4 Ways to Connect to Love in These Times

Connecting to love in these times of staying at home with social distancing and isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have found more time to ruminate about what has been going on in the background of my mind. Hearing about the death of loved ones, healthcare, EMT workers, and nursing home patients widens the gap of separation while longing to somehow know how to offer love and compassion.

This article gives you 4 ways to connect to love in these times. This time touches places of anxiety, loss, and grief you have experienced in your life in the past. These triggers bring up fear about how to cope with the anxiety, loss, and grief brought on by separation from others in the present.

1. Connect to Love in Yourself and Others

With all that is happening, the journey of love has to start from within. Where have you felt separated from yourself, not felt safe or protected, not able to live your truth, or feel more connected with others? Underneath is the need for mercy, self-love, and compassion.

Connect to Love in Your Heart

2. Connect to Love through Forgiveness

Connecting with the whole of yourself creates greater self-love. This love allows you to connect with greater compassion with the whole of others. Listening to your biofeedback, thoughts, emotions and physical response to what is happening inside of you creates the opportunity for empathy in considering others in the same way.

The 3 Directions of Forgiveness in the Buddhist tradition takes into account the need to be able to free up space in your heart and mind through the process of forgiveness. These three directions include what others have done to you, what you have done to others, and what you have done to yourself.

Forgiving allows you to open to greater awareness and understanding. Others have an influence on your awareness. Your responses are based on your perception of other’s behaviors, words, and actions. This impacts your ability to see the underlying intent and need for connection or boundaries in the situation.

Acknowledging lessons from the past by giving space for grief, anger, and hurt that constricted your life energy creates new possibilities for your thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes to choose new pathways when you put the burden down.

Jack Kornfield and Forgiveness Meditation

3. Connect to Love through Giving Back Responsibility

It can seem incredibly difficult in connecting to resolve traumatic early experiences alone. These parts that have felt unheard or acknowledged need the attention of your adult part and higher self. This means that you are able to respond to these parts within you now that are attempting to protect and manage your emotions of anxiety, fear and confusion from the past in a way that creates support, nurture and mercy in the present.

According to Steven Levine, this is having mercy on ourselves and others through conscious living. In this time where we become are made acutely aware of life and death, it is this work that allows you to expand the space within yourself to allow connection to your Self, your family, friends and loved ones more compassionately.

Part of the forgiveness process includes giving back the responsibility to others who have abused or harmed you. In these cases, you are working with creating compassion for yourself and your unmet needs for protection and safety to transform the negative experience.

In Family Systems, not giving back the responsibility to others for their actions puts you in the arrogant position to the perpetrator making you the big one taking on the responsibility and burden. You were only the little one or perhaps a peer. Giving back responsibility is actually a way to create order in your system. This allows each person to work with their own fate. This gives each person the inner power, dignity, respect, and responsibility to choose how to respond to life in a new way.

So, in these cases, it is vital to acknowledge the responsibility to end the Victim-Perpetrator Cycle. This happens inside of you. You might never receive a literal apology, but, working with the shift in perception of a negative experience to empower you now, changes your life in the present. By no longer carrying the burden, you free up life energy the imprint of abuse, stress response, anxiety, and unease that you carried.

This is where your ability to respond to life in a more authentic and life-enhancing way through choice begins to happen.

4. Connect to Love through Gratitude and Grace

Being separated from loved ones miles away, in nursing homes, or in hospitals, and not knowing when this could or might happen to people we know draws us into the space of grief. It can create a feeling of being powerless. Connection, love, and gratitude is the healing balm. Tell others you care and love them right now to bridge the distance.

Many years ago, in reading Richard Louv’s book,Web of Life: Weaving the Values That Sustain Us, he wrote about sending Gratitude Letters to family members and friends in place of holiday gifts due to lack of money. It is a beautiful idea for any occasion, especially at this time when it is difficult when you might be struggling with finances and not knowing when you will see your loved ones again.

This can also be a time to write a gratitude letter to a loved one who has passed. Your words have meaning in the Unified Field of Consciousness. They also have a loving influence on healing your Family System in the past, present, and future.

Grace Notes: A Living Eulogy TED Talk

Why are eulogies only for the dying? In this funny, touching talk, Andrea Driessen argues that writing your loved ones a “grace note” – a kind of living eulogy – is a potent tool for connection now that also lessens the pain of grief and regret later. Everyone wants to matter, and Andrea’s wish is that we share what matters most with our loved ones while they’re still alive to hear it.

Family Systems is one of the many healing disciplines within the body of Resonance Repatterning® work. If you would like to work with this process to create greater integrity in your wellness and well-being, sessions are available by phone, Skype and proxy. Start your process here.