Weekly messages to help you start over in life

Can’t Find Love? 6 Ways to Create Miracles in Your Love Life.

Can’t Find Love? 6 Ways to Create Miracles in Your Love Life.

Where have you been all my life?

Where have you been all my life?

“Love will immediately enter into any mind that truly wants it.” Course in Miracles

Have you found love to be difficult, challenging, confusing, or painful?

Do you wonder why love isn’t appearing in your life? Why does love seem to have bloomed in everyone else’s life, but not in yours?

Here’s the thing—you might be thinking that love is independent of everything else that’s going on in your life. You can be the way you are and live your life with ego, fear, and lack, but still expect that love will show up.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Until you deal with some of your internal blocks, fears, and judgments, love will seem far away and hidden. 

How you view the world, how you view each person, and how you treat others in all your relationships determine the ways in which love shows up in your life. Your internal judgment, ego, and unkind behavior, even if held only in your mind and heart, affect your relationships.

More than likely, you need a radical shift in your perspective, behavior, and mindset to create a space of love.

If you’ve been thinking, ‘I need more than love; hell, I need a miracle to find the man of my dreams,’ you’re in luck. (It just may take a bit of work.)

Create miracles in your love life.

Gabrielle (Gabby) Bernstein’s book, May Cause Miracles, could be the heart opener for which you’re looking. It was for me.

May Cause Miracles

Do you need a love miracle?

It helped me realize that love is not something for which you go outside looking. Love is something that you first must cultivate inside yourself.

Let me explain.

The book helped me see that many of my thoughts about love and relationships were steeped in my own ego, fears, judgments, and resentments. My internal world, mindset, and self-talk literally created my external relationships and determined the people whom I drew into my life.

Gabby reminded me of the Course in Miracle’s powerful teaching: “Your task is not to seek love but merely to find all the barriers within yourself that have built against it.”

Her book is filled with affirmations, meditations, and tools for shifting your mindset and altering your perspective on love altogether.

She teaches us to consider love holistically. In any situation, the only thing missing is love. When there is fear, there is no love. She considers miracles simply shifts in perspective from fear to love.

When you continually shift from fear to love, you will experience more love in your life in all your relationships—including romantic love.

Are you ready for a miracle-minded approach to love? 

Gabby’s book is a 40-day guide for subtle shifts that let you see everyday miracles in your life. Following, I review the six days in week 4 during which she talks about relationships.

Here are six ways to shift your mindset to love so that you’ll see more miracles in your love life.

(For the exercises and daily practices required to live a miraculous life, pick up May Cause Miracles (not an affiliate link), and check out the end of each chapter.)

1.    Witness your ego’s drama.

Gabby states that it’s the ego that convinces us that we’re alone, and that encourages us to complete ourselves by finding someone else. Our egos are the reason that we go out looking for a romantic relationship to feel whole.

The ego consumes our lives and, especially in romantic relationships, judges, attacks, compares, and makes our significant others feel more special. Our egos encourage us to feel different and special, and to elevate ourselves in our romantic relationships as well.

Gabby suggests that we become more mindful of our egos in all relationships. Start by witnessing your ego’s false perception of others.

Ask yourself who you judge and attack in your mind. Who do you elevate and make more special? How do you make yourself feel more special? To whom do you compare yourself?

 2.    Surrender your ego.

 It’s very difficult to overcome the ego, which is so pervasive in our lives. Gabby encourages us to surrender—to release ourselves from our egos’ grip by releasing our egos to our inner guides (our voices of love, our internal teachers).

Release your ego for healing to your spirit and inner guide. Go within yourself and choose to see everyone as equal. See everyone as love. Ask the inner guide to teach you love through every encounter you have (not just with your romantic partner).

When you find yourself comparing or judging others, surrender and respond by saying out loud, “I am willing to see love instead of this.”

When you want to make someone feel special or put yourself on a pedestal, say out loud, “I am willing to see love instead of this.”

Surrender to your inner guide to heal your ego and to see the oneness in everyone.

3. Use kindness when the ego runs wild.

 Use the tool of kindness to remind yourself that you come from a loving, kind place and that thoughts of kindness will help you remember your truth.

On Day 24, Gabby suggests making kindness your primary goal and to allow genuine altruism and authentic love.

Whenever you judge, feel separation from others, or start attacking others in your mind, use an affirmation like “Kindness created me kind,” or something similar.

Look at your thoughts and actions—are they unkind? Become aware of unkind thoughts. Reflect on how they make you feel, and forgive yourself for your unkind behavior.

“By continuously acknowledging your ego’s behavior, you will weaken the bad habit and transcend the ego’s need to judge,” writes Gabby.

Continue to infuse your day with kind affirmations and intentions so that you are more kind to people.

4. Be aware of your thoughts and judgments of others.

When you judge or attack someone in your mind, you likely do so because you feel a place of lack. Your judgment of others can mirror what you feel about yourself.

