I see you tired of the pain of unrequited love, wandering in the dry desert of your relationship, surviving off of scarce cactus blooms of love miles and miles apart.
I see you absorbed in the object of your affection – continuously wondering what he/she is feeling, thinking, and needing… at the expense of alienating your own soul. I see you every day trying very hard to be beautiful for others, forgetting to be beautiful for yourself. I see you feeling unsafe to just be you – to talk like you do, dress like you do, sound like you do, dance like you do. I see you terrified to receive the message that you are somehow not enough for the world.
I also see you loving BIG, and creatively, and with inspiration. I see you passionate to offer your love to the world, cradling a drop of trust that you have a unique contribution to give. I see your eagerness to nurture that drop into a spring of trust and self-love. I see you on the precipice of giving yourself permission to just be you, and dive into that sweet spring of your own love.
About a year ago, though I didn't realize it at the time, I was in a very unloving, cold, painful relationship. Our relationship wasn't always like that, but that's what it became. I was not a victim to this. I contributed to it. My default at the time was to be unaccepting, and I internalized the similar lack of love I was feeling from my partner as bitterness and resentment, and I, too sucked the love out of our relationship. For so long I was surviving in a relationship that was for the most part void of love and shelter. I was thirsty for love, and at the same time, too attached to him to love myself enough to leave, and he was, too, for a while, until he wasn't, and he let go. I screamed, I broke things, I refused to accept our ending after all of the effort and suffering I put into that relationship. But it ended, and there wasn't much I could do about it.
That devastation, that grief, was one of the most painful experiences of my life. To love someone so deeply – or perhaps, to be attached to someone so deeply – and receive the message that he was done with me; I felt abandoned, discarded, unimportant, unloved. And these feelings, while they were extreme to me in those times, were not unfamiliar to me.
Feeling unimportant, unloved, discarded – even before that point, I had felt these emotions often in my life – with friends, old lovers, family members. I too was tired of that pain. It was my familiarity with this pain led me to stay in that relationship longer than was healthy. I already had a high tolerance for no love, because that was sort of my default relationship with myself. I really thought that I loved myself at the time, and if I look at my actions, I can see how in many ways I did, and I can also see how in many ways I did not. My sense is, if you are reading this, this experience of feeling unimportant, unloved, discarded is at least somewhat familiar to you, too, and you're tired of this suffering.
You, perhaps quite literally, are dying - to be a loved woman.
We'll I'm writing this, just for you, to say that you can be a loved woman, and you don't need to die for that love.
Perhaps I'll even go as far to say that you are a loved woman, waiting to be uncovered, and nourished.
There's a saying that a diamond is always brilliant, even when it's covered by dust. We are brilliantly loved, and perhaps there's some dust covering our shine.
Here's the truth (no sugar coating, just straightforward love): if you are frequently feeling unloved in your relationships, it has nothing to do with you, and at the same time, everything to do with you.
There is a very important distinction here: when I say it has nothing to do with you, I mean it has nothing to do with WHO you are. You are not defective, unworthy, or disposable. I can promise you that, though I understand that sometimes hearing those words are not enough for us to believe them. I understand that perhaps you do feel defective, unworthy, or disposable. My service is to tell you that you are not, and there are so many more beautiful things that you are – like worthy, loved, radiant, important - but it is only up to you to believe that; it is only your responsibility – and not anyone else's – to believe that. Which leads me to my next point.
When I say that your experience of feeling unloved has everything to do with you, I mean that you are 100% responsible for your emotional experience in your life, including your emotional experience in your romantic relationship. The general idea is that if we want to feel a certain emotion, like happiness, it is no one's responsibility but ours to feel that way. This principle, sharing by personal experience, takes significant time and commitment and brain rewiring to truly understand (a rewiring that I am still working on), but so far I can tell you that it is worth the journey.
And that journey, of being a loved woman who is responsible for her love, is what I am inviting you to begin, as you prepare for leaving 2016 behind and calling in 2017.
Several years ago, before that challenging relationship that I shared about earlier, I made the simple most important commitment in my life: a commitment to myself, to truly know and love myself or at least learn how to love myself. You can say that I made a commitment to the journey of personal growth.
