Chapter Four: I am Love

Chapter Four - I Am Love: This is a fundamental chapter. Sometimes it can feel nearly impossible to choose love when we are put in a challenging position. But what would happen if you chose love more than not? You may be surprised how choosing love will radiate the earth around you. 

Transcript

Chapter Four

I Am Love 

Positive Affirmation: I am love. Today I declare that I love myself. I do not require anything for this statement to be true. The most important opinion to me is what I think and feel about myself. 

This chapter is all about love. If you consistently say to yourself, “I choose love,” or “I am love,” your life will change radically. This simple yet profound statement can be life altering. If you desire a life of peace and love, you must first become those things in your own mind and body. And you become love when you embrace it and seek it out. By “seeking love” I mean loving self and loving others. By embracing these two ideals, a greater depth of love is revealed. The depth of love is as endless discovery. The deeper you go, the greater it gets. 

We all have an unconscious drive to seek love. Love is our truest nature and it is also the nature of God. Therefore, in our unconscious search for love, we are really seeking God. When you observe two people in love, you catch a glimpse of the potency of love. Their love for each other creates an aura that radiates around them. Love is another name for God, so when two come together in love, God is present. That is what makes up the potency of the aura created by two people in love.

In Matthew 18:20, Jesus says: “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them” (KJV). 

Choosing Love

Choosing love is key, but making the conscious choice of love means taking responsibility. When you make the choice for love, you are telling yourself that all things except love are now up for review. 

Everything you create and support from that point forward must be loving. It may take time getting used to loving yourself, but, with practice, it gets easier and, finally, automatic. Loving self is the foundation for all other love; therefore, it must come first. 

An effective and helpful tool for this process is to ask yourself: “Is this choice I am making honouring my love for self?” It is always up to you to choose. The key is to keep making that choice until it becomes the only choice to make. 

Loving Self

Love for self does not have to be earned. Love’s nature is gratuitous. It comes to us freely and without reason. Nor are you ever less worthy of love. We all make mistakes, but when you do, that is the time to love yourself more. There is never a good reason to put your self-worth up for debate. You are not required to live a flawless life. Measuring perfection would require a benchmark, a previous standard to meet. Your life has no benchmark. What has come before may only be a fraction of your perfection. Why would you ever want to keep yourself enslaved to a standard from the past? 

When life goes astray, that is the perfect opportunity to be gentle and kind toward yourself. Denying self-love would only drag you down, causing you to feel worse. By making the choice to love yourself in your good times, you have an easier time making the same choice during difficult or stressful periods. That is why choosing love is so important. Removing your love for self is like cutting off your air supply. Love is a vital need for a healthy and purposeful life. 

My Experience of Loving Self

The bottomless nature of love is revealed to you when you fall in love with yourself.

For many years, I treated myself very poorly. I found it difficult to love myself. This was the deep, dark secret that I hid below my anger. I didn’t feel good enough, and that caused me to believe I was worthless. I found it difficult to love myself because I didn’t understand the nature of love. I couldn’t give myself something I didn’t have. I was unaware that we don’t possess love; love possesses us. 

Opening myself to love required me to be still and rest my attention inwardly. But not with my mind. With practice, I realized I was already full of love. The deeper I rested in myself, the more love I found. The act of loving myself put me in touch with my soul. I realized that love had never left me. It was I that had left the presence of love. By spending time with my soul, I also realized that when you love yourself, you are surrounded by the presence of God. Love for self not only nourishes us but enhances our relationship with the Divine. 

Loving self draws love into us, and I have come to know that I can ask for love and it will come. No matter where you are or what you are doing, love is accessible. It is as close as your next breath. Applying self-love is not an action you only perform once. It is a practice that you bring into your life and eventually it becomes second nature. 

Conditional Love

Love makes a lousy prisoner. While in custody, it will begin to dissolve and vanish from your entrapment. When you personalize love, it is reduced to a possession and its power is diminished. Love’s omnipotent power is only fully present when you stake no claim to it and give it freely to the world around you.

Love is not a possession. It is a gift that is shared. But how you were taught to love doesn’t always teach the true spirit of love. Children are often praised and shown love if they are good and act according to the rules. If they are useful, entertaining, or talented, they may even receive extra love. This can cause the child to have an expectation that love comes as a reward: do something nice for someone, and you get more love. 

In turn, this teaching can later create problems in relationships. When you give your love to another, you may have the expectation that you will receive something in return for your generosity. When love is given for reward, or for the need of a reward, it is a love that may be conditional.