“When we send love toward what we want, we feel better about ourselves and thereby experience more love in our own life,” Gabby writes.

Start looking at all your relationships as assignments—opportunities for spiritual growth.

Infuse with loving thoughts all your encounters with people whom you meet each day. Be grateful for the lessons and the growth that different people teach you.

Remember that each person you come across gives you the opportunity to strengthen your miracle mindset through the choice to embrace love over fear.

 5.    Be happy or be right? The F word.

While the ego refuses to forgive, you can use the F word (forgiveness) to restore your faith in love. “Forgiveness is the answer to true serenity and peace,” writes Gabby.

If you’d rather be happy than be right all the time—forgive. Forgiveness lets you wipe clean the slate and begin anew. It embraces oneness and love in all your relationships.

Consider repeating this affirmation from May Cause Miracles daily:

“With each holy encounter, I choose to forgive and release my ego’s false projections. Forgiveness reminds me that we are one. Each time I have a false thought toward someone, I will choose to forgive the thought and remember that we are one. In turn, I forgive myself.”

Every time your ego is bruised or your mind attacks or judges someone, fall back to peace by forgiving. Chose peace and happiness over your ego (and being right).

6.    Honor the moments when you chose love.

As you expand your loving intention toward everyone, spread kindness to others, and forgive others throughout the day, you’ll feel a sense of peace passing over you.

Honor the moments when you’re transforming and growing.

Continue to see love in your most difficult relationships. Find peace and healing in every relationship and encounter that you have. Chose the difficult path of letting go, overcoming, and forgiving. Transcend your fear through your faith in miracles.

Think of every moment that you chose love as a holy moment—a divine encounter. Sit with these moments and let them help you become a more loving person.

In your meditations and prayers, ask that others in your life be guided, protected, and healed from fear. Desire that others have the same happiness and oneness that you have in your life.

Gabby’s book and message are reminders that you can’t simply focus on one special or romantic relationship. Everything in the universe is tied together. How you show up for your neighbor or a total stranger is how love will show up in your life.

If you’re not seeing love and you don’t know why, could it be because you’re not showing up in your most loving, kind, and non-judgmental self each day?

If you’re operating from a place of ego, fear, and lack, you’ll see that in your romance.

Alternatively, if you show up with kindness, love, and abundance, you’ll find that in your relationships, too.

The work to be done is within you. Make the necessary changes to become the loving person whom you’re capable of being. Return to your truth.

You’ll not only start seeing improved relationships, you’ll also miraculously stumble upon the romantic love and partner for whom you’ve been looking.

If you know someone who is looking for love in his or her life, please consider sharing this post via Twitter, Google+, or Facebook. Thank you.

Photo credit @benurs

Who You Should Fall in Love with First: 4 Ways How

Should you ‘find the world’ in another person, as Alicia harmonizes? If you say, no, read on mis amigos.

We are all looking for love in our lives.

Not only to love others but to be loved. Without fear…conditions…limitations.

Love songs, classic movies and today’s blockbusters provoke us to find that ideal love we watch on the big screen.

Alicia Key’s tune above sketches a love so deep that a lover’s arms around you are worth more than a kingdom, more than gold and diamonds!

(If you’d rather have the $bling$ than the hug, raise your hand friends)

Movies depict undying and eternal love. Music serenades the perfect lover. Books depict the depths of love between two souls.

While we’re caught up in fairy tale weddings, passionate romances and soulful love stories, there’s one person we’re ignoring. 

The person we should be loving first.

Ourselves.

To love ourselves is a process of complete acceptance, compassion, forgiveness without limits or conditions.

But how many of us ever reach the place where we are truly in love with ourselves? How many of us even try?

We cannot love others until we fall in love with ourselves first.

Loving ourselves is a prerequisite to loving others.

We cannot complete others, as Tom pronounces in the clip, below until we complete ourselves.

Were you loved?

For some of us, the people who were supposed to love us never understood the way to show us love.

Perhaps they never knew how to love themselves either so loving you was an impossible feat.

The people who are supposed to love us made us feel inadequate, incompetent, inhuman or broken. Unloved.

4 Ways to Love Yourself (in a non-sensual way – ha!)

1. Compassion 

We tend to be harsh and merciless with ourselves.

A practice of compassion is the first step to loving ourselves.

Compassion doesn’t judge and doesn’t  put conditions on our love. Compassion sees our shortcomings and faults and accepts them anyway.

Practice empathy. Feel your pains, fear and guilt without wallowing in them. Be loving towards your past hurts and sorrows. Be gentle.

2. Acceptance 

To be able to truly love ourselves, we have to accept who we are as people.

To love ourselves, we have to accept our good and bad traits, qualities, characteristics and life experiences. We must learn to embrace our pains, sorrows, fears, shame and inadequacies.

