easy it is for many of us to get need and love confused, even as adults.

Love can be confused with need, obligation, familiarity, lust, gratitude and many other emotions. One of the most common issues I know of, is that we are labeling too many emotional states as “love”. Let’s say that John has an internal definition of love that includes being waited on when he comes home from work. While Jane has an internal definition of love that includes being listened to after a hectic day.

They both come home from work and are tired and want nothing more from each other than to be loved. John thinks he is loving Jane by rushing to fix her dinner while she is talking about her day. After all, that’s what he would like Jane to do for him. Yet she feels as though he is inattentive since he’s preoccupied with cooking dinner for her. John is secretly wishing that Jane would cook him dinner for a change. Jane wishes John would talk to her more about his day. They both become irritated and begin believing that the other one is insensitive or doesn’t really love them after all.

Jane and John have love mixed up with need. Love, when it is pure, has no emotional feeling of its own. Love simply is. Love is not the absence of hate. Love is more like acceptance of what is in the moment. Love is inclusion without dependency. Love is giving without expectation. Love is allowing without sacrifice. Love is gentleness without condescension. Love is connecting without controlling. Love is receiving without taking. Love is an attitude and a way of being. Love simply is.

What is negative energy and how do we protect ourselves from it? Sometimes I think people name things that are uncomfortable as negative and want that thing to go away, when actually it may important to the big picture. For example, anger. People often think that being angry is a bad thing and want to get to a place of total peace.  I am the first one to go for peace within myself and around me.  However, I also know that anger is vital to that peace.  If I thwart my own anger, or pretend I’m not angry when I am, then I may likely to become more angry later on because I didn’t set boundaries which I needed to set with others.

Growing up with the assumption of being selfish often leaves us believing we are selfish, and if we are selfish, then we must be bad, in general. Bad people are not worthy of good things including being loved by others and certainly not ourselves.

Clearing all of these beliefs in a phone session or through email is a great place to start the process of letting go of these illusions of being bad.  You don’t have to do energy work to clear the beliefs, you can do this work without it, but energy work speeds the process up quite a bit.

So, first become aware of how you  are talking to yourself.  When you hear yourself speaking to yourself in hurtful ways or not listening to your own hurt or pain, imagine how you would feel if you were a child and someone spoke to you in such harsh ways.  My guess is that you would not talk to another person on earth as harshly as you speak to yourself, so why would you do that to yourself?  Let yourself off the hook.  Simply start correcting your self talk.

Instead of beating yourself up about something, try giving yourself the benefit of the doubt, a second chance, like you would anyone else.

Think about how you would feel if you were worth being nice to, or treating with respect.  Pretend that you are worthy, even if you don’t believe it, but just pretend that you do deserve to be treated well.  How do you feel when you pretend that you are a decent person?

Someone asked me to talk about Self Nurturing.  It just so happens this is one of my favorite topics. Let’s start with what it is. You would think that just reading the term would be self-explanatory, and I suppose it is on the surface.  However, nurturing ourselves is not something most of us are taught as kids.  In fact, we are taught not only to NOT nurture ourselves, but to neglect and even abuse ourselves.

Did your parents ever say to you something like, “Be sure to give your friends the biggest piece of cake, or the most frosting, or the prettiest, or the nicest…” Of course this is good manners, it’s a way to be nice and civilized to others.  If that’s all we were learning and being taught as kids, things would be just fine.  However, most of us learned lessons underneath that message of “I’m less than everyone else.” “Asking for what I need is wrong or rude”. “If I complain about anything, I’m being selfish, even if I have a legitimate complaint.”  We grow up learning NOT to nurture ourselves.

Can you recognize these thoughts in your own mind?