Removing the conditions from love requires a closer look at oneself. Personal traumas are one of the greatest referring factors that drive people to be conditional with love. You may have been hurt by a stranger or, worse yet, by someone you love. Where do your walls come up and make you pull back from another? If you were to make a list of reasons why you would terminate a relationship with a friend or a partner, some of the reasons on your list would correlate with your morals, and a great many would be in correlation with your traumas. Your old wounds can disempower you and cause you to retract your love. 

All the conditions you place on your willingness to love will hold you back and disempower you in the process, but by releasing your traumas, your ability to love unconditionally occurs more freely.

End the Self-Violence

A crucial step toward loving yourself is to end self-violence. People are violent with themselves for many reasons, none of which are positive or productive. You will need to set down any dialogue in your mind or behaviour that is not respectful and kind to yourself, including overly critical self-analysis. Loving yourself means that you don’t scream at yourself in your mind. If the things you say to yourself would be offensive coming from another, you need to create a healthier dialogue in your mind. 

My friend, Jeff Roberts, shared this story about himself with me. Plagued by depression and suicide attempts, alone in his head and hiding from his feelings and emotions, he truly was a lost soul. At the beginning of a ninety-day program for flushing substances out of his body, surrounded by strangers who were also suffering emotional pain, he had no choice but to face his emotions head-on. He had to re-learn himself, find himself, and that was a very frightening thing to do. 

One unique yet impactful exercise given to him was to write down all the negative things he had told himself throughout the day. The list was long and what he wrote was terrible and filled with many negative thoughts. “Why bother?” “I hate myself.” “I hate my life.” “I am a loser.” Once he was finished the list, he handed it to his counsellor. 

During the course of the next six weeks of group therapy and one-on-one counsel, he completely forgot about his list. Then, one sunny day while resting in a hammock, another person taking the program approached him. This person, using a negative tone, began saying unsavory things to him like: “Why are you even here?” “You’re just a loser.” “You’re just wasting time.” 

After a few minutes, Jeff began to get angry and frustrated with this person and was getting ready to hit him. Jeff’s counsellor intervened, stuck a piece of paper in his face and said, “If he can’t say these things to you, why on earth is it okay for you to say them to yourself?” 

Jeff was astounded. From that point forward, he was cautious about how and what he thought about himself. He still needed to practice some mindfulness technique like self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-love, but it was a powerful experience—one he felt everyone could benefit from.

It is easy to start being unkind to yourself, but it is much harder to stop the dialogue in your mind once it becomes a habit. It starts with snide remarks like, “That was dumb,” or occasionally calling yourself an idiot, but over time, these statements can turn into, “I am dumb” or “I am an idiot.” This happens when you personalize these statements. You turn them onto yourself. These remarks become possessive and, in saying them, you transmute the idea into your new-formed identity. 

The longest standing battle in your life is not being fought outside of yourself; it is the one that is happening in your mind. The arguing and temper tantrums in your mind will continue until you decide that the war is over. When you decide to love yourself, your desire to wrestle with your internal conflictions loses its spark. You begin to realize that some dialogues are not worth the effort it takes to keep them alive. 

The irony here is that it takes two people to have an argument. So who are you arguing with? When you notice you are getting frustrated, pause and ask yourself, “What do I require in this moment?” Often, all the moment requires is for you to take a deep breath and relax.  

Self-violence is any thought, behaviour, or action that takes you away from your relationship of loving yourself, and it happens in many ways. It is not just the angry voice in your head. It is also the voice that repeats the same commentary that’s trapped in your mind. When a collection of thoughts causes you stress, worry, or anxiety, it is violent to allow yourself to keep thinking those thoughts. If you notice that you’re having “looping” thoughts, remember that you can choose to set them down. Tell yourself that you are choosing love, not a war in your mind. This doesn’t mean that you will never subject yourself to unpleasant situations; however, if your choices don’t bear fruit, be willing to make the necessary changes to support your love for self. 

If the voice in your head tells you that you can’t do something or that you’re not good enough, don’t listen. Reject that voice. It will get quieter and less obtrusive every time you don’t talk back to it. Eventually, it will become only a whisper that tries to get your attention from time to time. 

The love you experience corresponds to the love you have for yourself. In time, as you learn to love yourself, the world will begin to reflect that back to you. Like attracts like. If you’re loving with yourself, you will draw loving people to you. If you are grumpy, you might just find yourself surrounded by lots of grumpy people. By rejecting the self-defeating commentary, you will no longer feel that you cannot do whatever you put your heart to, and you will realize that you are good enough. 

