Let’s be honest.
We’ve all had experiences and situations in our lives that have in effect, forced us to build protective barriers to guard our hearts. When built, they may have served in protection, but the trick is to know when to allow your walls to collapse and let the old stories go. Once this happens, love pours in.
And the truth is everyone deserves to live a life filled with love and loving connections. So how can we intentionally create and experience more love?
Although many of us look for love on the outside, the path to love really begins inside. This Rumi quote describes it perfectly:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ~ Rumi
Too often, the lack of deep love in our lives comes from a lack of self-love and self-compassion. Many of our love barriers were created to protect ourselves from our own inner critic. Most of us are incredibly hard on ourselves. When faced with our flaws the negative self chatter starts: “I’m not good enough. I’m worthless.” “I’m not interesting enough.” “I’m too old – who would want me?”
And of course, the goalposts for what counts as “good enough” seem always to remain out of reach. No matter how well we do, someone else always seems to be doing it better. The result of this line of thinking is sobering: Millions of people suffer from insecurity, anxiety, and depression, and much of this is due to self-judgment, to beating ourselves up when we feel we aren’t measuring up.
So what’s the answer?