A Deeper Dive into Self Love
I was in love. I could feel him thinking about me and it would melt my whole body. I felt safe and open…trusting. I felt like the world was full of miracles and as long as we were together everything would be ok. We talked everyday and it felt like we were always connected, even if we were not together physically. It was like we had a telepathic bond that was always flowing energy back and forth to each other. At times I could not tell where he ended and I began. It was almost as though we were one person.
But then slowly he stopped texting, calling and seemed irritated when I tried to initiate conversation. How could he pull away from this obvious soul mate connection? Doesn’t he crave the connection like I do? Why do I need his touch, need his connection. Why am I so needy? Why am I chasing after someone who seems to run further and further away the more I try to connect? Why do I feel so disempowered and weak?
This story line played out many many times for me through the years. I would have a beautiful connection with someone for a while until it eventually started to dissolve and unravel and leave me in a hopeless mess.
What I am about to share with you is my journey from feeling needy and clingy to feeling strong empowered and full of self love.
When I started dating I had an expectation that if I dated someone and we slept together we were going to be married and be together forever. When my first relationship broke down it shattered my reality. How could this happen? I gave myself completely to this person only to have him leave. I did everything he wanted me to do, pleased him in every way sexually, but he still left. I was the perfect girlfriend almost wife like, but he didn’t appreciate everything I brought to the table. What was I missing?
In the next relationship I would try even harder to be a good girlfriend. Catering to his every need and whim only to have him get bored and eventually leave. I had one lover say to me…”You are like Chocolate cake, yummy and so sweet, but you can’t have chocolate cake even day, its too much. You’re too nice, too good, too much.”
This confused me because I thought that if I did everything he wanted, pleased him and gave him the world, he would love me and want to give it all back to me…but it never worked. The more I gave, the less I received and the faster they would run away,
Does this sound familiar? Do you constantly give in relationship and find that your needs aren’t being met? Do you show up again and again in love only to find that the deep loving connection you thought you had with your partner has somehow scared them and driven them away?
Have you ever heard the phrase, Treat others they way you would want to be treated?” Well in this case we have to tweak it a bit. “Treat yourself the way you would like other people to treat you.”, Here is what I realized about the energy of connection in relationships.
The more I loved and honored myself, the deeper of a connection I could have with another person without feeling needy or clingy. When I filled myself up first with love and nurtured the connection that I had with my body and Divine Source the better my relationships became.
But if I dedicated myself entirely to the relationship, if I took my energy and love and focused it solely on my partner and sacrificed my own life to give him everything he needed, our relationship would slowly disintegrate. And here is why…
We are meant to get our primary energy and love from our connection to Divine Source. Divine Source is an unlimited energy source that we always have access to. It fills us and gives us all of the energy that we need when we are willing to receive it and are grounded in our body.
When we get into a romantic relationship we feel safe and open ourselves up to feel more of Divine Source energy. The love we experience feels amplified and we start to believe that our partner is the Source for our love and well being. When we make that shift we go from an unlimited energy and love source to a finite one. Even though the energy we feel in a romantic relationship feels amazing it will eventually stagnate in your energy field. We are not meant to live off of another person’s energy, as romantic as that sounds.
What happens when we start depending on that other person for our energy and love needs is that we get filled up with their energy which feels good in the beginning because it’s filling in the places we haven’t been loving ourselves. All of the sudden we feel complete and whole. But it’s not sustainable. The energy we have gotten from that other person will eventually stagnant in our body causing us to not be able to access our own energy and power. That is why we need more and more connection with our partner and why it seems like there is never enough.
After a particularly challenging breakup I was guided into a practice of connecting with my Higher Self or the Divine Lover as I called it. The way I experienced it was like the personality aspect of God. Someone I could talk to who had access to more wisdom and knowledge that I had…but also realizing that it was also me…a higher vibrating part of me.
It is with this part of me I learned how to love myself in a more expansive way. Growing up I was told that I needed to love myself, but when I asked how you do that, no one had a good answer. I said, “Look, I am willing to love myself if you tell my exactly what to do!” No one could tell me how, so I went on a life long quest to figure out the steps.
