Love is difficult to capture in words because it encompasses so many things. A dictionary might say it’s a feeling of deep affection or a strong affection for another person. Yet love is far more than a feeling; it is a force, an energy. Love is not only something you send to or receive from others; it is also an energy you connect to and experience.
Love is not something you want but rather a calling to who you are.
Redefining Love
Think of love as formless, timeless, limitless, boundless, abundant energy swirling around within and around your body. Authors such as Richard Gordon and speakers such as Christie Marie Sheldon have established this phenomenon in recent years.
In love, anything and everything is possible. It doesn’t matter whether you are awake or asleep, young or old, poor or rich. You already have love, and different than having food or water, love does not come in a limited supply. Love is not something you want but rather a calling to who you are. You are far more than what you physically can do or see. Love is in you, around you, part of your creation.
What About Romantic Love?
People often confuse passion with love. Each of us is inundated with images of passionate sex, passion for looks, money, possessions, fame, power, and attention. Let me set you straight: Love does not crave any of those things, because it already is everything.
This universal love is also respectful of who you are and what you need. It is capable of removing what you don’t need while retaining what you do. Similar to how you might pull the weeds from a garden without disturbing the root system of a plant, love releases negative emotions while supporting your intuition and ability to sort things through.
Don’t Believe These “Love Lies”
“Love lies” is a term that captures a branch of self-limiting beliefs about love. Self-limiting beliefs stem from feeling “less than” or being told (by yourself or someone else) you are not enough. Love lies spin off these beliefs. As a result, you may find yourself being rather sarcastic, consumed by negative thoughts, or bitter about love.
Love is energy, you are energy, therefore you are love.
Left unrecognized, these little lies help build protective walls, hardening the energy around your heart. This makes love seem obscure, sketchy, and rather elusive.
Nothing gives me more satisfaction than exposing a love lie. It is like finding the clues to a mystery or solving a puzzle. Here are some untruths I have come across either in myself or in my clients:
- You either have love or you don’t.
- You have to wait for love to come to you.
- Love isn’t for everyone.
- Love means “taking care of someone else.”
- If your family didn’t tell you or show you that they loved you, then you pretty much grew up without love.
- Love hurts.
- Love shows up only when you are a size two or have lots of money.
- You need love.
- It is rare to find true love.
As you ponder these statements, know that what makes them false is that each of them is dependent on love coming from somewhere or someone else. Lie, lie, lie, false, false, and more false. Love is inside you. People and circumstances reflect what you feel inside.
These lies are based on your fear of losing love or perhaps never getting a chance to have it in the first place. (FYI, never having love is complete bullshit. Love is energy, you are energy, therefore you are love.) Love does not come to you, it comes through you. You don’t need love: You can’t need something you already have.
I must confess that for most of my life, I confused choosing love with taking care of someone else. It didn’t matter if it was a friend, boyfriend, relative, or complete stranger; love was always a way for me to reach out and give something to someone. It never occurred to me to find love within. Yet the love within yourself is the strongest source.
How Fear Disconnects You from Love
So if this wonderful universal love is inside you and all around you all the time, why can’t you feel it? Because fear has gotten in the way and blocked your access to it.
You are probably used to thinking of fear in a very literal sense — being afraid of spiders, for example. But the fear I am talking about in this book is an even bigger concept than that. I’m talking about fear that’s such an inherent part of your life that you don’t even realize it’s there anymore.
It controls your decision-making, negates your ability to love yourself, and forces you to be less, do less, feel less. This type of fear shows itself in a variety of ways — such as insecurities, anger, stress, anxiety, blame, doubts, jealousy, lack of self-worth, and straight-up bullshit lies.
Are You Subconsciously Living in Fear?
But, you say. I’m not afraid of love! I’d do anything to have more love in my life! I believe you, but I think you might actually have some sub-conscious fear in your life. How do I know? Well, Dr. Bradley Nelson, author of The Emotion Code, reports that human beings are only about 10 percent conscious.
In other words, you might only be aware of about 10 percent of what is influencing you. Your fears might be lurking in that other 90 percent. The good news: Choosing to access universal love will help you clear out those fears and reclaim the path to love.
Tuning into love in the midst of negativity is like pulling the plug on fear. It will drain away and love will prevail.
The tricky part is that your conscious mind is influenced by your subconscious mind. The subconscious is the invisible part of you easily swayed by images and subliminal messaging. When you veg out in front of the television or computer, fear, negativity, and toxicity are more likely to reach you. Fear works like novocaine, numbing your ability to experience love.
You may be subconsciously buying into beliefs, illusions, and fantasies that play off a “lack of” or fear mentality rather than love. The truth is, love and fear do not mix. In fact, negativity hates love. It is its worst nightmare. Tuning into love in the midst of negativity is like pulling the plug on fear. It will drain away and love will prevail.
In my healing practice, I have discovered that two of the greatest fears human beings have are that they will never really know what it is like to be truly loved by others — in other words, that they will never “find love” — and that they will never know how to love themselves.
When you are afraid you won’t find love or keep love, you may end up “chasing love” or going overboard to find it. For example, you might want to “be nice” but then overcompensate by regularly doing things that others are more than capable of doing for themselves.
In other words, you try to “find” love via nice deeds. For example, I have seen grown, intelligent women sprint home after working all day to cook dinner for a boyfriend who could be cooking for himself.
Unfortunately, when you “find love” under these circumstances, it’s attached to fears of not being worthy of love. Universal love is never attached to worthiness — but you can see how well-meaning but fear-based actions can easily cause you to misinterpret the universal love.
Now, if you are like me, you are probably thinking, Crap, this choosing love thing is going to be HARD. You may be realizing how much of your life has been driven by fear and how difficult it will probably be to undo. I get it; I have been there. In the beginning, I was all geared up to take on the challenge.
What I have learned, and what I hope you will learn from my choices [notice I don’t say mistakes; I don’t believe in them] is that choosing love actually comes from a place of non-effort. What do I mean by that? The more you try, the less you actually feel. It is the trying that leads to tension.
Love happens when you sense and feel the direction. Something inside of you softens, listens, and trusts the path you are choosing regardless of the outcome. So don’t worry about the workload. It’s all gonna go smoothly when you give up trying to control love, I promise.
Subconscious Fear Thwarts Your Efforts to Choose Love
Science is finding that if you have a subconscious belief that you are fat or unworthy, or that life is unfair, your subconscious mind will knock out your efforts — unless, of course, you release these beliefs and build new ones (which we’ll do in this book). Your subconscious mind will return you to your “original state” of feeling fat or unworthy despite your efforts to change them. Only truly releasing those beliefs will allow you to build new ones.
Choosing love aligns you with your soul. Your soul is the part of you that remembers where you came from (love). So to choose love means to bring your soul back into your body. It is the blocks of fear that get in the way, and as these blocks are removed, you will be able to experience love’s power.
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