16/09/2012
To support you in your budding commitment towards self-love, let me explain where most people tend to get stuck:
It's often in learning how to connect with and honour our own feelings and needs.
Most of us were not taught how to check in with ourselves so we could learn to be aware and respectful of our own needs and desires.
Some of us were even trained out of having our feelings and asserting our needs in ways that would have created healthy dynamics of mutuality, depth, understanding and authentic care.
Yet these skills of self-awareness and self-care are foundational to being able to set clear, healthy boundaries that allow a relationship to flourish.
I'm not talking about walls here. Walls don't let anybody else in. Boundaries, however, are fluid and allow us to be clear with others about what we can do, and what we can't do, what we want and what we don't want.
They allow us to say no when something doesn't feel aligned with our own well-being or integrity, and to say yes to those things that do.
And, contrary to our fear that if we don't give someone else everything they want from us, they might leave, boundaries actually serve to make our container of love stronger.
For good boundaries, the ability to recognize yourself as a separate autonomous individual who is holding ultimate responsibility for your own happiness in life, is necessary in order to create a healthy, happy relationship with another human being.
A wonderful way to begin practicing honouring your own feelings and needs and setting good, healthy boundaries is to ask yourself in any given moment, "Where is my attention?
Most of us have our first attention on others and are more aware of the feelings and needs of others than we are of our own feelings and needs.
This is the core of co-dependence and will create toxicity in relationships over time.
For example, have you ever felt yourself merge so much with another that you became unable to differentiate their emotions and needs from your own?
Have you ever believed that things would get better and that the relationship would succeed if you could just give more and step so fully into the other person's shoes that you could entirely understand them?
Have you ever found yourself disappearing your own feelings and needs in order to care for the feelings and needs of someone else?
Many of us have. And it's a misunderstanding of what mature love really is.
And so, in taking a stand to create happy, healthy love, you want to identify the growth and development you must begin to engage now in preparation for having this love.
This particular practice is learning how to keep your first attention on yourself while also being sensitive and available to care for the feelings and needs of others.
For many of us, this is a real evolutionary edge, for we have only before known either self-abandonment or self-absorption!
But true love will require more of us.
And our task in making a commitment to call in great love is to become a great lover.
A lover of maturity and depth who has cultivated the capacity to show up as a grown-up in order to co-create a grown-up love.
Commit to your own evolution in love . . . and your beloved cannot help but follow.
