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.

Allowing Anger

As a sensitive empath, anger (others’ and my own) used to scare me.  It felt too loud, intense, and violent.  But my emotional excavations have revealed anger’s vital – and healing – role in naming wrongs, restoring boundaries, inspiring change, and initiating reparation.

Sometimes, I get angry with my clients at work, and lately, I’ve been trying to give myself full and intentional permission to do that.  Yes, these are people who have experienced domestic violence (and often a myriad of other traumas pertaining to abuse and oppression).  And yes, while I know that anger and frustration are common and understandable features of direct service work with folks in high-stress, crisis situations, this is still super uncomfortable.

Which is why I never used to allow it.  Also, because I believed anger was callous and cruel, a violent force wanting to take possession of my body and turn me into an abominable, havoc-wreaking monster of epic proportions.

But no, anger is just a thing we feel.

It’s a powerful energy, sure, but it need not be channeled into explosive action or hurtful judgment.  And it does have to mean wishing someone ill, making them wrong, or denying their worthiness.

Allowing anger in the context of my DV work is important because if I’m going to honor and allow the fullness of others’ humanity, I need to honor and allow my own.  Pushing away anger is really just a feeble attempt at transcendence and emotional bypassing that separates me from the people I’m with and distances me from our shared experience of messy real life.

None of this means I turn to aggression (or passive aggression, the greater temptation being that I’m from the Midwest) to express myself.  Instead, anger is my ally in forming a grounded, assertive space from which to respond and proceed.

This happened recently.  I was angry with a client and was stuck in the same room with them for over an hour.  So I poured that anger into my energetic boundary (Karla McLaren writes about this practice in her book The Language of Emotions – highly recommended) and put my focus there, which allowed me to speak and act from my soft, true center, since it was grounded in and protected by my anger-fortified boundary.

And this is usually all my anger wants from me: a stronger boundary, safe space and comfortable distance, personal power and sovereignty.  But even before any of that, I think my anger, like any feeling, just wants to be felt – and recognized as the valid (and quite ordinary) human emotion that it is.