To give someone a drink of water, you first need to fill the cup. You can only give as much as you have. Fill you own cup and you have more to give another.
Love works in much the same way. Love is a cycle of giving and receiving. We can only give love when we feel the love to give. Life has a way of making us forget that our being needs love too and that it is acceptable to give to one’s being first.
When we feel love for self, we fill our being. In turn we have more love to give others. When we don’t give love to self, eventually our personal cup, our being, runs dry. We need to replenish our being by
taking time each day to practice self-love. The more we make self-love part our day, week, and month, the more natural it feels. There are things we do each day, that we added to our day out of necessity, such as exercising, that have now become a normal and expected part of our day. We can do the same by consciously choosing to practice self-love until it becomes part of each day. We can step into the flow of giving and receiving love each day, and with practice, in each interaction throughout the day.
A few ways to step into the cycle of love:
Give love by:
- Showing kindness to all beings.
- Choosing to walk into every interaction from a place of love.
- Being yourself. The best love you can give another is by showing up fully, as who you are.
- Giving yourself permission to release experiences and people that do not serve you. You are better for letting those people and experiences go and not dragging them into future interactions.
Receive love by:
- Accepting a compliment without dismissing yourself as ordinary.
- Allowing people to give you a gift. You are giving them the opportunity to give love to you.
- Accepting assistance – when someone offers a helping hand that you need at that moment, and they offer it without expectation, accept it. They are showing their love for you.
- Giving others the opportunity to do for you what you freely do for them.
- Taking a moment to acknowledge the love that is flowing to you.
- Acknowledging that you matter too. Accept love by loving yourself and practicing self- love each day, filling your being.
A self-love daily practice can be as simple as waking each day and being aware of how you think, speak and feel about yourself. From this awareness, when you catch yourself judging or speaking poorly about yourself, consciously choose better thoughts and words about yourself until the old programming falls away.
Loving yourself allows you to fully love others.
What have you done today to give or receive love? Share in the comments and inspire others.
Many Blessings,
Santa