What the Divine Lover did for me was to give me a place to pour all of my love into and have it come back to me. I would send it as much love as I could and it would reflect back down to me in equal measure. I would sing it love songs and feel the love radiating back to me as I focused on love more and more. I would go for walks in the woods and wish I had someone to walk with and share my adventures with and I would hear…”What am I chopped liver?” Which would make me laugh. This aspect of me is often really funny and makes me laugh.
Instead of looking for someone outside of myself to pour all of my love and attention on, I was focused on my body and my connection with my Divine Lover. I was learning how to feel love. How to feel safe enough to accept love and let it in.
Are you an over giver? When we over give to a partner it’s like a firehose of love and energy. The stream can become so strong that there is no way for the other person to give back to us. At times we have so much love building up inside of us that we feel the need to dissipate it. But what if we are given this love because we are supposed to be learning how to experience receiving it in our own body. Our body craves energy and love and we think it’s suppose to be coming from outside of ourselves, but what if the love that we think we are supposed to be giving away is actually the love we need to feel and let in? What if in order to really fully love others we have to learn how to feel this love for ourselves?
Sometimes we are scared to receive love because we don’t think we are worthy of it. If we are unable to receive love and we are being flooded with it with a constant flow from Source who knows that we need it, what can we do? We try to give it to others. We try to push this love into others and get upset when they can’t receive it…but it started with us. We were not able to receive our own love so they are actually a projection of our own unwillingness to receive our own love.
This brings us to how we treat ourselves is how others will treat us. I remember trying to tell partners what to do, how to love me. I was trying to “Do Receiving”. OK do this and I will feel love, do that and I will feel love. But I was trying to control the love coming from others in order to feel safe. I was trying to “Do Receiving”. Which is not receiving. It’s controlling.
Receiving is about feeling safe enough to open. Becoming vulnerable and opening up to the love that is all around you and wants to come in. But if you are not attuned to how to do this you have to practice first with your own love with yourself.
The way I started this process was making a list of all of the things I wish a partner would say to me. Then I made a recording of them and would listen to it daily. Next I made a love song playlist that I would listen to to get me into the vibration and feeling of love. I would take myself on dates, buy myself flowers, tell myself loving supportive things…Basically I would treat myself the way I had been treating my partners my whole life. I started pouring all of the love I was giving others into myself and things started to change.
I no longer felt clingy or needy. I stopped looking outside of myself for love and validation because I was getting a constant stream of it daily from myself. I said “I Love You” to myself many times a day and it became my inner tape loop when I started to become worried or stressed out.
The other day I was thinking about something amazing that happened that I wanted to share with someone, but there was no one that I could think of that would understand it or appreciate it the same way I did…and then a thought popped up that said. “What would happen if you could just sit with yourself and appreciate this moment, without trying to dissipate it. Without trying to have someone else validate it for you. What if you could just sit and feel what it’s like to be in this moment. Feeling what you feel.” And that is when I realized how much we have been programmed to look outside of ourselves to get permission. Permission to feel a certain way, permission to do what we want to do or think the way we want to think. How much are we as a collective just able to feel something and just sit with and fully feel the feeling and be ok with it.
After hearing all this you might think that I don’t think that I don’t like relationships at all, but that is not true! I love love! And someday I wish to be a loving, fulfilling healthy relationship, but in order to do that I believe I have to know on the deepest level that I have my own back and I am comfortable with giving and receiving love within my own being. If I know that I am full and complete within myself, my partner is off the hook. It’s not their job to fill me up with love and energy or to make me happy. That’s my job. Their job is to fill themselves up with love and energy and to find their own happiness so that when we come together, we get to share life as whole complete individuals helping each other to remember that connection to Source and to do what ever it is we are meant to do in the planet.
If you are stuck in the pattern of over giving and find yourself in a running and chasing relationships and you want to find your way to self love and self worth again please go to www.joannaalbrecht.com to sign up for a free week of training. There are videos that teach you the energetics of how to release energy and attachments that keep you in an addiction loop. You will also learn how to feel safe and grounded in your body so you can start practicing giving and receiving love. Looking forward to exploring this self love journey with you!