Being In Love Step 2: Loving From Your Self

Being in Love Step 2 brings us into the actual experience of loving another, being loved by another, and practicing holding that sense of loving connection in our hearts. It's so good to be loved, and to love in return. This meditation will help you to feel such love, within your bones, and move closer to expressing such love to another. I hope you enjoy it--I think you will.

Transcript

Thanks for joining me again today. This is the second meditation in my Being in Love series and it's about this idea that has been pretty powerful in our culture the last few years where people talk about loving yourself and loving yourself before being able to love another person fully. Now I don't know about the order of those kinds of things. I do think loving another person and really opening up, Caring for them, Having their happiness be essential to our happiness, That that kind of love helps us to love ourselves as well. So I don't know if you actually have to love yourself fully before you can love another person fully. I think that's probably a bit too much to ask. But for sure it seems like it helps an awful lot in our relationships if we hold ourselves in love and compassion and caring for our own selves. The practice of self-care and as I say to my clients extreme self-care certainly raises that ability that we have to love ourselves because we start to place ourselves as important enough to care at an extreme level and to institute practices into our own lives that allow for such caring and really nurture that kind of caring for our own selves. In doing that I think part of what happens is we learn to say no to the things that we want to say no about including relationships that aren't helpful to us and we learn to say yes for the things that bring us joy and happiness and fulfillment to help to express that fulfillment from within ourselves and we also learn to say thank you for compliments when someone says something nice about us rather than brushing it off or minimizing it just to stand in that compliment and bask in it feeling good about ourselves and to say thank you. I know for many years that was a challenge for me to be able to do that and finally a few years back I was able to start to say thank you. I was able to start to practice good self-care and I was also able to say no to hurtful relationships to people who I figured out didn't have my best interests at heart and to walk away from those relationships and not pursue them not thinking that there was something wrong with me but instead that person was just not a person that I wanted to be in relationship with. It took a lot of practice doing that to own my own happiness in that kind of way and that's what this meditation is about is about being in love accepting the responsibility for our own happiness our own love accepting the responsibility for saying yes to those connections and relationships and qualities within ourselves that we really want to nurture and that we most prefer that we want to express and saying no to connections and relationships and thought forms that come to us and letting those thought forms it might show up as negative critical comments within our own thoughts about ourselves to let those negative thought forms simply slide away and not attach ourselves to them they just come out of habit anyway they're not ever true because they're global statements universal statements and universal statements about a person are never true because there are always exceptions always so how could it be true when we hear those negative universal statements about ourselves in our own heads or from anybody else for that matter but this meditation is about you inside of your own thoughts your own heart so let's move into the meditation and let's see if we can find that place within us that loving caring place for ourselves so take a deep breath nice easy deep breath and as you exhale feel the relaxation moving through your body down from the top of your head all the way down your body to the bottom of your feet the more you practice this kind of relaxation by the way the easier it becomes so just feel that relaxation of your physical body and allow the next breath to slow down your thoughts to calm your emotions and to feel your own center that place within that's always been there it feels clear and serene where stillness is and as you come into your center begin to think about loving yourself holding yourself in kindness and caring compassion and warmth even having affection for yourself so establishing perhaps a new pattern of experiencing your own self a new pattern that is based in loving you and feeling that love within your own heart for yourself being in love allows us the opportunity to both love the other person but also to strongly fully love our own self and in the expression of the relationship and the expression of this love within our own hearts for our own self for our own life can come the expression of love in the relationship itself so allow yourself to feel this love within your own heart and as you feel this love think about the moments when you've agreed to something in relationship or even being in relationship when your best wisdom was trying to tell you that this isn't a good idea so think about that kind of moment we all have done this and feel the love within your own self feeling compassion for that decision and compassion for yourself for the ripple effects of that decision there's no need to judge yourself anymore about it you can simply love yourself and know that this was one of those moments one of those opportunities or listening to your best wisdom is something that you truly wish to learn to do better so hold yourself in love hold yourself in compassion and let that moment go when you didn't listen to your best wisdom and now come instead to a time in your life when you felt love strongly where you moved with that love joyfully where you felt caring and warmth and affection for another person or when you felt that other person had affection for you whether it's a friend or a partner a child a sibling parent a teacher whoever that person was just think for a moment bring that person into your mind for a moment who you loved and cared about and who loved and cared about you and feel that sense of this mutual love expressing the love within your own holding that person compassionate and at the same time feeling that compassion right now for yourself the joy the connection love and staying with it for just a few more moments feeling this sense of loving yourself within that connection with another person this can be where it starts with remembering loving and being loved and if for whatever reason it's hard to pull that memory up or you think that you didn't have any kind of relationship like that and it's totally fine to just focus on yourself right now and loving yourself and remembering a moment where you cared about you at a deep and rich level so just allow this love for yourself for another person from another person and from yourself wash over you one more time and consider taking this practice on as a discipline for the next week or two or you love yourself fully as full as you can and hold yourself in care and compassion and affection remembering a time or a person if you can who have also loved you in that way taking this on as a practice can help heal any difficulty that you had in relationships before or that you might be having now because it starts to grow that internal love where you start to know in your bones that you are lovable that you matter that you can be kind and warm and affectionate and that that can come sincerely from your own heart and in the actual essence of who you are as a person other people can love you so consider taking this on as a practice for the next week or two and feel it for one more moment all the way through your body this love for yourself and the expression of love for another we'll come out of the meditation now so remember this feeling remember this idea of taking this on as a practice come back into the room that you're sitting back into your body back into this time and when you're ready open your eyes

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