We all want love. Can we agree on that? So what keeps us from having more love in our lives? At least these four things:
- We don't really think we're worthy-we believe messages we've heard from parents, friends, etc. that if we only (fill in the blank), we could have what we want. So we keep trying to fill what we see as an empty bucket, instead of coming from "I'm ok as I am."
- We get too easily discouraged. We reach out to people at networking functions, place personal ads, go to singles dances, wait for someone who's said "I'll call you" and we give up when it doesn't happen as we hoped it would.
- We're ambivalent about what matters most, so we send mixed messages.
- We have expectations and demands about the way love has to be.
Four ways to bring more love into your life:
1) Do whatever it takes to experience yourself as lovable. Use Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life or Shakti Gawain's I Deserve Love or go to a library or bookstore's self-help section and browse through books until you find one that speaks to you. Hay suggests saying as often (even 300 times a day) as needed, "I approve of myself." What I've found when I do that is it replaces my old tapes. Just as you can record over a cassette or a video and get a new movie or musical piece, so you can get a new belief by "recording" different thoughts and words. Even though there are some areas in my life I'd like different, I can find lots of ways I do approve of myself. The more you are okay with yourself, the more others are okay with you.
Notice what a center of attraction a self-confident, self-loving person is. Many even find self-confidence an aphrodisiac, a sexual magnet. It's not hard to believe that even people with self-assurance have some areas they would like to be different. However, they focus on what works, instead of paying attention to what could be better. What will draw people to you is their sense that you are (in the words of God in Walsch's Conversations with God) fully expressing all of who you are. In Walsch's book 3, talking about relationships, God says on page 232 that "relationship has only one purpose. It exists as a vehicle for you to decide and to declare, to create and to express, to experience and to fulfill your highest notion of Who You Really Are." And if you are seeking to be love, "you will be doing loving things with others, for your Self-so that you can actualize and experience your grandest idea about your Self and Who You Really Are." I love Walsch's books; in them, God is totally supportive of each person really (my words) "getting off on" they are. Can you imagine how desirable you would be to others if you exuded self-respect, assurance, clarity about who you really are.
2) To get to that place of self-love, you can never give up. Figure out what matters and hold the vision, as strongly as Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa did. Your purpose, to attract to you what would make your life richly fulfilling. You simply can't give up on that. Read Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich or John-Roger & Peter McWilliams' Do It! or check amazon.com for a book that deals with persistence, self-love, commitment to self, purpose, goals, and the like. If one thing you're doing isn't working, try something else. Get a support person who with whom you exchange calls every day to share wins, and support each other. Sometimes to attract love in your life you need to complete projects that will give you personal satisfaction, so you can feel good about yourself.
- One way is through questions to/from your support partner:
- "How did it feel to work out?"
- "Who will you call to ask about taking a class?"
- "What time will you spend writing your article"
- "What singles event are you attending this week?"
- "How did you nurture yourself today?"
- "What was the one extra thing you did today to show your commitment?"
Support is critical. If you could have done it on your own, you would have already. Join a Mastermind group, or check out listserves like www.listbot.com, www.egroups.com, www.onelist.com (where I do a weekly letter called AskYourself). They will have dozens of groups you can be part of, many of which offer support. For instance, go to www.egroups.com for a conversationswithgod group.
3) The biggest antidote to ambivalence is doing what it takes to get to clarity.
If you're not sure if you want marriage or just a short romance, children or no children, this man or that man, ask: What do I need to get clear? You may come up with journaling-writing stream of consciousness pages on this vs. that, or on "What I am resisting right now" or on "my last ten years" written from the perspective of 2010. You may well be in a similar state of non-clarity ten years from now if you don't write/talk/figure out what you need to know and do now to be certain about what is important enough in your life to commit to.
One thing you might say over and over when you are feeling confused is "I know what I want to do", "What choice would feel most fulfilling right now?" Another useful tactic is to sit quietly, or go on a walk by yourself, or daydream by the water and not have an agenda other than "clarity" or "my next step." Sometimes trusting the process is the smartest thing to do. There's nothing wrong with a Pros and Cons list, or with asking a friend's opinion, or testing out different ways to make your life meaningful. But at some point, if you're still not moving forward, you might just make a choice. "I will take dancing lessons." "I will place a personals ad." Check out Kaufmann's Happiness is a Choice.
4) With clarity comes a good deal of peace and renewed energy. Now you need to be aware of what demands you have put on your outside world. It's always fine to have preferences-slim vs. heavy, blond vs. brunette, 45 vs. 60 years, monogamy vs. several partners. And if you have done your writing/ reading/ discussing/ pondering about what you're here on earth for, you will know what is essential and what is peripheral. You still need to distinguish between preferences, expectations and requirements. If you don't have clarity about your boundaries, about what is or is not fulfilling, you may allow the merely acceptable instead of the desirable into your life. I am not advocating that you take whatever comes your way, nor am I suggesting that you be rigid.
What I am saying is that we all have our positives and negatives, and that if a partner meets most of our needs, it probably does not serve the relationship to harp on the missing pieces, to say, "if only he" While it can be wise to ask if your partner would be willing to call when she will be late/ to give him breathing space when he first comes home, it is probably not useful to assume he doesn't love you if he wants to go out with the guys or that she's losing interest because she said no to sex twice.
If you think about it, we're talking about CPR for having what you want: Clarity, Persistence, and knowing your real Requirements.
For a larger perspective, Thomas Leonard's The Portable Coach has a chapter "Become Irresistibly Attractive to Yourself. I'll note the 10 headings. Check out the content on www.topten.org (search for that title). You can also read more at www.thomasleonard.com.
- Stop doing what you know is bad for you and start nourishing yourself.
- Stop trying to meet anyone else's expectations and start meeting your own.
- Stop being good and start being radical (such as Let go of doing something that you're being pressured to do).
- Stop comparing yourself to others and start identifying your own measures.
- Stop setting yourself up and start making life easy on you.
- Stop setting other people up and start underpromising.
- Stop waiting and start trusting your inklings.
- Stop chasing and start appreciating(It's better to spend your energies attaining all of a nearby goal than absolutely none of a distant goal)
- Stop trying to become somebody and just be yourself.
- Stop having problems and start solving them.
