Turning Willingness
into Love as a Habit
“Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be
made like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Through exercises and discussion in the last chapter, we have grown our awareness and our willingness to be authentic and vulnerable and found ways to identify the presence of limiting beliefs and things that block us to love. In this chapter, we step up. We take action and establish new habits in order to actualize love in our lives on a daily basis and in an ongoing way. This takes courage.
Willingness Exercise:
Visualization for Becoming Courageous
By visualizing yourself being connected solidly to the earth and sky, you feel powerful and brave, and understand that you are stronger than you realize. You will need a few moments of quiet, uninterrupted time.
No matter how hard the wind may blow around you, you are connected and supported. You have the earth solidly beneath you and the sky above. You are centered and stable and strong. And no matter what direction you may choose to move, you maintain these connections. You are bigger than you might seem at first glance. You are earth and light, human and spirit, worldly and divine: irrepressible, immovable, and sure.
Taking Responsibility
Being authentic does not mean that we are weak, it means that we are real. We can be vulnerable, but we needn’t be victims. It is our job to take responsibility for the condition of our inner selves at any and all times. The idea is to be strong and tender at the same time, and in appropriate ways. We need some toughness in order to be assertive and to set boundaries, but we have to maintain a loving heart. We must learn to be kind and compassionate, yet firm. Real gentility is strength subdued and softness by choice. It is not voluntary weakness.
This idea is aptly demonstrated in the Aesop’s fable about the sun and the wind who compete with each other to see who can get a man to remove his coat. The wind pummels him with all of its brute force, but this only makes the man pull his coat in closer and tighter. The sun, on the other hand, is gentle, warm, and persuasive; unquestionably powerful but encouragingly patient, and the sun ultimately convinces the man to take off his coat.
In this way, we can clear ourselves of the things that block us to love. We cannot attack ourselves with forceful winds of anger or intensity, but must be like the sun—intentionally gentle, compassionate, patient, smiling, and warm. We must be courageous in our honesty and aware of our tendency to cave in and shut tight.
The practical side of clearing blocks is to catch ourselves in the act of harsh and critical thoughts and negative behaviors, and be willing to change. When we call ourselves idiots, we can hear ourselves do it and stop. We can change the word and change the energy. We can “flip the script.” We are clearly not idiots. Maybe we were trying to do too much at once and made a mistake in our haste. We can tell ourselves to take a deep breath and slow down. Rather than lashing ourselves with negative judgment, we can reassure ourselves that it’s okay and we have more time than we think. This is the loving way.
Forgiveness
Generally speaking, when we are feeling hateful, either with ourselves or others, we have become stuck in fear. I like to think of love and fear as the two main baskets of emotions that we experience. In the love basket is gratitude, happiness, tolerance, forgiveness, joy, excitement, and other positive, good-feeling emotions. And in the fear basket is suspicion, anger, impatience, resentment, shame, and greed, to name just a few.
When we are full of negativity and living from the fear side of the equation, there is a process by which we can make the shift back to love. For the purposes of our discussion, we have been calling this process “clearing our blocks.” We touched on it briefly in the previous section, but we need to understand it in more depth and detail if we want to make it a positive habit and an effective tool in our lives.
There are three steps to the process: identification, consideration, and resolution. We begin by acknowledging, or identifying, that we feel out-of-sorts. It’s possible that we can pinpoint an exact event or moment that “made us mad,” or “stressed us out,” or something specific that we are afraid of, or feel guilty about; but it’s equally possible that we have no idea what is causing our irritation. The purpose of the first part of the block-clearing process is simply to identify that we feel blocked.
The second step is to consider the cause. If we know what it is immediately, all the better, but if we are unsure, this is the time to do a bit of self-reflective trolling for information. We think when we were last feeling good and remember the events that followed. Sometimes it becomes clear upon review what has upset us, and sometimes it’s not so obvious. Often, our own less-than-admirable behavior has triggered us and we are feeling shameful and self-conscious, or we may have a kind of free-floating fear of some upcoming event or simply be overwhelmed with exhaustion. Without holding ourselves to perfectionist standards, in this step we do the best we can to understand why we are feeling “off.”
