When you truly love yourself it’s easy to receive love from others.
What images and notions come up for you when think about love? Warm and fuzzy feelings, babies cooing, romance, heartache, passion and devotion are some associations to the word. Do you have any rules and expectations around love such as how people should treat their loved ones, or who you can and can’t love, or how people are supposed to express their love? All of these concepts and regulations actually inhibit love. Love isn’t a commodity to be sold, bartered or negotiated. It’s the essence of who we are and it is free flowing within us.
Many have been taught that to receive love requires having someone else love you. This just leads people to restrict the amount of love they feel based on how many people love them or how much others express love to them. You can’t get love out there and you can’t measure love. It originates within us and it’s infinite.
We don’t really need to have someone else in our life in order to feel love, although it is a divine expression when shared between two people. It doesn’t matter if your parents expressed love to you growing up, how many friends you currently have, or whether you have a loving partner. Only you allow or stop the flow of love into your life. No one can give you any more love than you already have and no one can take it away.
When you truly love yourself and recognize that it’s a vibration that exists within you, you can fully share love with another. Unfortunately, we have been conditioned to look for love through others which leads to codependence and neediness. When people feel upset because their partner isn’t expressing love to them or because they have difficulty attracting a loving partner, the source is usually a lack of self-love.
What it would be like to let go of all the concepts, rules and past experiences you have of love and instead open your heart to feel the abundance of love within? Imagine what your life would be like if you fully loved yourself.
How you feel about and treat yourself will be mirrored back to you. By increasing your self-affinity, not only will you increase your self-esteem, but you will radiate this vibrancy out to others and it will be expressed back to you in abundance.
In order to love yourself and receive love, explore the following questions and exercises:
Let go of expectations. What are your rules and expectations about love? Look within your relationships for the hidden rules. Do you expect to be treated in a certain way? Do you withhold love for any reason? Do you have criteria for who you share love with, or how you express it, or how you like to receive love? What does it feel like to let these go?
Tune into self-love. Sit with your eyes closed in a relaxed, centered, meditative state and become aware of the highest form of love, above and beyond any rules or limitations. You might at first see it as an image, symbol or color, or you might just sense it. Feel the essence and vibration of love and let it flow throughout your whole body until it overflows out of you.
Release charged memories. Do you have any charged memories around love (positive or negative)? How do these affect your current experience of love? Tune into any past-time pictures you carry within you about love that may be charged or untrue. One by one, release these out of your space and watch them disappear. Replace these with your highest vibration of love.
Give love to receive love. Whenever you are tempted to withhold love from another or react to someone else’s unloving behavior, instead turn up the volume of your own inner abundance of love and shine this on the other. Allow yourself to receive love by expressing love.
Love yourself daily. Treat yourself lovingly every day. Be kind to yourself, listen to your body, change any negative self-talk into caring words. Be your own best friend.
Whenever you feel lonely, or hurt by another’s unloving behavior, remember it’s a sign that you need to love yourself more. Give yourself exactly what you need to feel cared for and supported. As you bring more love into your life by loving yourself, you will attract and receive love from others.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi
Do you have any questions or insights on how to love yourself or receive love? Please share below.
