Hosting love in your life starts from within. This is created by nourishing safety and trust in your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs you choose to communicate and act upon in any given moment . It is rooted in self-love, setting healthy boundaries, self-reflection and self-regulation.
“Find the love you seek, by first finding the love within yourself. Learn to rest in that place within you that is your true home.” ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Self-love leads to self care. This means that you develop compassion for your life on the emotional, mental, physical and spiritual levels. By doing so you embrace all of the parts of yourself that experienced pain as well as the parts that have been there for you when you needed to meet challenges. Being able to listen to what is happening within gives you information that supports your beliefs, thoughts and behaviors that have molded your life, as well as giving you a template to work with to sculpt the new life you would like to experience
Early in life, your response systems to stress were structured by what you learned from your family and caregivers. Difficulty loving yourself shows up in your adult relationships when you have experienced a painful experiences created by absence, inconsistency, or abuse that instilled a lack of safety and trust.
As you learn to compassionately take care of your needs and wants in life today, you give yourself a way to ground and expand your awareness beyond your automatic responses. This allows you to be present in the moment with a more expansive view of what you are experiencing. It also then allows you to call up on these insights to see what is happening with other people.
Boundaries are necessary for your health and well-being. Your body gives you signals that tell you when you feel elated or ill at ease. Your stomach might churn, your muscles tighten, and your heartbeat races. Over time when you do not establish boundaries based on what will create safety and security for your wellness and well-being, your body signals in stronger messages. This could include headaches, difficulty with digestion, physical mobility, or life-depleting conditions. These signals speak to you on the cellular level to express the need for establishing limits.
Through resonance on the unconscious level, you will continue to draw to you the relationships that contain the puzzle pieces of your early Social Engagement System.Your adult relationships will continue to give you the components of your first relationship with your parents. The limiting embodied protective automatic responses will create anxiety, stress, mistrust, fear of being vulnerable, emotional unavailability, neediness, or caretaking,
Your system might have learned to tough it out, tolerate or ignore signals that indicate danger or boundary crossing due to conflict resolution styles of your parents, abandonment, separation, loss, traumatic experiences or addiction to guard against pain.
Today, as an adult, when faced with the need to set a healthy boundary in your life for yourself or with others, you might not speak up, lash out, isolate, leave, or attempt to please the other to keep the peace. Your system defaults to early and habitual patterns you learned to handle trauma.
Loving yourself gives you the ability to connect to others in new ways that create discernment, safety and trust. It allows you to trust your internal feelings, body sensations and values. By doing so you create a healthy environment for trusting yourself and others that are worthy of trust, moving toward what is life-enhancing or away from what is life-depleting to allow healthy bonding and connection with self-care and boundaries in place.
Anatomy of Trust with B.R.A.V.I.N.G. from Brene’ Brown
Hosting love with self-reflection is key to healing limiting beliefs, thoughts and automatic reactions is through bringing to awareness or making conscious how these limiting patterns established through your life and Family System. Your parents and likely their parents experienced these life-depleting ways of dealing with closeness and conflict. You received this teaching through their words, actions and behaviors. The resulting negative beliefs get projected onto your adult relationships with automatic limiting beliefs such as “Love causes pain,”You cannot trust (fill in the blank),” It is my fault,” “They will leave me,”“Love hurts.” (They is used to represent any type of relationship).
It is important to acknowledge that you have the ability to work with and change these automatic reactions from the past by examining the roadmap of these patterns when they come up.According to Gabriella Kortsch, PhD, self-regulation starts with your intention and desire to become aware enough to be reflective with your ability to notice how you are perceiving whatever is happening. This includes your ability to notice how you are reacting and interpreting what is happening through your thoughts, feelings and inner dialogue. This awareness then leads you to remembering that you have choices about next steps throughout the entire process, and you can choose what is good for your own life.
Taking time to self-reflect is vital to hosting love within.This is where choices show up. Triggers show up in everyone’s life. Smoking, drinking, binging, shopping, high risk or adrenalin rising behaviors, overeating, shopping, binge watching movies, workaholism, etc. can be external go-to’s when unease arises. While this might work on a short term basis, this doesn’t lead to resolving the issues so you can experience something new in your life related to what you would truly like to experience.
How you regulate your response to triggers that create agitation, anxiety, fear, grief and pain that numb or delay the pain temporarily feeds the established neural pathways of pain from the past, or you can choose natural ways to create nurture and support within.
Hosting love by choosing natural ways to self-soothe to create calm in your system trains your body-mind-spirit system by regulating how you respond to stress leads to greater wellness and well-being for the long-term. You are designed for self-healing. Focusing on new go-to’s that respond to the question, “Is this kind?” while considering next steps is a great way to work with Self-Reflection.Will the response you choose lead to new healing pathways within by activating your Sympathetic Nervous System (rest, digest, calm, and heal)? Will the choices strengthen your ability to host more love within as you navigate your life and relationships?
The following two articles give you some ideas for this purpose:by finding neutral to create positive change in your life and using your innate senses to create natural endorphin stress responses. You can explore this website for other natural modalities including breath, movement, acupressure, meditation, gratitude, aromatherapy, light, sound, etc. for more ideas.
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