Today large parts of the world are celebrating Valentine’s Day. I find it so strange that we live in a world where we have commercialised everything to the point that even the most important things in our lives can lose their meaning and significance.
I have always found the idea of Valentine’s Day a little absurd since love cannot be bought or sold. Love is not a commodity. And creating a day where we remind people of their own loneliness, disconnection, and insecurities seems like the opposite of loving to me. It seems almost cruel. I’m not saying don’t appreciate your significant other, but I am questioning why you need a reminder to do that, or why they only get to be seen and celebrated on ONE day of the year.
Love isn’t a feeling either. The feeling you feel when you say that you are in love, is infatuation, desire, or lust. Love, real love, is an ACTION. Love is a way of being in the world. It’s the opposite of judgement. When I choose to show up in loving, I’m choosing to suspend judgement and to truly see the essence of the person in front of me.
Love is where it all starts. Most importantly, it starts with self-love. However, for so many of us, it doesn’t start with self-love. In fact, for many of us, we find it far easier to love someone else than to love ourselves. And yet, can you really love someone else if you are in judgment of yourself or them?
Early on in my work with my coach, I discovered that I judged people A LOT. And I used to project a lot of my own stuff onto them. As I started working with my Inner Judge, the realisation dawned that I judge others, because I judge myself. And the truth is, the bigger your Inner Judge, i.e., the more you judge yourself, the more you will judge others.
So, if you are in constant judgement of yourself and others, can you really say that you love them? Or if your love is conditional on them meeting your expectations? Often, we love others when they show up the way we expect them to. We love them when they don’t disappoint us, but we get upset when they disappoint us.
And unfortunately, if we build our relationships on expectations, we are going to feel disappointed a lot of the time, because here’s the thing: other people can’t read your mind. And that is true 100% of the time. So, when someone does meet your expectations, they did so by sheer luck or accident. And sadly, you won’t even recognize or appreciate it, because you expected them to meet your expectations, so you will simply take it for granted.
On the other hand, if someone fails to meet your expectations, you will be upset, angry, disappointed, and perhaps even feel unloved. Do you notice how all of this is playing out in your own mind, and has nothing to do with the other person, who is simply innocently going about their live, completely unaware of the fact that they had just disappointed you?
So, what is love then?
True love – love as action – requires loving the person regardless of how they choose to show up. It requires dropping your expectations of them and giving them permission to show up as their real selves. It requires not holding grudges, or not getting upset or disappointed when they inevitably don’t do what you expect them to do.
True love – love as action – requires letting the people in your life that you love BE their own persons. It requires holding them as naturally resourceful, creative, and whole, and thus capable of making their own choices in life. It requires appreciating them for who they ARE, and not for who you want them to be. It requires noticing the ways that they are actually trying to show you that they care, instead of blaming them for not meeting your expectations.
This requires a lot of inner work. The most important piece of inner work it requires, is cultivating a sense of loving self-compassion and self-forgiveness. Loving someone in that way, requires learning to love yourself that way first. Alison Armstrong says, “you will only allow others to love you as much as you are willing to love yourself.”
If you cannot see, appreciate, and value yourself; if you cannot treat yourself with compassion, kindness, and respect, you will also not let others treat you that way. We teach others how we want to be treated by how we treat ourselves. Consider this for a moment…
Self-love requires reconnecting with your own innocence, your own youthful joyfulness, and appreciating that you too, are doing the best you can, that you too, are simply human, that you will make mistakes, and disappoint the people in your life, and that that is ok. Part of the human experience is learning to love yourself and others fiercely.
Loving fiercely
What does fierce loving mean? It means taking a stand for love instead of judgment. It means choosing to bring compassion to the situation, and it requires accepting that making mistakes is part of being human. Believe it or not, but we are all doing the best with what we know and have. We are all doing our best to figure out this thing called life, and we are all going about it in different ways. Because there is no right way to live life. There is only YOUR way.
