Intellectual Foreplay Question of the Week: What causes you to feel love?
Love Tip of the Week: How we feel is a direct result of what we are thinking. As you allow your thoughts to be more loving, you will feel love. If you want to feel more love, be more loving.
Dear Eve,
Valentine’s Day is coming and once I again I feel isolated and alone. I just hate feeling like no one loves me. I’ve been in a few relationships, but not sure I would say that true love was part of the equation. I just want to feel loved and don’t know what to do.
Aloha,
Here is the deal, you have to love if you want to feel love. Love is an inside job. It isn’t like someone actually hands us something we get to handle, hold and touch. Rather than being something we have, love is something we feel.
We tend to want to blame others for the lack of love in our lives, but the kicker is that someone could love you with all of his or her heart and you might still not feel loved. Or someone could not even know you exist and you could feel full of love for them. The source of your love is not outside of you. This is true for both the love you give and the love you receive. Love exists within you totally independently of the object of your love (or the absence of someone to share that love with.) When you love someone and they die, the love remains. Love has little to do with the proximity or even the existence of the other person. When we break up with someone, love does not go away either. We just block the flow of love.
The love is inside of you. Love is who you are on a soul level. Love is your natural state; your natural feeling.
Ego is what blocks love—every time. An active ego shows up in the need to control and the need for approval and materializes in relationships through nagging, sarcasm, judgment, disappointment, jealousy, possessiveness, hurt, fear and a sense of loneliness. When you do not like what you are experiencing in yourself, in your relationships or in your life, there is a block in the flow of love and joy. As we learn to transcend our egos, we can restore the flow of love in all of our relationships. Your job is to remove the blocks that are damming the flow of love.
Start by aiming to feel love, regardless of a partner. List all the things, experiences, people, tastes, feelings, colors, movies, books—and aspects of yourself—you love. More accurately, list the things that help you to feel the love that is already within you. Then as you read the list, hold the vision of that thing, like a sunset, for instance. Picture the sunset in your mind’s eye and see if you can feel the love inside you. Do that with everything on the list. Consciously let your love grow and begin to recognize what it feels like. Then, throughout your day, look for things to love and to be joyful about—even the little things like a parking spot in a crowded lot, a kind smile from a stranger, a flower growing up through the cement. Notice what love and appreciation feel like and begin to allow that feeling to flow through you all the time.
Equally, notice when you do not allow the feeling of love. In those moments, guaranteed, your ego is at work. You will block the flow of love when you are judging others or when you are judging yourself; when you are trying to control others, or when you are trying to gain their approval. You will block the flow of love when you are inauthentic (dishonest or withholding the truth). Notice when you are blocking love. Then take a deep breath and transcend your ego, realign with that feeling of love that you have been developing and choose thoughts, words and actions that are in alignment.
Then, when you are in a relationship, enjoy the power and beauty of two people feeling the love within at the same time and sharing it with each other—rather than getting it from each other. It is, indeed, a beautiful thing.
Most important, have a happy Valentine’s Day and devote every other day to love, too!
With Aloha,
Eve