Self-violence can sometimes be a habit that is created over an extended period, so working your way out may require dedication and practice. Self-violence can also be a learned behaviour from your environment. If necessary, place sticky notes around your home to remind you to be gentle and loving toward yourself.          

            Ending self-violence can be as simple as making the decision to be kind to the world, to other people, and to yourself. Kindness is a simple and effortless way to love yourself and others. Kindness is love in motion, for hidden inside the act of kindness is love. 

Love versus Fear

Fear cannot live in a house love rules.

Fear is a healthy response to dangerous situations in life; however, if nothing is happening that warrants fear to arise in you, it can become a disempowering behaviour that can be detrimental to your mental health and overall wellbeing. One of the ways to access deeper levels of love is to work at reducing your fears. Fear has a way of creating the illusion that you are trapped in your current situation. It also prevents you from going after your heart’s destiny. 

 Love yourself enough to reach for your dreams. Love gives your dreams permission to become your reality. Look for the ways fear has limited you and kept you in the safety box. Many people today pile loads of stress and anxiety on their plates because of fear. Benign sounding statements like, “Eat all your food because there are starving children in the world” are based in fear. You can’t eat enough green beans to cure starvation, nor do you need to fixate on the world’s problems over dinner. There are many examples of fears that get passed on from one generation to the next. 

It is healthy to have logical fears, but when fear creates immobility in you or causes you to over-feed your children, you have taken it too far. Most fears are not about your present reality unfolding around you. They come when your mind takes you into a past or future moment—one you don’t want to live or relive. If fear is immobilizing you, ask yourself if what you are fearful of is happening at that moment. Is your fear valid?

Understanding Fear

Fear is not the opposite of love. Love stands alone as a powerful force that has no opposite. Some might think that the opposite of love is hate, but this is simply not true. Hate is an emotion that we experience, but love is far greater than an emotion. We can feel love and express love, but that doesn’t define the nature of love. Love is divine. God and love are inseparable, for love is to God as the weave is to cloth. Therefore, love is omnipotent. Hence, love cannot have an opposite, since that would infer that God has an opposite. Conversely, when you are fearful, it diminishes your ability to love freely. Fear weakens your spirit and dissolves your power to a finite nature. In a world of problems, make none of them your own. This doesn’t mean you abandon being compassionate and caring. It means you don’t let the fear of a situation disempower you. 

Worry, like fear, is also a great slayer of love. Worry is born out of fear. Worry is fear taking ownership of your mind and body. Make worry an unwelcome guest in your life. Make no allowance for it to contaminate your mind and body. The problem with worry is that it has the same effect on you as fear. It lands at your feet, weighing you down, rendering you powerless. Love, on the other hand, strengthens body and mind while empowering you to accomplish the most seemingly impossible tasks. Love’s reach is beyond the mind’s comprehension. When you notice worry and fear taking over your mind, start a new practice of inserting love. For example, if your partner is driving home in a bad snowstorm, instead of worrying about them, say prayer and send them love. Be creative and replace your fears with courage, hope, love, acceptance, or even rational thinking. Remember, most fears involve you being a fortune teller—they have you predicting a future moment that has yet to come. 

Finding Love

You are like an ocean. On the surface, there may be waves and storms. However, you contain deep, still waters. May your heart be the anchor that draws you into the depths of your soul during your darkest night. For your heart always knows its way home to love, even in the fiercest of storms.

You do not need to search for love. You just return to it within yourself. Your love does not come from another. Believing that is a critical error. The nature of love is gratuitous and comes to you freely and without reason. If you ask, love will arise. Love’s reach is infinite. It can find you in your darkest times just by you asking for it and being willing to receive it. Love doesn’t live in a faraway place or a difficult space. It is here now. Once you find love within, you can expand it by turning your attention on it, then resting in the love found in you. 

Resting in your love can be like a meditation. It can also be a wonderful way to return to a calm space when you are experiencing emotions or elevated levels of stress and anxiety. Think about a time when you were loved or when you loved a person, place, or thing. Call up that memory and feel it. Once you can feel it, now just rest in it. If other thoughts arise, just let them float away, and rest in the feeling of love. 

Characteristics of Love

The more love you put into life, the more life you find in love.

A life without love is not a life at all. Love brings understanding to the most unexplainable situations because love pulls you deeper into yourself and connects you with a Divine wisdom. God is like a radio station, and love is what you tune in to in order to be connected. God is the transmitter; the Holy Spirit, the wave; and you, the receiver. 

