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How?
Begin with the experience of love in any form, such as caring, goodwill, friendliness, support, appreciation, seeing the good in others, compassion, fondness, kindness, or cherishing. Can you soften and open to this experience? In a particular relationship or in general, can you make room in your body and mind for love?
Is it painful to feel love because it stirs up old frustrated longings . . . so that you dial down the love to suppress the longings? If so, this is understandable and common. Try to help yourself by letting the longings flow, too, so that they gradually ease and release. Meanwhile, bring awareness back to the love itself, which will lift and protect you. Amazingly – flowing in or flowing out, love is love; wounds from not receiving love are often soothed and even healed by giving love.
Sometimes people feel overwhelmed when they connect to others with love. Repeatedly sensing your breathing and body can help you feel stable as “me” while opening to “we.” See what it’s like to feel both loving and centered in your own strength, respecting and sticking up for your own needs; fences make for good neighbors.
Since the brain gradually tunes out what it’s used to, try to see others newly, taking some seconds at least to recognize the being behind the eyes. For example, I’ll imagine another person laughing with friends, or feeling hurt, or as a young child.
No one can stop you from loving. I once had a difficult relationship issue, and I finally realized that I could simply love this person even if the love needed to be mainly, if not entirely, internal to me. Not coincidentally, I began feeling better in the relationship, and over time, the other person became more comfortable with me.
You can offer your compassion and good wishes even if there is nothing you can do to make a situation better. Your love is still sincere and still matters. What others do with your love is on them, not you. All you can do is make the offering. You can love even as you disengage from sticky entanglements, wishing people well even if you need to step back from them.
Love comes from inner freedom in which you’re not controlled by negative reactions. It also leads to greater freedom in your mind, relationships, and world. Love is a kind of solvent that gradually dissolves the neurotic knots inside your head. In touch with love, you feel less vulnerable and have more room to breathe, speak, and act with others. And walking through the world – whether down a busy street or out in the woods – as no one’s enemy, giving others no cause to fear you, with good wishes and kindness in your heart and face, you feel more like stepping freely into today and into tomorrow.
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