Episode 41: Love Unlimited

Love isn’t magic.  Love isn’t destiny.  Love doesn’t come and go by itself.  Love isn’t a result of the actions of another.  Love doesn’t move from one person to another. Love can’t even be shared.  Love isn’t a result of anything outside of us—it is always a result of a thought we have had inside of us.

Love is always a choice we make.  

And even though we know this on some level, we still spend too much of our lives waiting to feel love.  We wait for things outside of us to create the feeling of love for us. We are waiting on others to feel love.  But the truth is, we can have as much love as we want. Love is unlimited and it is always available to us—through the thoughts we choose to think.

What then is keeping us from feeling more love in our lives?  If we have an unlimited supply, why aren’t we choosing to feel love as much as possible?  What keeps us from choosing the thoughts that create the feeling of love?

In this episode, I’ll show you some common thoughts that are keeping us from feeling the love we really want. These thoughts seem protective in a way, but these ideas end up actually hurting us by blocking us from feeling love.  

Once we identify the thoughts that are keeping us from choosing love, we can decide to think about love in a totally different way.  Believe it or not, you are responsible for how much love you feel which means that you can access the unlimited supply of love any time you want…and that, my friends, is 100% awesome!

Love is a feeling. What do we know about love because we know it is a feelings? Feelings are always and ONLY created by our thoughts. Feelings never exist independent of thought. Feelings are created in the body when neurotransmitters turn words into chemicals. We think in language and then our brain sends signals to the body and feelings are created.

This means that love doesn’t just happen to us. It is created by our thoughts, just like any other emotion. But we don’t often think about love as something we create. Instead we wait to feel love, thinking it is dependent on outside circumstances.

A Metaphor To Help

I want you to imagine that you are thirsty. You are so thirsty. You just want a drink. A drink would feel so good and fill this need you have.

Now imagine that you are sitting outside hoping that it will rain. If the clouds will behave and the air currents will cooperate and the jet stream acts in a certain way, then you can you’re your mouth and get water and quench your thirst. And you’re just waiting and hoping that the things outside of you—the jet streams and clouds—will create rain and then you can stop being thirsty.

Not realizing, that all along, you have had the power to quench your own thirst. There is an unlimited supply of water and you can simply allow yourself to fill a cup with water and take a drink.

Now I know its not a perfect metaphor, but I hope it will show you that when we delegate the responsibility for our thirst to anything outside of us, we are completely dependent on pther things that we can’t control to meet our needs.

This is exactly what we do when it comes to feeling love. We are waiting for all the people and things in our life to behave in a way so that we can feel love—rather than owning our experience, owning the fact that the amount of love we are feeling is totally created by us and by what we allow ourselves to think.

Just as you can get yourself a drink and you can meet your own needs, you can choose to feel and create the amount of love you get to feel in your life.

Thoughts That Prevent Us from Feeling Love

1. One thought that keeps us from feeling more love is the thought: “I’m going to get hurt and I need to protect myself.” (We usually do this by withholding or withdrawing emotionally.)

Flawed thinking: We have a thought that we are going to get hurt. In order to avoid getting hurt we decide to feel less love—which hurts us. When we choose to withdraw emotionally, we are hurting ourselves. And, ironically, we have done it in an effort to avoid pain. The result is exactly what our brain was trying to avoid in the first place.

Solution: Not loving never protects us from anything. Not loving hurts us every time. To increase our capacity and opportunity to feel more love try asking yourself:

• In what way do I think feeling terrible is protecting me?
• In what way is feeling terrible actually doing the opposite…how is it hurting me?
• What feeling would be kinder to ME?
• What can I choose to feel that will feel good to me?

Love is always is a gift we give ourselves. Every time. Don’t hurt and punish yourself in an attempt to avoid getting hurt.

       2. Another thought that prevents us from feeling love is that we think other people need to be different or change in order for us to love them. There is a fear that if we love them as they are, they will always be as they are.

Flawed thinking: What is happening when we think this thought is that we are feeling worse and using those negative feelings as a means of changing others—as a tool to get others to be different. But they don’t feel worse. We do.

When someone else acts in a way that we don’t agree with, as a way of changing that behavior our brain tells us that we should move out of love into another emotion like frustration or annoyance or anger or resentment. The trouble is, that it doesn’t work. People still are who they are and we only end up feeling less love and lots more terrible.

Solution: We always want the other person to be different, when the truth is we are the only one who need to be different. We have set up conditions to us feeling love—conditions are dependent on things outside of ourselves. Those conditions are blocking us from feeling love.

When you think someone should be different so that you don’t have to feel terrible (angry or frustrated or irritated), ask yourself:

• What conditions have I put on loving this person?
• What conditions have I decided that are more important than feeling love
• Why am I denying myself the feeling of love?

3.  Another thought that keeps us from feeling love is the fear that people don’t love us. We have thoughts like, “If they really loved me, they would do x, y, or z.”

Flawed thinking: In this version of punishing ourselves and feeling less love, we are keeping score. We assign points to what others do or don’t do and then determine if there are enough points to allow ourselves to feel love or to believe they love us. Did you know there isn’t even a score board anywhere? You just get to feel love if you want to.

Solution: Whether or not that other person loves you doesn’t determine how much love you feel. How much you love them determines how much love you feel. Instead of trying to figure out how much another person loves you, decide how much love you want to feel and then think the thoughts that will create it.

Ask yourself:

• Is there ever a time when love isn’t a good choice?
• Is there ever a time when love would make things worse?
• Is there ever a time when love would make you feel worse?

Choose Love

How much love we feel is a choice. A choice we make with our thoughts. Every time. If I don’t feel love, it is because I have chosen thoughts that don’t produce love.

And that’s just good to know. It doesn’t mean you have to choose thoughts that produce love, but it does mean that you are in charge of it. It does mean that you are responsible for how much love you feel. No one else determines how much love you feel—no matter what.

We often don’t realize that feeling love is a choice. But the truth is, there is an unlimited supply and you get to have all you want…and that, my friends, is 100% awesome.

Mentioned on the podcast:

• Sign up for a free coaching call

• Bonds That Make Us Free by Dr. Terry Warner

• T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-

We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

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