We must come to term with our histories, biographies, upbringing, personalities and  our quirks.

Self-acceptance is the road to self-love.

3. Show yourself that you care.

How do you treat yourself? Is your life balanced, healthy and fulfilled?

Are you running around every day being ‘busy’? Not eating well? Working too much? Not exercising? Not being mindful? Stressed? Worried?

Are you treating yourself the way you want someone who loves you to treat you?

If you love yourself, take actions in your life to show yourself love, gentleness and kindness.

Look at the things in your everyday life that bring you physical discomfort, stress, worry, and emotional pain. Take steps to eliminate and reduce those factors.

Look for work that allows you to truly love yourself. Eat foods that shows you that you love your body. Be around positive and caring people. (Don’t talk to your mother-in-law – joke!) Create a daily schedule that allows you to spend time with yourself.

Take small steps to show that you’re important, that your health and body matter and that you’re worth taking care of.

4)    Take action.

Romantic relationships fail when you stop working on them. So does the relationship you have with yourself. If you’re not actively taking actions to show yourself that you care, you’re not loving yourself as you’re capable of.

If you’re not removing caustic and harmful people out of your life, you’ll find it harder to love yourself. If you’re not doing work or a career that suits your personality, you’ll find it harder to be joyful and treat yourself well. If you’re not taking care of your body, you’ll feel less healthy and positive about yourself.

Accept yourself and strive be good to yourself.

Not only will you fall in love with yourself and be a loving person be but you will be able to share that love with all those around you. You will be love, can give and receive love.

The secret to loving others and being loved the way you want is to love yourself first. (Here are 17 additional ways how. Thanks Evelyn!)

My friend Wendy Irene talks about the importance of loving yourself in her weekly videos. Watch to learn more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUT5g6ljss4&feature=player_embedded#!
To pick up my book, Self Romance Manifesto: Fall in Love With Yourself and Live From Your Heart, click here.

How to Change the World?

How to Change the World?

We can make change. Can you make change?

We can make change. Can you?

Welcome to my friend and guest post contributor, Galen Pearl:

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.  –Rumi

“Arab Spring” is the term often used to describe an ongoing series of protests and wars spreading through the Arab world in the last two years. The term sounds promising and full of hope, although the conflicts themselves, regardless of the outcome, have caused a great deal of suffering.

I read that one slogan of the demonstrators has been Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam, “the people want to bring down the regime.” Many of us can understand this sentiment, whether in support of people seeking more freedom in other countries, or wanting change in our own country, or just change in our own lives.

In the United States, there has been much talk bringing down the regime (American style). But what is the regime and what does bringing it down look like? The rhetoric from the last campaign and the subsequent fiscal cliff fiasco make it hard to distinguish the regime holder from the challenger. While the two sides argue about which way to paddle, the canoe sweeps ever faster toward the rapids and the falls.

Make love, not war.

Personally, I think we had it right back in the 60s with the slogan Make love, not war. True, we were naive and had no clue about how to live that slogan in any sort of socially productive way. But I think we had the right idea in that we understood the truth of Buddha’s teaching that “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed.”

Even so, we succumbed to the same mistake as those we sought to replace, by thinking that we could change things by changing others. I was like that, too. I thought I had the answer to any question about what our country should look like, and I was angry and dismissive towards anyone who disagreed with me. Make love, not war, you idiots! Hmm.

Changing ourselves is how we change the world.

Gandhi encouraged us to “be the change we want to see in the world.” Making love instead of war means being love. Vishnu understands this. His tagline for this blog is “Change yourself. Change the world.” Those aren’t two separate acts. Changing ourselves is how we change the world. In fact, it’s the only way to change the world.

So we start with bringing down our own regime, experiencing our own Inner Spring.

My Inner Spring began years ago when I knew I needed to change my life. My regime was based on fear and governed by threats. If I didn’t control my world, meaning everything and everyone outside of myself, then disaster was sure to happen. I don’t know that I brought down my regime as much as it sort of fell down by itself. It was not sustainable and began to crumble in spite of my frantic efforts to maintain it.

I finally surrendered to the inevitable, and only then, in the relinquishment of force, did I discover the lightness of being, our natural state of joy. I’ve since learned that the way we bring down our regime and experience our Inner Spring is by practicing the qualities we want to see in our world. As the bumper sticker says, compassion is revolution. So is joy, forgiveness, kindness, gratitude. And as we manifest our Inner Spring, World Spring is sure to follow.

Galen Pearl is one of my favorite bloggers and a wise teacher.  She regularly posts though-invoking reflections on her blog, 10 Steps to Finding Your Happy Place. Her practical and relevant book on happiness can be found here. I’ve found it to be a life-changer. * Photo credit.

What about you? What does you current regime look like? Is there anything in it that you want to bring down or transform? Are you living your Inner Spring? What would that look like?