At any moment when you start judging how someone is choosing to live their life, you have moved away from loving and you have moved into judgement of them. And sometimes we can’t help ourselves, because we think we know what the right way is. Or we tell ourselves that the reason why we are insisting that someone does what we want them to do, is because we love them. But can it really be love, if they are not free to choose?
Fierce self-love is radical in the sense that it requires that you also love the parts of yourself that you don’t like or approve of. It requires that you suspend judgement of yourself about things you feel shame about. It requires radical honesty, to love yourself WITH your flaws and faults and to be transparent about those flaws.
There is just something empowering about witnessing someone who can stand in the full truth of who they are. They claim their strengths and gifts – i.e., they know what they bring to the world that is uniquely them. AND they can also admit their weaknesses or the things they are still working on. They can appreciate their own journey of learning. They don’t put pressure on themselves to be perfect, and consequently, they also put less pressure and judgment on others to be perfect.
They have come to appreciate that perfection is an impossible goal and that striving for perfection is setting yourself up to fail. Demanding perfection from others, is like putting a mountain between you and them that makes it impossible to truly connect. And without connection, without real connection, we cannot thrive, we cannot survive.
Ultimately, we are social animals. We yearn for connection and belonging, and we find ourselves in this internal tug of war between seeking our own freedom and independence AND seeking to be deeply connected in meaningful ways to those we care about. To thrive in life, requires finding the balance between those two forces.
If we overdo for others and never honour our own needs, we become resentful towards the very people we claim to love the most, and we become invisible to ourselves. We start ignoring our own humanity, our own yearnings, to the point that life is simply about caring for others. However, see this is not real service, because there is judgment in this way of being. There is the expectation – even if it’s subconscious or subtle – that we be seen and appreciated for our sacrifices. And this is judgement and not love. This is wanting others to tell us that we are worthy or that we are good enough. In a way, we are judging THEM for not appreciating us more and for not living up to our expectations of how it should be.
Radical self-love means that we claim our own worthiness for ourselves; that we know we are worthy, regardless of what we DO in the world. We are worthy, because we have received the gift of life.
If we lean too much to the other side, where we always put our own needs, wants, and desires ahead of others or the relationships we are trying to cultivate, it throws us into disconnection. We cannot sustain a deep and meaningful connection with the people we love if we are not willing to also see and appreciate THEIR humanity and hold space for that. We cannot receive the support that is available to us, if we close ourselves off from connection and from receiving.
Radical self-love means suspending judgment and bringing loving to my relationships with others. It means I seek connection over perfection. It means I create agreements with those I love and hold them as individuals who will honour their word to themselves, instead of walking around with unspoken expectations of them and resenting them for not showing up the way I had wanted them to.
It means appreciating that everyone of us is doing the best we can. We are trying to figure out this thing called life and we each have our own path to complete – our own spiritual curriculum. Connection is a gift, because it allows us to share our experiences with those we love, and it makes our short stint here on this earth less lonely.
But any real connection we seek, starts with reconnecting with ourselves first. It starts with healing those wounds of disconnection that have been inflicted upon us as we have moved through our lives. It requires reclaiming our worthiness by reconnecting with our inner child and the innocence and joy they held. It requires replacing judgement with loving and acting in a way that give both yourself and others permission to show up fully.
It requires surrendering to the moment, and choosing to be present in THIS moment to fully experience it and the other person. It requires an appreciation that nothing is guaranteed and that we never know when our last moment will come. So, instead of wanting this moment to be different, the real joy is accepting this moment and surrendering to it fully, so that I don’t put any obstacles in the way of fully connecting with the person in front of me.
So, as you step into every moment of this month of love, my invitation is to slow down and choose the action of loving. Suspend your judgements of yourself and others. Get curious. And see what happens. When you inevitably falter, instead of berating yourself, try compassionate self-forgiveness. Appreciate how you were doing the best you could in the moment. And appreciate that little person inside who brought innocence, joy, and full loving into everything they did, and give yourself permission to reconnect with them.
You ARE love, when you choose to be…