Have you ever felt that you had to change or adapt your behavior to be acceptable to someone else so they’d love you?
Spirit guides want you to know that the kind of love that you have to work hard to be worthy of is not really “love.”
There is another kind of love…
…a fulfilling and authentic love that comes from within.
It is actually your love, and with or without a partner, that love is always there. It is a quiet feeling that’s easy to ignore or overlook. Sometimes we forget that it’s there at all.
When we are born, we ARE love. We have no judgments about anything, and no notion of the ways that we have to show up in the world to be okay for other people. We just exist as awareness in human form. Perhaps we are aware of sounds or colors, but no perception exists that we are noisy or irritating if we cry. We especially have no idea what it means to be unworthy of love, or not good enough.
Growing Out Of Love
Once our minds are developed enough for grown-ups to hold our attention, they begin to teach us the rules and judgments that exist in their minds, which were given to them as children. That is how the human dream gets passed down from generation to generation.
We quickly discover that we are not okay just as we are. Perhaps we’re made wrong for crying, having emotions, expressing ourselves, or not wanting to go to bed at bedtime. And gradually, tragically, we have no choice but to believe our elders when they demonstrate to us how “bad” we are.
The way we punish our children is usually the way we were punished.
We withdraw our love, remove them from the company that is visiting, take them out of the store until they can be who we want them to be in that moment. The child begins to understand that in order to be part of the tribe, he or she has to learn what the rules are and follow those rules. The rewards are acceptance, approval, and being allowed to stay in the company of whomever is present. Being included means being worthy of the love, which, by now, seems to live outside of us.
How This Relates To Relationships
This is how we go into relationships — believing that love lives outside of us and we have to be good enough to get it. Our lovers teach us what their rules are, and because of our childhood domestication, we work to adapt our behavior to get their love. Here’s what that looks like: maybe you are dating a man who has made it clear that he doesn’t respond positively to too much texting and calling. Maybe he told you a story about his ex-girlfriend driving him crazy with her “neediness.” So you make a mental note of that and adapt your behavior so that you never appear needy. Maybe you decide you’re only going to text him if he texts first.
We also unconsciously teach our lovers what our rules are, and we punish them by threatening to withdraw our love in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, so that they change how they do things to keep our supply of love flowing.
We all do this because we believe the love is not inside, it is somewhere out there, and getting it is contingent upon being good enough.
But a woman doesn’t really want a partner who will compromise who he is to be with her, and a man doesn’t want a partner who will become someone else to hang onto his love.
Your True Nature Is Love
You can heal this tendency to bargain for love by remembering that your nature is love, that you were born as love, and it cannot be taken away. But this can’t just be a concept. You need to make this real, to feel your own love so you can go on and express that love in a partnership. Of course, after a lifetime of believing that love exists outside, many of us have been cut off from that feeling of love on the inside. What does it feel like? What IS it to love yourself?
Real love equals Acceptance.
Accepting something doesn’t mean you like it. You might be unhappy with your past choices. And accepting them doesn’t mean you like them. Accepting yourself exactly the way you are means that you acknowledge that in this moment, this is the truth of you. And how you are showing up in this moment — perhaps overweight, angry, grieving — is absolutely okay. The moment you accept yourself and don’t make yourself wrong or bad, is the moment that you’re both loving yourself and receiving your own love.
You are the love that you have been waiting for! Accept yourself exactly the way you are, and you are loving yourself. If you practice self-acceptance as a way of life, you will soon stop the cycle of attracting people you have to get it right for. When you judge and reject yourself, you find yourself in relationships with people who will also judge and reject you.
What kinds of relationships could you have if you felt your own love sustaining you?
Do you remember the feeling of being a baby, when you could do no wrong, when people let you be yourself because you were too small yet to know the rules? No punishments and no blame. That sweet perfection you were continues to be the truth. If you can’t remember that far back, imagine it. It was you once, a perfect, innocent life form through which awareness had a totally clear outlet of expression. It wasn’t stifled, muffled or subdued. It just WAS. Sometimes it was loud and messy. Other times it was giggly and excited. But there was nothing defective about it. It was you. It was Life. And life never makes mistakes. Life is never wrong.
