Cultivating Loving Feeling + Tools for Deepening Self-Love

I grew up with the maxim that love isn’t a feeling; it’s an action. Which I appreciate. Because love is gritty and hard and takes us to depths in ourselves and reveals truths about our human condition that can rock our worlds and shake us to the core. And when it comes to love, sometimes we just have to put our heads down and power through.

But somewhere in this pragmatic, sensible approach, I lost the truth that love is not only practical action and no-nonsense work, but also a feeling we cultivate with intention. And this feeling bit is just as important.

My relationships – with my partner, with my people, with myself, with the earth, with my creativity – all require my investment in creating feelings of connection, appreciation, and awe, as much as they require concrete action and commitment.

I felt this most recently in my relationship with myself, which had become all action, no feeling.  Even though I was loving myself with action – acting and advocating on my behalf, taking care of my body, mind, and spirit, setting boundaries, and going after my dreams and honoring my desires – there was a gap in feeling that left me with a missing piece and asked me to consciously nurture positive feelings toward myself to love myself better.

Because feelings aren’t just fleeting hits of emotional sensation – they are deep energetic compass points, transporting currents of power, and spiritual fuel. And my own tendency to dismiss feelings when it came to love was leaving my love relationships unbalanced and deprived of this essential ingredient.

So I’m welcoming feeling back into the mix and attempting to bring more warmth, appreciation, and wonder to love so that I can create energies that connect me with the world, feed and inspire my relational commitments, and ultimately make love an act of devotion, joy, and transcendence.

Here are some ideas for deepening your experience of self-love:

1) Let yourself feel all your feelings, even (especially) if they seem silly, contradictory, or nonsensical.  Give yourself safe space to feel, and let yourself laugh, cry, and rage.  Speak to yourself like you would to a toddler who is overwhelmed or tantruming.  

2) Answer the following questions: what do I appreciate about myself?  How can I cultivate feelings of warmth and connection with myself?  How might I deepen into delight in my own aliveness and being?

3)Give yourself experiences of wonder.  What takes your breath away?  What inspires and awes you?  Give yourself space to feel, experience, and allow those feelings, experiences, and memories.

4) Ask: What do I most need to deepen self-trust?  Maybe it's prioritizing your basic needs, fortifying your boundaries, cultivating positive feelings for yourself, or deepening your routines of care.

5) Honor your desire, and let yourself want what you want.  Too often, we push down what we yearn for, believing it's too big, too shallow, too frivolous, etc.  What might it mean to let yourself have it, and to allow that energy to pull you forward into mystery?

Wishing you all so much beautiful love and deep relationship.

The World Needs Your Art

Six months ago, I was not painting. In fact, I had not picked up a paintbrush in more than a decade.

Five months ago, I brought home some watercolor supplies and started dabbling.

Three months ago, I started painting a lot and sharing my work.

Art has been the lightning-bolt epiphany of my 2018.

I am so happy to be making art, and although I can appreciate and understand the timing of it all, I am also sad there was a decade of my life that I wasn’t.

I had two primary objections to creating art of my own: I believed it didn’t really matter (or at the least the kind of art I would make wouldn’t really matter), and I believed I was not artistically gifted enough.

The shift started when I heard Fabeku Fatunmise talk about art and how/why it matters - that art is a transmission of energy and talisman of magic. I began to see for myself how art is a portal into a language, experience, and world beyond words, how art creates a bridge into what we can access no other way.

I began to notice how art was transforming me. And then I began to imagine how I might take the energy inside of me and make it into shapes, forms, and images on paper too.

Suddenly, it didn’t really matter how much talent I had. I wasn’t trying to paint a picture that could be mistaken for a photograph; I was trying to take an energy inside of me and make a thing that transmitted that same power and frequency.

Art has created so much magic and connection in my life this year – as I’ve taken in others’ art and shared my own.

If you have your own objections to making whatever art calls to you, I hope you recognize those as the lies they are - and see that the world needs your art and will be a more magical and alive place if you create it.