The third step is resolution in the form of compassion, forgiveness, and making amends. We are human, and therefore, fallible. And so is everyone we encounter on a daily basis. We cannot hold ourselves or anyone else to standards and expectations that are impossible to meet—not if we want to feel loving and happy. We must forgive ourselves for being less than perfect, for having negative emotions, for speaking when we might have done better to remain quiet, for losing our temper, and for being occasionally unkind. And we have to forgive others for the same things.
We have a tendency to hold a resentment if someone snaps at us, doesn’t properly acknowledge or appreciate us, or whatever it may be that causes us to be upset on any given day. And yet, if we’re honest, we can fairly easily discover some moment in our own history when we did the same thing to someone else. To forgive is to give up our claim to righteousness. It’s to live and let live; to allow for the fallibility in ourselves and others on a regular basis and as a daily practice.
Refusing to forgive sets us up in permanent negativity and blocks us to the experience of love. It sets us apart and makes us feel superior to others, or inferior to them, depending, even though neither viewpoint is true. There is freedom in understanding that it’s okay for us to make mistakes of all kinds, and that it is normal and appropriate that we do so, and that others do so as well. It’s part of the human condition. Living in the open air of love and forgiveness is good living, and it’s our best option for fulfillment and satisfaction in life.
But our forgiveness doesn’t end up meaning much if we continue to make the same mistakes over and over. We have to own our part in creating negative drama and take responsibility for our actions. So there is a finishing step of resolution, and that is to say we’re sorry to someone we may have wronged, and then do better going forward. We have to make a commitment to improve our behavior. We have to learn from our errors and then demonstrate our learning by acting differently the next time around.
Willingness Exercise: Catching Yourself
By following the block-clearing process described above, and spelled out below, you will be able to restore yourself to feelings of love and well-being whenever you feel troubled. This exercise is designed as a daily practice and an ongoing life skill. You will need the willingness to be self-reflective and use your best observational skills.
Scenarios
Using this exercise to learn to clear what blocks you and regularly forgiving yourself and others for errors of all kinds, is a practical as well as a spiritual habit. It increases the loving energies of appreciation and compassion and allows for resentment-free living.
Intimate Relationships
To this point, our discussion has been about love in a generalized sense: characteristics of love, love for ourselves and for others, how it can be blocked within us, and how it needs to be regularly cleared. Let us turn now to the more specific topic of successful and healthy interpersonal love relationships. These are particularly sought after and particularly high in their rate of failure. Why should that be?
For starters, it’s not possible to have a healthy and functional loving relationship when one or both partners are chronically blocked to love, or when one or both partners have their drawbridges locked fast in the up position and are all about defensiveness and garrisons. Healthy intimacy requires loving energy to flow back and forth.
Plenty of dysfunctional intimate relationships exist, and most of us have probably been in at least one of these in our lifetime. For my part, I have been in many. But I didn’t get to experience real love, no matter how loving I felt, until I encountered another individual who was committed to love as a principle and love as a concept in his own life.
Secondly, the journey to a healthy, loving intimate relationship begins with healthy relating to ourselves. We must learn the art of care and kindness before we can give it away. We must learn compassion and self-honesty and appropriate boundaries and communication. These things, in whole or in part, may come naturally to some people, but in my experience, they do not come naturally to most. So we have to learn about them and learn how to integrate them into our lives.
But even if we have attained our full capacity of vibrant loving energy, we cannot head out into the world and have a loving exchange with anyone we choose. Whether we are male or female, if we choose our potential partner because of their looks, their jobs, their family background, or their education, we will likely not find what we are hoping for. Our radar must be tuned to those who have loving energy, who are willing to listen and talk and share from the heart, who show compassion, who take good care of themselves, and who have a gentleness about them even if they are physically strong.
