Attracting the Love You Want

Hola Everybody,
Today's my friend, Shearoc's birthday! Happy birthday hun. May your journey be slow and joyful. Her birthday wish is to have 100 blog comments!

It's "Relationship Thursdays" and though I don't jack about it, it still doesn't stop me from writing about it!

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Attracting Healthy Relationships

All of us want to be loved, to experience a loving, healthy relationship. Still, I see so many people frustrated in their attempts to find such a relationship. It seems to me that people are often frustrated in their quest to find someone who will love them unconditionally in a mutually respectful relationship.

So what's the secret? How do we attract and find a healthy relationship into our lives? Well, I don't even own a cat, but I'm going to give you the answer to these questions -- for free. I learned this the hard way, because I am dense, but once I realized it and put it into practice, my relationships (and my life) have been so much more fulfilling and rewarding. I offer it here to you in the hopes that it will work for you.

Here:

The major obstacle that stands in the way of establishing a loving relationship with another person is that unloved part of ourselves. That unconscious aspect of ourselves that we have never fully loved nor accepted that stops us from bringing true love into our lives. Even if we were to encounter or bring in a healthy relationship into our lives, this unloved (and mostly unknown) part of ourselves acts to prevent us from enjoying and cultivating the new love we feel.

Here's why...

If you don't love yourself, you'll doom yourself to spending your precious life looking for someone else to do it for you. And the sad part is that it never works, because people who don't love themselves attract other people who don't love themselves. How can you get someone to love you unconditionally when you're not doing it for yourself?

When you truly love yourself deeply and unconditionally for everything you are and you aren't, you attract people who love and accept themselves deeply and unconditionally. If on a fundamental level you feel unlovable, then you will attract a lover who feels the same way.

In not loving ourselves, we cause ourselves to seek in desperation someone else to love us. The rationale being that if they give us enough love, our unlovable part will disappear. It never does. The only thing that will make that go away is loving ourselves unconditionally.

Many of us spend our lives running in fear from that unlovable part of us. When we finally stop and confront it, we usually discover it's a particular kind of fear, and there are only a very small number of them.

One that plagued me for years was the fear of abandonment. It's not hard to see how this fear played havoc within my relationships. In being afraid of being alone, I was compelled to either keep people distant so it wouldn't hurt when they left me, or clung to them so ferociously that they couldn't leave without dragging me with me. Clinging was like adding insult to injury and was extremely painful, by the way.

Another big fear is the fear of being smothered. An individual caught in the grip of this fear falls prey to the anxiety of losing one's freedom and individuality. Fearing that surrender to the union will cause them to lose their autonomy, they will keep people at arm's length -- just as a person who's afraid of drowning will keep an arm's length from the water's edge.

The good news about fear is that it's simply a pulsating energy of queasy sensations in your stomach area. The best description of fear I ever heard was from the renowned therapist, Fritz Perls who stated that fear is merely the excitement without the breath. And here the breath plays a significant role in overcoming fear. Breathe into the fear and watch what happens: it disappears like so many butterflies fluttering away.

If you dare to love that fear directly, you can actually feel the fear dissolve. In its place you will now feel a wide open space into which a new and wonderful relationship can enter. That's what happened to me, and what I see happen to people who muster the courage to love themselves and all their fears.

The grip of fear holds you in check and makes it impossible for you to enjoy good relationships. The reason? Fear makes you push people away when they get too close. That's because our fear gets associated with closeness and it stirs up our complexes when let people in. Therefore, in order to keep the fear under control, we keep people at a "safe" distance. We push down the very aspects of ourselves we need to bring out to the open. Having already judged ourselves as unlovable, we struggle painfully to have others love us. This is akin to a dog chasing its own tail: the more they try to love us, the faster we run from it.

It is only when we give that scary place a moment of love that we can begin to actualize a relationship based on healthy values.

Do you want to stop the merry-go-round? Do you desire to solve this problem right now? Fortunately, you can -- right now, right here, this very moment.

First get out of your head and tune into your body. Do a quick-scan of your body. Are you afraid that the ideas in this blog won't work for you? Do you fear that nothing will work, that perhaps you're fundamentally flawed and just aren't good at relationships? Do you despair that you will never enjoy a loving and intimate relationship with another?

Right now, feel all these so-called negative feelings and love them. Love them as you would unruly children who in actuality crave attention and care. These are the feelings we have abandoned and like orphaned children they press their dirty faces to the window panes of our minds and hearts, pleading to be let in, Invite them in, clothe them, sit them by the fire and kiss their dirty little faces. These are the parts of ourselves we have thrown to the curb, let them back in.

No one ever loves themselves deeply and unconditionally all the time. Don't expect to perfect at it, especially in the beginning. Begin with a moment or two of loving yourself and work up from that. Even better: simply commit to loving yourself. That way, when you find yourself not loving yourself (and you will), you'll always have the commitment to fall back on.

One important note: remember that loving yourself has nothing to do with egotism or conceit. That's not self-love, Egotistical people are desperately to get other people to love them, even though they feel deeply unlovable inside. That's why everybody sees through the tacky boasting: it's so phony and apparent to everyone else that the person is crying out for attention.

No, what I'm talking about here is genuine, heartfelt, humble love for yourself. It's a feeling of acceptance for everything you are and everything you aren't. Only Gods and Goddesses feel absolute love and acceptance for themselves all the time and no one is truly comfortable around Gods and goddesses -- they're too fuckin' infallible. The important thing for you, however, is to make the commitment to feeling that way. Making that commitment to loving yourself helps you develop a firm foundation to stand on throughout the ups ad downs of your life.

Say it now -- go ahead:

I commit to loving myself deeply.

Feel that idea in your body. Use it as the basis for the inner work -- your own evolution.

Love,

Eddie