Reconstitute a Shriveled Heart
If you were to rate your overall capacity to love on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), how would you measure up?
What if you were to rate your capacity to love even more specifically. For example, take a moment and rate your ability to love using the following scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest):
Yourself -
Your Partner/Spouse (if applicable) -
Your Children Individually (if applicable) -
Your Parents -
Your Siblings (if applicable) -
Your coworkers (if applicable) -
Your Boss (if applicable) -
Your Friends Individually -
Your Government (both local & national) -
Your Neighbors Individually -
Fellow Students (if applicable) -
Your Teachers (if applicable) -
Perfect Strangers -
Those who have wronged you -
Your Extended Family -
Truly, the list could go on and on!
So, how'd you do? Are you a great lover, or is your heart shriveled, dry, and small?
For many years, my own numbers put me at the bottom of the list. I was more of what you might call a fighter. :) It's not what I wanted to be, I just felt trapped, helpless, and overwhelmed by other people, and that feeling fed a defensiveness in me that became so prevalent my husband and kids gave it a name: the Dragon Lady.
Perhaps, your numbers and temper are better than mine were, but if you feel that you too are struggling with the ability to love and forgive, might I share three important realizations I had that reconstituted my dry and shriveled heart and opened me up to love again?
How to soften a heart of stone into a soft bunny's tail in three steps:
Love Yourself
No, really, Love Yourself!
You absolutely MUST Love Yourself!!!
Let's break each of these important steps down so that you can really understand each one intimately.
1 | Love Yourself
To KNOW yourself IS to Love Yourself.
Sounds simple enough, right? But, to be frank, it's not! Knowing yourself is far more difficult than one might think.
We all grow up in a world of survival, and because of that we learn how to hide and distance ourselves from our unique qualities and attributes because we think they are unacceptable to those we look to for our survival.
If we perceive that aspects of ourselves are undesirable to friends, parents, siblings, teachers, bosses, coworkers, and so forth, we will try to change and hide our so-called unworthy light under a bushel.
Much of who we really are slumbers below our superficial behaviors and actions because we don't think those aspects have any value, and as these parts of our heart slumber, we become more and more disconnected from them; we may even forget that we have these overlooked personality traits and characteristics, because we’re just trying to be "normal" and fit in.
For example, I lived much of my life as an extrovert, when in fact, I am a true introvert! I became an extrovert to compensate for what I perceived to be "weak" and "inadequate" social qualities and abilities.
When you are living in survival and trying to get approval from others, you will often notice that a natural inclination or behavior you have isn't bringing you the love, respect, and bare necessities of life you feel you need and want, so you alter yourself to be more agreeable so you can get the love, the admiration, or the attention you’ve been denied.
After years of denying myself the privilege of being whole by allowing the natural inward flow of my nature to once again guide my social interactions, I found a way to open the secret door into my soul and recover all of my hidden gifts, talents, abilities, and qualities that I had packed away years earlier when I was drowning in a lack of self-worth.
To see my whole self has been to love myself, and guess what? The amazing thing is, when you love yourself you begin to love others without force, control, or effort. Love is love, and when it is directed at you it is hard not to share that love with others.
2 | No, really, Love Yourself!
After I unlocked and opened wide the secret door of my soul and viewed it without bias, I was overwhelmed with possibility! I had potential! Me, a nobody from no where had a mission, a purpose, and a potential to live up to! Who would have thought? Well, honestly, I had hoped for years for that very blessing.
For most of my life, I had felt my soul calling to me from behind the secret door of hidden shame, but I didn't understand the message. It was all garbled up in negative and false beliefs about myself.
However, a day did not pass by that I didn't feel a strange nagging that I wasn't doing something that I should be doing. There always seemed to be an itch that I couldn't scratch somewhere inside.
When I began to shine a light on all of the hidden parts and pieces of myself, tucked away behind the secret door, I realized that survival had split me and parted me out like an old car; who I really was had been scattered about and was in need of some serious re-organization.