We are steered astray by our upbringings. We look on the surface and determine value with our eyes and our minds instead of our hearts. We think physical strength in a man promises us protection and that beauty in a woman promises us desire, but this is not necessarily so. What attracts us over and across time is inner beauty and the energy of love.
So that is what we’re looking for, and that is what we want to open ourselves up to. That is where we will find pleasure and laughter and long-term satisfaction—not in fancy cars and big houses and expensive clothes, but in kindness and freedom and acceptance of who we are. Loving people have the ability to love us because they love themselves. Unloving people do not. It’s really that simple.
The “work” of love, or love in action, is all about the ongoing desire to evolve, to improve, to follow our True North and our true purpose, both as individuals and together as a couple. Love is letting go in the sense that it cannot hold the beloved back. It must encourage her forth and support him on his path.Wherever we may be called or led in terms of our life purpose, our partner cannot ceaselessly resist us, or we will depart. We have to believe in and support each other.
A relationship that is rooted in healthy and sincere love is not all about one partner making it big or living his dream, but about both partners supporting each other. It recognizes the unique and intrinsic value of the individuals, what each has to offer the world, and what each has to express. And it also recognizes the value of the partnership itself as an entity. What characteristics does the union feature? Is it inspiring to others? Is it supportive of any children? Is it growing? Is it grounded in good communication?
So often, we settle far short of this. We get married and become uninteresting. We stop talking to each other and cease to be excited about possibilities that abound. We plop in front of the same television shows week after week and live vicariously though our favorite television personalities.
We need to invest time, energy, and enthusiasm in our intimate relationships and not allow them to wither or bog down. We do this by taking responsibility for keeping ourselves inspired and refreshed by life and encouraging our partners to do the same. Our purpose is to expand and evolve, not to settle. But we have a role in this. We may need to change some of the familiar ways we go about things in order to properly habituate ourselves to love as a daily experience. We need to raise it up inside ourselves and grow it from within. Then we can inspire it in others and enjoy our intimate relationships, and all of our relationships, free from toxic negativity.
Willingness Exercise: Daily Practice for Growing Love
By focusing on what you love and what’s positive and beautiful in yourself and in others, you can change your life for the better, become a more loving individual, and almost instantaneously shift your mood. All you need is the willingness to begin.
Example #1
I love the color yellow. I love pine trees. I love silence and just the right amount of wind. I love mountains. I love feeling cozy. I love heat on a cold day and ice-cold water when it’s hot. I love to watch bunches of birds in flight patterns overhead and the feeling of being done with work at the end of a long day. I love candlelight, sunlight, and firelight. I love dawn and dusk and the full moon. I love to sleep and to wake up.
It’s this simple—not complicated at all—but quite profound in its effect. This practice stirs up love and gets it moving. And once it’s moving, it can flow out and around and make you feel good, and make others feel good too!
Another daily practice to grow love is to finish “I am” statements in a loving manner. Language is a strong force for programming change within, and the two words “I am” are creative and powerful beyond measure.
There is a profound difference between the energy of saying “I am ugly and fat and no one will ever love me,” and “I am beautiful.” Likewise, there is a difference between the very common, “I am bored,” and “I am vital and alive.” If you live in the breezes of negative self-expression you will feel negative, and vice versa.
Example #2
I am full of goodness. I am kind. I am healthy. I am considerate. I am an excellent friend. I am strong and organized and capable. I am happy. I am blessed. I am in love with my husband. I am renewed every day.
Again, it’s not complicated. Anytime and anywhere, we can make these statements to ourselves, and if we’re really feeling it, we can share them with others and lift their spirits as well. “You are beautiful. You are smart. You are graceful. You are wise.” We can include each other. We can expand our enthusiasm and good feelings outward. Doing this is fun, and we can’t lose. It’s a win-win proposition.