Love’s silent nature embraces you and brings meaning to your endeavours. It knows perseverance. For it is there with you during your toughest times, giving you just the right support you need to push you further than you thought possible. Love fits anywhere, anytime. Love is malleable. Love’s nature is simple yet impossible to describe because of the depth that it contains. Love is without limit. There is no cap on how much of it is available for you to experience and share with yourself and the world. Your life is one grand opportunity to love, and it is in Love that you find your greatest instructions for life. 

When you practice unconditional love, you are less likely to judge yourself and others. This type of love allows you to see everyone from a different point of view. When you love, you find your likeness in, rather than your difference from, others. Seeing yourself in others makes you more compassionate. Learn to love yourself and the world and watch how life just gets sweeter by the day. 

If there were a recipe for a rich and full life, invariably you would find that love is the first and most essential ingredient.

Loving the World

Love is an ever-expanding presence in life that grows within you every time it is given away. This expansion enriches your life and enlivens your connection with others. Often, love is held back and reserved for a select few called family, friends, or partner. To hold back your love and to restrict it to a select few diminishes your ability to tap into a much larger aspect of love. Anytime you share your love with another there is an automatic presence of God in that moment. People often withhold their love for fear of getting hurt. This closes the door for more love to come to you. Unconditional love gives and never needs or takes. By expecting love to be returned when you give it, you are really just lending love. But when you lend something, it doesn’t always return in the same condition you lent it, if it returns at all.

When developing your love for the world, it is important to understand that some people are acting in accordance with their consciousness. When they act out and project their stress or anger on you, try to remember that this is an opportunity to practice unconditional love. When people act out, it’s a good indication that they are most likely in need of your love. By not taking other people’s problems personally, you’re able to stand back and just hold them in perfect love. When you do this, you provide a safe environment for others to rise to a greater potential within themselves. 

I am reminded of a Buddhist story. 

One day while Buddha was teaching, he was being harassed by a person in the crowd who kept yelling throughout his entire teaching. Someone in the crowd asked Buddha why he didn’t ask the antagonist to leave? Buddha’s response was: “If someone offers you a gift which you are not willing to receive, to whom does it belong?”

Source Unknown

This Buddhist teaching has been a power tool for me. It has taught me that I don’t have to take other people’s gifts of anger just because they are offering it to me. 

If you find it hard to practice unconditional love with strangers, start with your partner or a family member. In the moments where you are being tested by someone, try to remember they are offering a gift you are not willing to receive. It requires nothing to give your love to others. The transaction is free. Everyone can give unconditional love. 

At the very least, practice with yourself. Find the most lovable aspects of yourself and share them with the world. Give every person you meet a reason to think about you later. You can accomplish this by anchoring your focus on the love that resides in you. The nature of love is wise and all knowing. By sharing your love with the world, you will begin to see more love in your life. 

Without love, you are powerless. Love takes you into a direct relationship with God and delivers unending peace. The exploration of love leaves you rich in body, mind, and spirit. It evokes the power of God to dwell within your heart. The enlightened beings who have come to this earth have all radiated a love that has helped humanity evolve. By uniting the lover and the beloved within, you too radiate a Divine love that transforms the world. This union is developed when love becomes your reason and the driving force in your life. Each time you choose love, you purify and amplify your entire being. When you place nothing before your willingness to love, the result is peace.

The Three Choices to Make Daily

1. Be loving to yourself

2. Be loving to other people

3. Be loving to the world

What wonder is love? The entire universe cannot contain it yet it lives within us with full consciousness of its own magnificence.

Tools to Deepen Your Experience

1.     Spend a day choosing love. If someone speaks to you, respond with love. Everything you do, hold the intention of love while you do it. 

2.     Take some time to review where you need to bring more love into your life. Are there any places you need to insert more love for yourself or others? 

3.     Are you kind to yourself? This includes how you talk to yourself in your mind. If not, practice letting go of any dialogue that is unkind.

4.     Make a list of all the reasons why you would terminate a relationship with a friend or partner. Take some time to review why you feel the way you do. Are there any wounds that you need to heal from the past? 

5.     Do your fears trap you or cause you to hold back your love in fear of getting hurt? If so, take whatever steps you can to let go of your fear. Bring logic around your fears and insert love wherever you can. 

6.     Do you worry about things that are not happening in the moment? When you notice that you’re doing this, be willing to set down your worries. 

7.     Practice doing the meditation exercise on love. Think about a time when you were loved or when you loved a person, place, or thing. Call up that memory and feel it. Once you can feel it, now just rest in it. If other thoughts arise, just let them float away and rest in the feeling of love. It can also be helpful to slow down your breathing and hold your attention on your heart.

8.     For a day, practice holding everyone you see in love. Try to see yourself in others. Find similarities in everyone you meet.