Your longing for love is a gift and not a weakness.
I love empowering reframes. Reframing the way we think about something can bring about immediate and significant change and healing, and this is recognised in that it is one of the techniques taught through Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). Our feelings, behaviour and the way life is for us is governed by what we think and value. The lens we look through determines what we see and how we respond to what we see. Accepting that your thoughts and beliefs are not true, but rather just perceptions and interpretations, can be unsettling, but is ultimately freeing, because it opens you to limitless possibilities.
The only thing you can really change is your mind, yet that can change everything.
Jeffrey Allen
There is actually no ultimate truth in the physical realm, as even the way we perceive and interact with physical matter is only an interpretation of our physical senses that we then further interpret through language. Abraham Hicks and Dr Joe Dispenza teach that what we are experiencing as “what is” in the present is simply the residue of what we thought in the past and that we can create something different and new in the future by thinking new and different thoughts.
One of my growth areas this year has been admitting to myself and others that I need and want love. I experienced quite a lot of rejection from others and rejection of parts of myself when I was younger, and my response to that was to guard my heart and to wear masks that said I didn’t need anyone else and I could do everything for myself.
I never wanted to seem like I needed other people, or needed love, largely due to a fear of rejection. I didn’t want other people to see me as needy, or weak. My growth in terms of my beliefs around longing for love began when I realised that the life intentions that I had been writing for the last few years did not include an intention about being in a romantic relationship.
This growth deepened when I watched Ken Page’s video above a few weeks ago in which he reframes common beliefs about longing for love. What Ken said helped me to see longing for love in a new way, not as a weakness, but as something beautiful. There were two key concepts that stood out for me. Firstly, the concept of seeing longing for love as an expression of who you are as love and desiring love in all forms. Secondly, the idea of honouring and accepting your longing for love.
As I listened to Ken Page say the following it helped me to see my longing for love from a wider perspective:
when I talk about love, yes, I am talking about romantic love and spousal love, but I am also talking about all kinds of love. The feeling of natural flow of love, a love of things in our home, a love of our friends, our family, our pets. All of these forms of love fill our lives, and when we experience longing for love, it’s actually a kind of inner state of greatness. It’s the part of us that will not be seduced by a career that meets our needs, by money, by recreational activities. It’s the part of us that says I need and I want love and I won’t be happy with anything less.
Ken Page
I had been perceiving my longing for love from a partner and from friends and family as something separate, and as something negative that was connected with fear. As I listened to the video I began to re-view it as an expression of my soul as love; as part of my soul’s identity as oneness, and connection and beauty. I began to see that my longing for love was not coming from a wounding, it was an overflow of my deep sense of connection to soul, to Source. I began to see my longing for love from people not as a separate weak and needy aspect, but as part of that beautiful part of me which responds with such depth and sensitivity to music, and nature and meaningful stories and art. My longing for love comes from a deep sense of who I am as soul, as love. As I begin to see that with more clarity, I can see the strength of it.
Your longing for love is one of your greatest gifts, it has kept you from falling into a relationship where there is no love, and staying there. It has kept you willing to search, not to give up, to keep looking
Ken Page
The other point that stood out for me in this video was the idea of honouring your longing for love.
the next time you feel a sense of emptiness or longing or need for love, I encourage you not to think you need to transcend it, but in fact that you should honour it. The next time you feel that, allow yourself to feel that and say, “I am someone who needs love this deeply”, and sit with that for a moment after you say that and watch the influx of rich emotion and self-honouring that happens when you say that.
Ken page
This links into the self-love practice of accepting yourself no matter what you feel that Gay Hendricks talks about in his book Learning to Love Yourself and which I describe in chapter 5 in my book 10 Steps to Happiness.
Acceptance is the key to creating change. You don’t have to try and force your thoughts or feelings to be something they are not. You do not have to change or fix yourself before you can love yourself. When you love yourself for however you are feeling as you are now, you are saying it is okay for you to be who you are. You don’t NEED to change, but through this process, transformation can happen naturally and effortlessly.
Acceptance is the key to creating change. It opens up flow in your body, mind and emotions.
Janine Lattimore
One of the fundamental laws of change seems to be that things need space in order to change. They need room around them in order to find new form. So, for example, if you wish to change your feeling of depression into something more pleasant, you would not want to try to talk yourself out of it, tense against it, or take a pill to alleviate it. These approaches would deny space to the feeling . . . What would work . . . would be to allow the feeling to be . . . release your tight grip on it so that it has moving space. . . To accept the way it is does not mean we listlessly give up. In fact, accepting it the way it is has tremendous power. The first step in generating positive change is to see it clearly, whatever it is.
Gay Hendricks – Learning to Love Yourself
I experienced this as I stepped into accepting my longing for love and embracing myself for feeling it. As I did this it felt like a tension within me melted. My longing for love shifted from feeling like an emptiness and like a hole in my heart, to feeling like an openness; from a feeling of wounding and weakness, to clarity and strength.
By contrast, I realised that in not admitting to myself and others that I needed or wanted love, I was denying and shutting off parts of myself and creating tension within me and within my relationships with others. When we deny what we truly feel, or seek to transcend it somehow because we think it is wrong or bad, then we create dishonesty and separation. When we open to accepting those parts of ourselves which we have rejected for whatever reason, then we step into healing and wholeness. We become more coherent, and in that coherency, stronger in our alignment with who we truly are.
One of the other things that Ken talks about in this video which I would like to discuss is how longing for love is often equated with co-dependency. I don’t think co-dependency is rooted in a longing for love, I think it is rooted in a longing for security. Many people see love and security as the same thing, but they are not. Our human need for security is based in ego and fear. There is no fear in love. If the feelings that you have are based in fear and insecurity, then they are not based in love. True love liberates. It uplifts, it frees, and it holds dear but does not hold on. This is Spirit-based love as opposed to attachment and desire.
To love others in this way, we must first open to loving ourselves this way.
I have found that one of the best ways to love ourselves deeply, is to accept whatever we feel and to choose to love ourselves within whatever we are feeling, including a longing for love.
Embrace the gift of your longing for love as evidence that you are one who loves deeply. Celebrate it by doing what you love, being with those you love, loving yourself and seeing the beauty all around you.
Photo by Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash
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