Simple but Not Easy:
The Importance of Boundaries
If we have the courage to be authentically ourselves, keep an eye out for what blocks us, develop positive self-talk and positive behavior habits, and refuse to overcomplicate things in our minds, we can grow love in our lives. We can look for loveliness everywhere, and if we’re looking for it, we will find it. It seems almost impossibly simple, but over time, with our consistent attention, we will begin to feel more love, both for ourselves and for the people we encounter.
And as we become more loving, we attract more love. We have an open drawbridge and an open door. And this is a beautiful thing. But if love is unfamiliar territory for us, we must proceed with caution. Newly grown love within us is like a sprouting plant. It needs care and protection. We must learn to watch out for those who would take advantage of our happiness and effervescence.
I used to give my love recklessly. I assumed that everyone wanted what was best for me because I wanted what was best for them, and it all felt like a happy love party with nothing but good feelings and warm fuzzies. I was like a dog wagging my tail and wiggling at everyone who came around. But smart dogs will sniff the hand of those they encounter before they let loose their full joy. And if they smell something that makes them suspicious, they know intuitively to hold back just a bit and wait for more information.
I was not so good at holding back, and I encountered a handful of individuals over the years who wanted to exploit my love but not return it, to take from me all that I would give and then demand more. And I willingly participated, which is something for me to own, and I do.
All kinds of dysfunctional behaviors masquerade as love, and we grab onto them with high hopes. No one is more confused than we are when we end up feeling stressed out, manipulated, and possibly abused. Part of learning how to properly love ourselves and others is learning to be discriminating, to watch for red flags, and to become able to identify exactly who and what we are facing. It may not always be love in other people. Sometimes it’s addiction, sometimes it’s lust, and sometimes it’s possessive fear.
We can still be loving underneath, but in a calm and present way: steady, curious, and watchful. We must be cognizant of our responsibility to protect ourselves from harm. Perhaps the way to think about this is to imagine that at the end of our drawbridge there are two gates, an “in” gate and an “out” gate. We can keep our drawbridge down, but close either gate when necessary, or close either one partway. If we are unsure, we must proceed with caution. We, and we alone, are the gatekeepers of our loving energy, and how seriously we take this job will determine our sense of safety and well-being.
The neutral mindset we spoke about in Chapter One is appropriate to consider in light of this discussion. We have a tendency to project positive or negative characteristics onto others based more on our internal state—our hopes and fears—than on the reality of who is actually in front of us. The point is to not jump to conclusions. If we find ourselves thinking we know who someone is and wanting to trust him or her implicitly, that is a red flag. Our internal voice, the same one that tells us when to stop eating, will guide us in this regard as well. So as we are learning to hear it, this is another place to listen for its wisdom. It will likely tell us to slow down and remain on guard, but we habitually blow right past it. We insist that we know better, but we generally pay a price, and often quite a steep one, for our insistence.
Appreciation Exercise:
Visualization for Healthy Boundaries
Visualizing the two following scenarios will help you appreciate your role as a loving protector of your beautiful self. In addition, you will come to understand the importance of observation and self-awareness in setting healthy boundaries. You will need a few minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time and an open mind.
Knowing that you can count on yourself to keep a lookout for danger and are able to set and maintain boundaries to protect yourself from harm will give you a sense of self-appreciation. Your safety is your responsibility, and learning to trust yourself to know what you are and are not willing to risk is empowering and affirming.
Review and Daily Action Plan
We must approach any new situation and any new people with as much caution as we approached the pool in the exercise above. Knowing who we are and what does and does not serve us is our ongoing job.
It is also our job to know when and where we are blocked to loving feelings, and to clear the blocks by being forgiving. We need to have the courage to be authentically ourselves; to continually grow love in our lives by being willing to communicate what’s going on inside of us, and to express our appreciation and our compassion for the people and the things that populate our world. This is the way that we habituate ourselves to a life full of love. This is how we step up to experience the rewards of the real thing. It is not a game, not a farce, and not reserved for only a lucky few. Love is a way of being and a way of seeing that begins with willingness and ends with appreciation. It creates good feelings and makes for good living, and we can claim it for ourselves any time that we want.