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It’s been a while since I wrote here and it surprises me to see that almost a year has passed. A lot of you may still be getting some form of inspiration from what I have written and I am glad that I can contribute something positive to your life. It won’t be possible to fill in all the days that I have missed but I will be filling this site again with a lot of learnings and realizations that I have garnered over the past year and in my day-to-day life.

And the first is to be simply honest with yourself. One question that really resonated with me was “Does this work for you?” It was from an inspirational book that I read and rang true for me. Too many times, we put others first, thinking that by doing so, we are being good and spiritual. However, without genuinely knowing that we are contributing to another person’s welfare without sacrificing our own, we can only breed resentment out of this ‘generosity’. The first person we need to show generosity to is ourselves. Once we learn how it is to do that, only then can we offer the same to another.

Love and Light.

Image by Nadine Umali

Valentines, being tagged as the season for love, here are just some thoughts that will, hopefully, uplift your soul and provide some new insights.

These are from the Soul Journey whose webiste you may access here.

On…
Being In Love
When you love someone you should never try to give reasons why you love them. Whenever you explain your love you most likely make it conditional – conditional on the continuing presence of whatever those reasons are.
Love can never be explained. True love is not a concept. It is not even rational. Soul love is a state of being one with another. It is unconditional. In this state of love you live and die for another as you would for yourself. You cannot explain or justify that.
At a soul level – if not at a mental level – you know why you are together with another person. You need to trust that and allow that knowing to manifest in purposeful growth or service with them.
Mentalizing in any number of ways – explaining, justifying, defending, rationalizing, analyzing – creates distance where union was present. Love is of the heart and contains the intelligence and understanding of the heart rather than of the mind. This intelligence is not separative, as is the mental intelligence, but unitive, and therefore of the soul.
Love is not a verb. You do not love. You are in love or are not in love. When you are in love you are literally in its presence as it is in you. Feeling grateful and expressing gratitude for being embraced by love keeps it alive and nourished. This gratitude must then overflow into expressions of support, understanding, comforting and compassion toward others who are in real need. Selfish gratitude depletes love. Generosity feeds it.
Unconditional love is soul to soul contact that fully accepts the limitations of oneself and the other without judgment and with compassion.
To be in Love is the greatest privilege any human being can experience. To share that state of being with another is the greatest gift we can give.

Exercises:
In a meditative, reflective state take into your heart, one by one, the important people in your life, and experience the love you share, expressing deep gratitude for each.

Love and Light.

Google Images: guardian.co.uk

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

-D. H. Lawrence

In love, as in life, we were meant to be ‘wild’ - to be free and untamed. But too often, we find ourselves in the throes of some attachment which leaves us feeling sorry for ourself for not getting the love that we think we ought to have. I know. I am currently passing through that dark valley myself.

At the other end of that, though, I see a very different scenario - one where my free spirit naturally has its courage and where it radiates, rather than frantically seeks for, love. This is the stronger position. When we have love within ourselves, we can never fear the loss of another and we KNOW that we are enough.

In love, as in life, our happiness and freedom cannot depend on another. We will either fall into the trap of resentment or self-pity, both of which puts us at a disadvantage. It gives our power in the hands of another and we will end up greatly disempowered.

In love, as in life, the power must always rest with ourselves. Only then can we naturally attract the love that we need and want in our lives.

Peace and Love.

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The only invisible defect that you have to remove is the belief that you have one. It is tantamount to viewing yourself as ‘damaged goods’, making it hard for you to love and accept yourself and making it doubly hard for others as well.

-Nadine

Image by username:galutah

During an interaction, one way to know if you are sticking up for yourself to try and observe what you are paying attention to. Are you paying attention to how you are feeling or to how the other person might feel? If it is the former, then you are on the right track.

Too often, our focus is on how the other person would feel or on how the other person would possibly react. It is no different from a parent asking first how the other child is feeling before he or she asks their own child. If you were the child in the situation, you would, without doubt, feel very bad and abandoned. So it is with ourselves.

Since many of us have been conditioned to put others first and have also been taught that paying any attention to ourselves was some sort of vanity or selfishness, we might not be able to reverse this trend overnight. If we notice many of the people we respect, however, we see that they do not act as doormats and, in fact, have a very keen and healthy awareness of what does and what doesn’t feel good to them. They also do not have any hesitation in saying “no” firmly.

No doubt, once you start on the path to taking care of yourself, you will come up against childhood feelings of feeling insignificant or being afraid. Pay close attention to these feelings. You may not always be able to react the way you want to in certain situations but awareness will always bring you one step closer towards genuine change. One technique that I can recommend (when dealing with uncomfortable or rather difficult emotions) is EFT which was pioneered by Gary Craig. It is an efficent and quick way to resolve a number of emotional issues which you may be facing right now. To visit their site, you can click on this link. There are several case studies there as well as the procedure on how to do it.

Love and Light!

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This is one question that I had for a very long time up until recently, when I started participating in more advanced emotional therapies. Is it possible to love yourself when you’ve had little or no modelling of it, especially during your childhood years when you most needed it? The answer, I have found out, is yes.

