We want to celebrate the love that is between us and within our lives this Valentine’s weekend, but can we first harness the power of what love is?
How do you own your love?
I pose this question, and I can feel the power of something rumbling within. It excites me to participate in the embodiment of love, to drive something wonderful and real forward. Not to candy coat, but to sit in the center of it and hum it into the world in a way that translates to another person as a good feeling within them, and within me too.
To harness love means to take the reigns in your capacity for love, to be able to hold and treasure it. To have the skill of being within it so not to let it slip away from you when the mountain of life gets steep and rocky. You can put your needle on the grooves and let it play, and then play again and again in new, spontaneous ways.
If you or your relationship are struggling with receiving or generating love, it may be a good time for some therapy. Love is such an essential right, but many of us struggle with how to feel into it without fear. Reach out to me if you want to grow within your capacity to feel, recieve other’s love, or express yourself in relationship in more caring ways – Kristel Allen, LMFT
To be clear, I don’t mean a possessive form of owning something- I want to know how you know that you are loving and when you are loving. The reason for this is that I think when we know how we do something, and what circumstances support it, we can repeat it. We can repeat loving, and being loved if we own our love. Why not make it something that can be practiced, harnessed energetically, and thus available at will?
To gather and form love into something that can be found again is an act of our humanity.
Having ownership of love means, for example, if someone in your life does something that is hurtful, annoying, or outright outrageous, you have the reigns of where your nervous system goes. You may need to catch yourself from falling down into despair, and know how to be self-loving in very explicit ways.
You may need to know how it is that you feel love as well, so that when it comes knocking at your door, you recognize it as a friend.
You may need to stop yourself from lashing out at your loved one, find some way to be patient with them, to contact them differently, and stop whatever pattern is being replayed inside of your relationship. These are acts if loving yourself, your partner, and your relationship.
Knowing how to return to love, and understanding its rightful power is a skill, a practice, and an energetic art form. Love is fluid, and thus can take on many forms.
Let’s share together around our own ways of loving so that we can learn together how to not only love, but to love well, love often, and love freely but without losing precious selves along the way.
- How do you gather yourself when upset with your child so that you talk calmly to them, directing their minds into actions that will serve them and others?
- How do you yield in order to forgive a friend or ask for an apology from your beloved?
- How to you fill yourself with good feelings or self-affirming thoughts before walking into a stressful meeting?
- How do you create boundaries for yourself, so that you care for yourself around hurtful people?
- Are you giving something away when you love? Or are you holding something up that you don’t give away, but you stand within?
Love may be selfless, but loving is something that we very much do, live, and become as humans having a personal experience.
Love may be free, and essentially an energy that lives within and between all things. But we are human, and so to own it means that I get to participate in its becoming. I think it is wise to not just take it for granted without holding a hand out and offering: “I love like this.”
Owning the way that you love is in itself a transformative act.
Please use the comments section to address a question above or below so we can learn from one another. Let’s give voice, or share an image, to the place that love has in our lives.
- How do you own you own your love? What form does your love take?
- What does it look like to another, and how does it feel to you?
May you meet the vulnerabilities of love with courage, vigor, and gentleness along the way – this weekend, and always.