Overcoming limiting beliefs about love.
Oh love.
Our innate burning to yearn also holds our most intimate wounds, and such is why love is so revered yet also feared.
Love is an expression of that which simply is.
Love can be turbulent, just as love can be silent. Love knows no bounds, and is not partial to anyone. Love flows simply where love is made open to flow.
That is exactly the heart of this discussion. In this article we are going to understand why love is so paradoxical in nature. We are going to dive into how overtime we begin to constrict the flow of love and develop many limiting beliefs surrounding the welcoming of love into our lives.
I wholeheartedly believe that love is completely an inside job, and the only thing that stands between us and love is ourselves and own self-prescribed limiting beliefs that we have developed through our time as human.
We are going to break down self-worth, dating, and relationships so buckle up cowboys and cowgirls.
Limiting beliefs about relationships
First things first, we truly need to break what we believe relationships to be.
The terrible truth in today world is that very few people actually engage in relationship by relating with each other. Rather, most people engage in relationships by simply relating with themselves.
I know this sounds funny but this is a critical distinction to make.
The reason why our perception of relationships has become distorted is this very reason.
Our beliefs about what a relationship should look like in regards to how the other person should be and how it should suit your ideals about partnership and so on and so far is shaped through convenience and idolization.
Simply put,
We idolize our partners to fulfill our perfect ideal of a convenient relationship to us.
Rather than relating to the beautiful unique individual that you mate undoubtedly is, we relate to ourselves through our own image of how that individual should be.
The reality of who that person truly is becomes shadowed by the pedestal that you put that person upon so as to fulfill your own personal sculpture of how someone should love you, and only as it is convenient for you.
Now quickly, I do want to emphasize the worthiness that you possess to have a partner that can meet you desires and expectations, but for the moment let’s just continue on the train of thought that we are on.
The evidence for what I am proposing to you about sculpting this ideal of your partner out of convenience for you is rife in western culture today.
Divorce rates are at all-time highs, relationships all around us fall apart.
Why do relationships fail so frequently?
When the relationship no longer is convenient for you it becomes more convenient to leave the relationship.
Said in a different light,
When your partner no longer lives up to the narrow expectations of who you think he or she should be, you find another partner to use to relate to yourself.
Again, if you have left a relationship because things got “hard,” what really happened is you left the relationship because you no longer could relate to yourself through the other person as your ideal mental construct of your partner.
Here is what I am illustrating.
Limiting beliefs about finding love.
We get lost in the seeking for love outside of the self.
Once more, this is beautiful and you deserve to be reflected with love, but stay with me.
When we seek for love outside of ourselves, we begin to adopt the idea that we need to find love as if love has gone somewhere into hiding.
The belief that you need to find love in order to feel love is the biggest inhibition to your journey of being in love.
You are never truly in love with another; you are simply in love itself. We dwell within love together, through ourselves and through each other. Love does not only exist with your partner because love knows no bounds.
SO what do we do need to do?
We need to liberate love like the watering hose that has been constricted to flow.
The constricting of love is our shaping of an idealistic view of who we think our partner should be and using that perception as a sort of looking glass in attempts to find the perfect one to finally experience true love with!
To hell with that, my God are you kidding me?
What a tremendous amount of pressure and tension upon ourselves and for the unlucky contestant to live by.
Here is the truth.
The love you allow yourself to feel is shaped by the beliefs you have about what love should be.
I would even second that love is shaped by the limiting beliefs you have about what love should be.
So let’s dig in a little deeper.
IF you have a very tight view about what love should be for you, and more power to you truly knock yourself out, how would you hold love as if it could be held in your hand?
Would it get sunlight? How would you water it? What could that love see? How often do you have to check in on the love to ensure it is still alive in the way you want it to be?
Is that truly how love was intended to be?
Love needs to grow in order to thrive. The second love is controlled, it is dampened, muted, and it loses some of its beautiful color and texture.
Think for a moment, “Do I try to control what love should look like?”
Now lets dive deeper into the root cause.
limiting beliefs about self-worth
The extent of love you can feel from another is the extent of love you feel from yourself.
So the real issues of love arise not because of someone else, but because it simply brings out your own inhibitions and blind spots in regards to loving yourself!
A-ha! Now we are getting somewhere.
Let’s return to the idea that love doesn’t go anywhere and love simply flows where it is allowed to flow.
This allowance is a conscious action perpetuated over and over again across time until it become second nature, or unconscious rather.
The way that you perceive love now has been molded and shaped since you were born, starting with your family dynamics, friendships, crushes, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, etc…
What we often fail to understand is that love is completely an inside job.