It’s possible to give yourself a healthy dose of love even when you didn’t have a blueprint for it or if you still have a belief somewhere inside of you that says you are not good enough and that, no, you are not deserving of love.

Self-love is more than giving positive statements. Based on experience, I would like to share at least two aspects of self-love which, once re-learned, can gradually empower us and raise the level of our emotional health:

1. Having patience for our emotions: When we were kids we probably didn’t have our feelings acknowledged all that much. We may have even been told to ‘quit it’ or to ’shut it’. No wonder then, as adults, we tend to do to ourselves the same thing that was done to us years ago. When we come across any uncomfortable feelings, we tend to shut them out or to ignore them. If they don’t go away immediately and we don’t respond the way we would like to, we immediately assume there is something wrong with us and beat ourselves even more from it. Patience and acknowledgement of feelings is a lifelong learning but with each step you take to learn and practice it, you also take one more step towards being yourself and restoring love and empowerment to yourself.
2. Paying attention to your feelings: Closely related. This should have been the first one. But anyway, expounding on this… We may have learned early on that paying attention to someone else’s feelings was the way to go. That if we could only know how others would feel about us and control or change it in some ways, then we could get others to treat us the way we want them to treat us. In my experience, the more people sense that you need them to feel a certain way about you, the more they usually take advantage of that and, generally, bully you. However, if you take care of your feelings first and make that your top priority, pretty soon, you won’t need another to soothe your feelings for you. You will also begin to start noticing even more when other’s behaviors are not acceptable and either confront their behavior or refuse to associate with them any longer - choosing instead to have better people in your life.  

As of now, I am still on the path to learning and integrating these things in my life. I find that it makes me feel better in my interactions and generally helps me to break any connection which I feel is not serving me in the moment. Hopefully, this, too, can help you wherever you may be in your journey right now.

Love and Light.

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I have heard so many phrases and quotations attributing certain qualities and characteristics to love. The most popular one, of course, is that love hurts. Others talk about love merging with the other person or giving up all sorts of things just to prove undying devotion. What I’ve found out though, is that in love, the only thing you have to give up is control.

If you give up your world, your dreams, your very self in order to cage the person or the thing you love and to provide guarantees, believe me, it will not serve you. When it comes to love, theonly person we can give a guarantee is ourselves - that no matter what happens with the other people in our lives, we will be there for ourselves.

It isn’t really bad to go through this stage of finding out about love. There are some really good ideas about what love is and what it means though. My favorite comes from Dr. Margaret Paul. Two of the things she constantly says which has made an impression of me are:

1. If you give yourself up for the person who you say you love, you become less of yourself and;
2. If you become less, you will be less attractive to your partner or the significant people in your lives as well.

The best way to attract love is to become better, to constantly learn about valuing ourselves and learning to slowly let go of people and situations that no longer serve us or those that only give us a ‘feeling’ of being loved and being important, but which is not really love. I think all of us go through these, however, and it is only a matter of time before we become aware of the patterns and are led towards re-evaluating our decisions now based on a more solid foundation from our experiences.

Time and time again, we have been shown that when we try to hang on to love so much, it is when it is most likely to slip away - oftentimes abruptly. But when we have our own inner self-love to begin with, we attract people and create situations which make for more secure relationships and greater self-worth and esteem.

Love and Light!

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It is often said that we are most attracted to those people who exhibit the traits that we want. What we do not know is that, more often, these traits are already within us, just waiting to be released and manifested. Just as we can only recognize what we have aready seen and experience, so can we only see in another what we have seen in ourselves. So love is something other than completion. When two souls meet, it is a meeting of two whole souls, reminding each other of their completion.

“By going deep within ourselves we can find a sense of what it is that we seek in another. The again, it is also of great importance for us to learn how to give ourselves what we need.”

-p. 362, tao paths: love

Never be afraid to start again. Life is a cycle and everything is always ending and beginning at the same time.

Image by Chris Ortiz

When we think of the word commitment, it conjures up in our minds the thought of being irrevocably bound in thought and act to some cause or some promise. We make a pact with ourselves or with an ‘other’ about a certain thing or a certain course of action that we will take and we promise to fulfill it for a certain period of time or forever, perhaps.

The problem with this type of commitment is that it may later on be perceived as a threat to someone’s independence or something that one has to do or should do or must do. When this becomes the case, that particular commitment will, inevitably, be dropped.

The secret to commitment is that it done not once, not twice, but on a daily basis. Each day, you have to re-evaluate your commitment and each day, you have to make a new promise to yourself to do whatever it is that you have promised to do. When you find that you consistently fulfill your commitment to yourself and to others, then that becomes your basis for its continuity. It is then backed up by consistent actions which turn into habits. This becomes your bond with your commitment and to the results you see stemming from it.

Everyday, when you wake up, ask yourself, “What am I committed to today?” Are you still committed to pursuing your goals? Are you still committed to building a better body or a better relationship with your spouse or friend? Your answer will serve as the platform for your next set of actions.

Love and Light.