As I pieced myself back together again I saw for the first time an amazing thing! With all of my parts in order, I had a form, I had substance, I had a point! I wasn't some poor worthless soul that didn't matter, there was a master plan at work. I had a unique and individual to me purpose.
To see my purpose was to LOVE my purpose! I spent hours, days, weeks, and months reveling in my new-found potential and mission. All of the natural abilities I had, both the acceptable and unacceptable had a place within my purpose and I realized that my own weaknesses, and everyone’s really, are merely strengths that are atrophied or misused.
ALL OF ME IS IMPORTANT!!! And, if all of me is important, then all of everyone else must be important too. Perhaps, others felt like I did and were hiding important aspects of themselves behind the secret door. Maybe, others were underestimating themselves too!
I looked around me and for the first time I began to see those around me with new eyes. If I was inherently good, so was everyone else! I wanted to shout it from the roof tops! So, I did. I started giving others a peak behind the secret door and they too began to see the truth about who they really are.
Every time I offered a peak behind the secret door with someone else, I could see their light get brighter, and because I was sharing my love and gifts a strange change took place in my heart, it went from rock hard and shriveled to—as the Grinch experienced—my heart grew "three sizes” each day I helped another.
I had more capacity to love, because I could see what was worth loving!
3 | You absolutely MUST Love Yourself!!!
There are no two ways about it! If you want to love and be loved, you must first love yourself. You can do that in one of two ways; you can force some fake feeling to enter your heart, or you can focus on things that draw love into your heart naturally.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty", one of my favorite quotes by Keats.
To feel love you have to be surrounded by love. But, what is love?
The reason focusing on who you really are is so powerful, is because you are love. You were created with the express purpose to love and to be loved in return.
I believe that we were each born into a survival environment on purpose, so that we could be scattered about! I know that must sound ridiculous when I said previously that you have to gather up all of your scattered pieces. But consider the effects that being lost has on someone who is finally found. It’s hard to understand hot without cold, and it is just as difficult to know love without having experienced a lack of it.
How can one truly know love if they have not first known what it is like to go without it?
To know hate, hurt, jealousy, abandonment, abuse, survival, and any other pain-filled emotion, is to know affection, healing, generosity, acceptance, nurturing, thriving, and so forth.
We comprehend love, because we have something to compare it to.
To experience cold is to experience hot. To know want is to feel blessed. To comprehend desire we must also understand discontent.
If we want to feel love, we must first experience what it is NOT!
Survival is the perfect school for teaching LOVE. To have a shriveled heart is to know a full and bursting one.
Each of us have felt the pains of regret, remorse, shame, resentment, guilt, neglect, greed, jealousy, want, abandonment, denial, and hurt; therefore, each of us have the capacity to know forgiveness, atonement, reprieve, peace, kindness, selflessness, compassion, empathy, abundance, generosity, and love.
To be without all of your natural abilities and tendencies is to love them. To be denied your own pure and beloved potential is to love and honor it. To forget who you are gives you the opportunity to remember it, to value it, and to seek after it desperately.
You have been gathering the experience you need to truly love yourself your entire life—because of survival—that would allow you to truly value your purpose and mission; to really value yourself.
As you feel your soul calling to you, and then as you answer that call, the gap between you and your real self that has been caused by trying to survive will gift you with the hope, the faith, and the incredible power of motivation that comes to those who have been lost, alone, neglected, abandoned, shriveled, and abused, to truly see the worth in being found, recovered, restored, forgiven, atoned for, and to fill their hearts with Love.
When you go without love from others, but give it to yourself, you find that the experience and feeling of that love are only enhanced by the deficit of love received from others; and again, when you love yourself you will naturally and undoubtedly, love others regardless of how much love is reciprocated to you in return.
Once again, there are 3 solid ways to truly heal your shriveled heart:
Get to know and love yourself as you are
Love yourself as you learn to share who you truly are
Love yourself more fully as you recognize and gain wisdom from the struggles you’ve already experienced with love
