FREE TO LOVE FREE TO HEAL - CHAPTER 10

Fall In Love With Your Self and Write a Great Love Story

Congratulations on reaching this point! Assuming you have been following along each week and doing the exercises, you are not the same person you were when began the Free to Love process nine weeks ago.

You have identified emotional residue from your past and brought it into your conscious awareness, where you have separated the emotional charge from the facts of the experience. You have let go of many stored feelings of regret, resentment, and guilt, replacing them with understanding and forgiveness. You are committed to practicing conscious communication and creating loving and fulfilling relationships.

The question now is What story do you want to see unfold in your heart from this point forward? You have the opportunity and responsibility to create an authentic life, one in which you are the writer, director, and lead actor, rather than a bit player in someone else’s tale. You have the capacity to create a compelling life story – a story in which you are free to love and in which you love freely.

Falling in Love with Your Self
You are powerful, intelligent, and interesting. You are complicated and valuable. You are attractive. You are a good person. You are worthy of love. You are deserving of happiness.

You have these lovable qualities and more because you are living the gift of a human incarnation and have this rare opportunity to be a conscious manifestation of the universe. You are the universe playing hide-and-seek with itself. You are the sacred in disguise. You are God in drag. Knowing this, you cannot feel sorry for yourself for very long, because your heart and soul retain the memory of your essential divinity.

Be Kind to Yourself

When you love something, be it a puppy, your garden, or a child, you naturally want to take good care of it. Now that you are committed to choices that support and reinforce your happiness, treat yourself with the same intention and caring you’d give to anything else you love. Minimize toxicity; maximize nourishment. Life-damaging habits, which in the past provided temporary relief from your sense of unlovability, have outlived their usefulness. You no longer need to anesthetize yourself from yourself.

Look at your use of love-substituting behaviors and begin trusting your internal pharmacy of well-being, rather than depending upon chemicals that temporarily modulate your emotions. Commit to a regular practice of meditation, yoga, exercise, and conscious communication and enjoy the power you have to create balance from within, reducing your need for outer acts of manipulation.

Detoxify your Life

Look at every aspect of your life and identify experiences that are depleting rather than nourishing. Evaluate your food, water, air, music, TV, and job choices and see how you can reduce the ingestion of energy and information that is not serving you, while replacing it with that which does.  If you have been coping with emotional pain and the physical toll it has on your body, consider attending the Chopra Center’s Free to Love, Free to Heal program. Learn more about Free to Love, Free to Heal program here.

As you are making your commitments to be more nurturing to yourself, it is essential that you make conscious choices about your relationships. As you know by now, relationship toxicity can be as or even more harmful to your psychological and physical health as a poor diet, excessive alcohol, or recreational drugs. And, sometimes freeing yourself from a toxic relationship can be more difficult than letting go of a toxic substance. It takes courage and sobriety to become disentangled from associations that are boundary violating or energy depleting.

People remain in toxic situations primarily out of fear – fear that they will lose financial security; fear of being judged harshly by family, their religious community, or God; fear that they will irreversibly harm their children; and fear that they will not find anyone else to love them. If you are currently in such a relationship, your highest and healthiest self must take the lead in guiding you to freedom. If you feel stuck in a relationship that is creating ongoing pain for you, start planning your exit strategy now. Using your creativity, timing, and finesse, you can be free to love again.

Take Time for Yourself

People often find the motivation to engage in emotional healing when a relationship ends. The pain and loneliness of going from being a couple to being single provide a powerful incentive for looking at oneself and one’s patterns. Although it may not feel like it at the time, being in-between relationships can be an incredible gift. I encourage you to take full advantage of this opportunity to recreate a state of lovingness that transcends the need for a lover.

If you have recently come out of a painful relationship: wait. If you immediately jump into a new love without taking the time to find your center and heal your heart, you are almost guaranteed to perpetuate the turmoil. Take time to fall in love with yourself. As a rough rule of thumb, take one to two months for every year of your last relationship before you even consider starting a new one. Spend this time with yourself and with supportive family and friends until feelings of desperation subside. They will. Not until you are genuinely happy spending time with yourself are you in a position to begin engaging with another person.

Beginning New Relationships

Every aspect of our being is present in seed form. When you are ready to find love, recognize that all potential patterns of a relationship are broadcasting their promise from the moment you begin exchanging energy and information. It’s natural when you fall under the spell of love to see those aspects that reinforce your ideal and ignore those that do not. Everyone has light and dark elements, and most of us have become good at disguising those characteristics that we’d prefer others not see.

An important question to ask yourself when you notice a pattern is Can I live with this behavior if it persists? If your willingness to create a deeper bond is predicated on the expectation that you can “fix” someone, take a few steps back before diving in too deep. Now that you have brought the light of healing into your heart, you do not need to look to someone else to make you whole because you now know that wholeness is your inherent state.

The Seven Laws of Loving Relationships

Almost everyone would like to experience peace and harmony with the people in their lives but often struggle to manifest these desires. Most people envision an ideal intimate relationship based upon shared interests, open communication, mutual nurturing, and passion.

Although there is no proven formula that applies to all relationships, embracing a few key principles in your heart will reduce conflict and enhance the flow of love. These principles are valuable in friendships and business relationships, as well as in families, marriages, and intimate partnerships. Click here to find the Seven Laws of Loving Relationships.

Love Is a Practice

Cultivating your lovability – your ability to love and to be loved – is a lifelong pursuit. You now have the basic skills to play the game of love with finesse, but do not imagine that you can master it, for love will challenge you throughout your life. Listen to the wisdom of your heart and allow it to guide you into higher expressions of love.

I wish you all the best on your journey.

With love,
David Simon

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If you would like to learn more about the Free to Love, Free to Heal workshops led by David Simon, M.D. at the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, please visit www.chopra.com/free to love or call 888-736-6895.