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The Power of Self-Love

Namaste,
I hope you are feeling well and happy!
Thank you to everyone who has followed along and responded to my latest posts on manifesting. This week, I would like to start exploring the reality of love and the power of self-love. But before we begin, a quick note that the latest Parvati Magazine, on the theme of “Relations”, is live now! Please check it out and share with your friends.
Most of us grow up with the idea that someone “out there” will come along some day to fill us up. Mesmerized by fairy tale myths of a perfect prince or princess who will transform our lives into magic, we looked (and maybe even are still looking) for the one person who would make our lives perfect and bring us the happiness we feel we have been deeply missing.
But the reality of love is something different. Getting real about love means learning to face our own lives and look at our values, our hopes, our dreams, our tender places, our relationships with friends, family and peers and most importantly, our relationship with ourselves.
If you feel unhappy and down on yourself, trying to find a lasting relationship would be like trying to catch rain with a sieve. It lacks the containment to attract the nectar you seek to quench your lonely heart’s thirst. If you look within, you may feel a hunger that is deeply insatiable. This is a feeling that only you can satisfy. It would be impossible for anyone to do that for you.
Until you feel you are worthy of love, you are unable to sustain the true love you ultimately seek. When you feel incomplete within yourself, your sense of partiality tends to attract partial relationships that last for some time and then dissolve. It is only when you feel whole within yourself that you attract the wholesome love that provides the meaty sustenance to accompany and enhance your life.
When you learn to love yourself, you become like an open cup ready to receive the bounty of life. That may seem like bitter irony. You may ask, “If I feel whole, why would I want to find love?” Love is organic and infinite. It is not an end point, but an ongoing, alive, evolving force. Love does not arise though wanting. In wanting, you identify as separate from that which you want. How can you attract something from which you feel disconnected? When you feel that you are not separate from, but exist within, love, you are able to receive and sustain it.
Love flourishes as an ever-present force to be witnessed. For most, love is to be found, to be had or to be lost. But for the wise, love is to witness an unfolding. As you love yourself or as you love another, you learn not to grasp or to control, but to appreciate with inner spaciousness the blossoming, the evolution of this moment as it is.
It is not someone else’s job to make you feel loved, but up to you to tap into the love within yourself that comes from the abundance of love that is the universe itself. Friends, family, lovers, spouses can amplify that connection within you, but they are not the source. To put that job on someone else would be to sidestep your own spiritual responsibility.
Feeling disconnected from love can be deeply unconscious, due to wounds you may carry from childhood and/or from past lives. There may be a very young place within you that still feels unmet by your mother, your father or both. From this place, you may tend to express a wanting for love. You may be feeling unconsciously, “I want daddy to make it all ok,” or “I want mommy to love me in the way I need”, which then gets projected onto any potential partner you may attract. How could a partner fill that void?
A mature, lasting love relationship is not two halves making a whole, but two wholes dancing in the infinite. We must do our own inner work on our deeper issues before we can have a lasting and meaningful relationship with another person.
It is up to each one of us to realize that within us exists an unbroken tie to the universe, an unending tap that flows with love. The problem is, most of us are standing on the ‘cosmic hose’ that is pumping love our way, while we scratch our heads bewildered, wondering where all the love has gone. To develop self-love, we need to look within at the ways in which we block the flow to feel love and to feel loved.
Next week, I will share more about self-love, with practical exercises to come. Until then, here is a self-love prayer you can customize in any way you wish and repeat as often as possible:
May I love and accept myself as I am in this moment.
May I embrace all of myself with gentleness and ease.
May I know that I am love, that I am loved.
May I be at peace.
Until next time,
Love yourself.
Love others.
Love our world.
We are one Earth family.
Namaste,
Parvati