If I truly learn to love myself, not the cheesy platitudes that we are accustomed to, but truly learn to love the self for all the good, bad, and the ugly, then I can actually begin to understand love meaningfully.
If I don’t give myself permission to love myself, how could I possibly know what love is like so I could give it to another human, right?
Said differently, if I deem myself unworthy of love internally, how could I ever experience love externally?
The extent to which you allow love to flow through yourself, is the method of perception you use to identify what love means for you.
So to love someone else truly, you must understand two key components.
Firstly, you must learn to love all of yourself, and create a process to continue accept and love yourself for who you are in each and every moment.
Secondly, you must learn to love someone else not through how you think they should be for you but how they should love themselves for them.
See the difference?
It’s a subtle distinction, if you love yourself for you, then you have to love someone else, well for who they are, not for who you think they should be.
The love is not yours to control.
It must flow to grow. If you try to control love, which the only way we actually control love is by loving someone else according to how we think they should be for us, then you actually end up with less love to experience because you are only relating to yourself in a narrow controlled scope of love.
To expand the love you see and feel, you must expand the love you see and feel for your own self.
This is akin to worthiness. To feel worthy enough to love yourself fully is the prerequisite to actually open up to receive love from another.
The beliefs you have shaped around yourself that deem you worthy or unworthy for love are the same beliefs that manifest into how you see love in outside world.
So, in a romantic sense, this leads us to dating.
Hooray!
Limiting beliefs about dating
So many people struggle with finding the one, because they are looking for a very specific idea of what the one will be like.
I call this the pedestal.
Overtime, we have shaped this fantasy of what the one will be like and we focus so much of our energy on finding this one instead of becoming the one in our own self.
There are two aspects of this right?
The first is that you spend your energy looking, rather than simply becoming.
The second is that if you are looking for the one, someone else must be looking for the one. So are you focused on becoming someone else’s one?
Take that analogy with a grain of salt because I want to dismantle the pedestal of the idolization of the one.
What I am illustrating is that we view coming into union and partnership as an act of seeking. Yes, of course, there must be some amount of action taken to make yourself available but what I am speaking to is balancing this heavily imbalanced scale.
The same amount of energy you put out into seeking a partner you must also be putting into seeking yourself.
The hardest question sometimes to ask is, “Would I date myself?”
This immediately brings you into your unique process of becoming, because nobody else can help you become other than you.
You must become and create a process of continually becoming, just as your potential partner must also be continually becoming.
The greatest filter you can have while dating is to discover if your potential mate is dedicated to his or her becoming.
Here is the congruency to this.
If you attract people who are not becoming, then this reflects and reveals to you that you can focus more on becoming.
All of this understanding is rooted in your belief system.
You limiting beliefs about dating arise from the limiting beliefs you have about being dated.
You love and fear exactly what you are. You love like the parts of you that love, and you fear like the parts of you that your fear. Often we are driven more from our fears than our love, and so what see predominantly is that which we fear. This is actually very beautiful.
What this shows to us is that to reshape the beliefs operated by the fears we have around dating; we need to reshape the beliefs operated by the fears we have about our self.
This means that to overcome fears of dating and limiting beliefs about dating, you first must overcome the fears that have that you feel would arise within dating and the limiting beliefs in your own self that prevent you from addressing those fears. To address your fears, observe the energy in which your beliefs arise.
If your beliefs are sharp and dense, especially as sensations in the body, those beliefs are coming from fear. Follow the beliefs back to the root of the fear. Acknowledge what your fear is, accept that is there, but do not try to throw your fear out the window.
Likely, you fear is based in trying to protect yourself from a hypothetical scenario of being hurt.
Equally so can you simply acknowledge that you do not know for sure if you will be hurt of not? This is your doorway to transcend limiting beliefs.
Limiting beliefs are completely rooted in your ego trying to preserve itself in a comfortable identity. The power and belief you give to this ego is consequently what you will see play out.
If your ego is operating from the fear of being hurt, it will likely justify its perception through creating a scenario where you automatically sabotage yourself so you can feel hurt, yet comfortable in your identity as someone who becomes hurt when you open yourself.
You are a victim to the hypothetical as much as you believe in the particularly hypothetical.
If you fear dating because you fear that you will be hurt, you gave already created a scenario in which you are accepting being hurt as reality, even though it is purely hypothetical.
Your vessel to transcend this and all limiting beliefs about love, relationships, dating, and self-worth is to construct a new perception of the hypothetical in which you are no longer a victim but rather a creator.
When you move beyond victimhood, you are a ready to open to new depths of yourself, which then allows you to open to new depths of receiving love.
Alas, new beliefs can be shaped here, and you gain access to your beautiful latent potential as a sentient being.