I manifested that commitment in many ways, and probably the two most impactful ways have been through participating in personal transformation seminars and ongoing one-on-one personal coaching for 2-3 years now. Before that commitment to myself, I was mostly a slave to my thoughts, which were often very harsh and critical, and I was too unconscious to differentiate between what was truth and what was illusion. That commitment to myself (manifested as seminars, coaching, and consistent personal introspection) helped me cut through illusion to differentiate lie from truth; to differentiate who I truly was and who I truly was not.
While it seems that it was coaching and seminars that helped me to create transformation in my life, I believe that the true source of the transformation was that single commitment I made to myself; the commitment to always rise, to always learn, to always grow. It was that commitment to myself that helped me stand again when my relationship had burned down to the ground, and all that was left was me and my very sad self. That commitment is what helped me choose to finally stop blaming my ex-partner for what happened in our relationship and take a serious look at how I was 100% responsible for my experience of our downfall. That commitment is what gave me the material and the courage to transmute that pain of abandonment into gifts to offer you now.
It is very easy to blame, and while we get the sweet payoff of sidestepping our own responsibility, there is no growth there.
What I gained from that relationship, and am offering you now, is one powerful lesson in being responsible in relationships: we train people how to treat us with love or no love.
Subtly or overtly through my actions, I see how I trained him to treat me with little to no love by sending him the message that I would accept that kind of treatment. I think many of us do this, but by accident, and understandably so - we are thirsty for love, and scared that love will leave, and that we will die thirsty, and so we tolerate less than loving actions from others; especially usually the objects of our affection. In this way, intentional or not, we train people that it's okay to be less than loving to us, and they just learn what we teach them. I understand now, through that very painful experience, that it is not only always up to me to train people how to love me, but that it always has been up to me. So, as I said earlier, our experience of feeling loved or unloved has everything to do with us, and at the same time, remember, nothing to do with who we are.
The commitment that I made to myself is what helped me to alchemize the pain of that relationship into gold that I gift to you now. If it wasn't for that commitment to myself, I would possibly still be lost somewhere in blame-land, carrying a heavy load of resentment and bitterness, which practically ensures no love.
My commitment to myself is also what helped me go even a step further and alchemize the pain of a neglectful alcoholic father into gifts to help women learn to love themselves. My self-commitment gave me the power to rewrite my personal story from one of victimhood, insecurity, and non-acceptance to a story of responsibility, courage, true power, and grace.
I do not think anyone needs coaching or seminars to create transformation in their lives. I believe that you are whole, complete, and fully capable of addressing life's issues without any external guidance because you have the highest guidance within you. However, if you are feeling the call of thirst for higher living, then my belief is that there is some part of you who is so eager for you to make this loving commitment to yourself… to commit to the process of transforming insecurity into shelter, fear into courage, unloved woman back into loved woman.
This is not a New Year's resolution. This is who you are.
Being a loved woman is your birthright. It's your birthright to feel loved, sheltered, honored, cherished, respected.
Being a loved woman is also your responsibility. Women are powerful creatures capable of singing the world back to life with their love. It is not only your birthright but your responsibility to sing your song and dance your dance and contribute your unique lyric to the song of the world.
How long are you willing to wait to be the person you are pretending you want to be?
I believe that most of us are thirsty souls wandering through a desert dry of love, wondering when the clouds will grant us the sweet water of love again. We search and search and search and, every so often, we find rare cactus blooms of love miles and miles apart. These show up in our lives as romantic relationships, friendships, compliments, acknowledgement, likes and followers on social media, things outside of us; and through this conditioning, we sort of forget that if we just turn around and take a deep look within, we would see that there is a deep spring of love waiting for us to discover it, and it's aquifer comes from within.
So with this turning page of a new year, I invite you to commit to watering your soul and jumping into the life-spring of the search of truth. There are so many ways to manifest this commitment to yourself, and honestly, the ways don't matter nearly as much as you taking the first step and making the commitment. So today, I invite you to manifest this commitment to yourself! Send yourself the message that you are worth it! Express that self-commitment in at least one way today, whether it's scheduling a free coaching call with me or with another coach you trust, or by enrolling in the upcoming 6-week Rewild Your Soul self-love seminar, or by going to that event that you've been scared to go to, or saying that truth that you've been scared to say, or dancing the way you've always wanted to dance. However you express that commitment to yourself, first, just make the leap; make that commitment to yourself to grow, to rise, to drink.
It's worth it. You're worth it. I promise.