Michel Dest

Penticton, BC, Canada

Adora Chua

Singapore

Robyn

Australia

Thérèse S

New Jersey, USA

Deanna Shi

Nashville, TN, USA

Denzel Closs

East Hartford, CT, USA

Jeroen van Wieren

Den Haag, Netherlands

Lyda

Hope Andersen

North Carolina, USA

Explore the transformative nature of love, identify its imposters, and learn to heal your life and bonds.

English

Learn how to bring love into every aspect of your life to create miracles! In this talk, we explore what love is and what love is not. Some of us confuse love with other things, which can create a lot of problems for ourselves and our relationships. This talk is all about the healing power of love, and real-life examples are used to demonstrate love's power.

The Healing Power Of Love

Hello, and welcome to this talk about the healing power of love, how to heal your relationships through love, and how to be abundant and fulfilled through the healing power of love. The universal law of love deems that love heals and transforms everything for the better. There is nothing that cannot be transformed through love, and we will be exploring what love is and what love is not. In A Course in Miracles, we are told that there are only two vibrations that really exist in the world, love and fear. And if we are not in the vibration of love, we are in the vibration of fear. There is only ever the loving thought or the fearful thought, loving words or fearful words, loving actions or fearful actions, and any choice made out of fear will ultimately not service. Choices made out of love will. The Sufi poet Rumi wrote, Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. What is love? In Corinthians in the Bible we are told, Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. I love these words, and they are something to aspire to, but I'm sure that most of us are not there yet. And that's okay. Love yourself in your imperfection and in your good intentions, even if you fall down from time to time, or more often. In my book A Shift to Bliss, and also in my course here on Insight Timer, Releasing Beliefs of Fear and Lack, I talk about the imposters to love. So often we confuse them with love, but they are not love. They will not heal, they will not transform things for the better, but they keep us stuck and struggling. So I'd like to share with you the 10 most common imposters to love. Number one, power and control. When we attempt to have control over another person, or have power over them, we are in fear and not love, and no good will come of it, just as no good will come to the person who is willing to give their power away or be controlled. Number two, sacrificing our needs for another person. We must love ourselves before and above others, and give to ourselves before we give to others. When we sacrifice our own needs for someone else, resentment eventually creeps in. Number three, caretaking and pleasing. Doing for others the things they can do for themselves actually disables them. It doesn't really help them, and it prevents us from caretaking and pleasing the person we are meant to caretake and please, ourselves. Number four, dependence. Depending too much on another, or wanting them to depend on us, stunts our growth and eventually drains a relationship of love. Love is not dependence. In fact, when we love ourselves enough, we are willing to walk away from any relationship that doesn't really honour us. Number five, rescuing. Unless there is a real emergency, the only person we should be rescuing is ourselves. When we feel the need to rescue, we are not seeing another human being as an empowered human being, which they are. Love helps, but doesn't rescue. Number six, guilt. Guilt says, I have to, and I should, rather than, I would love to. If we are acting out of guilt, we are acting out of a deep sense of inadequacy or shame. Number seven, idolising. When we put someone on a pedestal, we aren't seeing them truthfully, but through an unrealistic lens that is bound to disappoint us eventually. Number eight, addiction. Relationships that are addictive take us from feeling extremely high to extremely low. When infatuation or idealisation wears off, we plummet into disappointment and want the high feelings to return because we don't have enough love for ourselves to sustain a more realistic relationship, or to walk away because we have realised this isn't love. Number nine, demanding perfection. Believing that we or others must be perfect in order to be loved or lovable will ensure we will be disappointed in love. Love sees through the faults of ourselves and others. And number ten, narcissism. Taking the concept of self-love to the extreme, narcissism manifests as extreme self-centredness with a disregard for others. Genuine self-love manifests as loving ourselves first, so as to love and give to others. Narcissism never leads to fulfilment, and choosing to be in a relationship with a narcissistic person won't ever lead to fulfilment. I'd like to share with you now ten aspects of love that are really important to know. Number one, love of self must come before any other love. You are the most important person in your life. You are actually the centre of your world. You are worthy of your own love. Self-love means being discerning, creating healthy boundaries, and doing what is right and good and true for ourselves. Number two, love is freedom and allows freedom. The soul wants to be free. The soul withers when it feels trapped or controlled. So allowing ourselves freedom and others freedom is a very loving thing to do. Number three, love sees possibilities and not limitations. Possibilities for ourselves, in others, and in situations. Love always finds a way. Number four, love is giving, but not depleting ourselves in the giving. When we give, we give with joy. If we are giving with resentment, then we are sacrificing, and sacrificing is not love. Number five, love is consistent and grounded. Hearts that keep opening and closing create emotional roller coasters. On and off love is not love. It creates emotional exhaustion. Quietly consistent love is true love. Number six, love is acceptance. Accepting ourselves as we are, and others exactly the way they are. Accepting how we feel, or how they feel. This doesn't mean that we don't work to change things, but we must start with acceptance. Number seven, love is forgiveness, forgiving ourselves and others. Even if we leave a relationship, we must still do the work on forgiveness. Love is gratitude, that's number eight. Appreciating all that we have gives us a full heart. Number nine, love embraces imperfection, not perfection. Perfectionism is the enemy to love. And number ten, love seeks to understand. Saint Francis of Assisi said, Father grant that I may seek not to be understood, but to understand. If you sit with someone long enough and hear their story and their point of view, you will begin to understand why they've made mistakes, why their lives are not flowing well, why they self-sabotage. And from this can come compassion. One of the most common ways we block love is being in blame and judgment. When things don't go our way, it's so easy to go into blame and judgment and criticism. It may be of others, or of ourselves, but this will only make a situation worse. Because blaming and judging do not stem from love, they stem from the ego, and the ego does not look through the lens of love. Blaming, judging, criticizing keeps us in a very disempowered state. Deeming another person or a situation or ourselves as wrong or guilty actually robs us of the growth opportunity we are being presented with and keeps us in a low vibration. Blame, judgment and criticism close the heart. Love opens the heart. Love cannot flow when we are in blame and judgment, and so we block our good from coming to us. Love is the energy that gets things flowing. Notice when you go into blame and judgment, and I say when because most of us do it. Every moment that you are aware of it is your healing opportunity to transform this old pattern. I'd like now to give you some examples of love being used to heal a. a situation b. to create abundance and c. to heal a relationship. The first example I'd like to give you, which is of a situation healing, is about a client I saw who's been looking for a job and over and over again he's been let down or rejected by either a prospective employer or a recruiter and he was feeling frustrated and actually very angry. He was judging them, calling them selfish and just out for themselves, inconsiderate. I asked him how does he know that the employer or recruiter is selfish or any of those things. I had noticed that his heart was closed down and he was in judgment and blame and his anger showed that he was in resistance, not acceptance. I explained the universal law of acceptance that through acceptance things will change but what we resist will persist. Accepting things as they are in the present moment is a very loving thing to do because you're loving the what is. I asked him to consciously open his heart and to send love to all those people he was judging and blaming and love also to himself. Love and compassion to himself because trying to find a job and getting knocked back over and over again can bring up a lot of fear that the next job is not going to come and can create feelings of hopelessness. I asked him to do this heart opening and sending of love every day and needless to say the phone began ringing and things started happening. The second example I'd like to share with you is of love healing your finances. There are so many examples I could give here both from my own life and also my clients. As a soul coach I coach other healers in their healing businesses and so this is an example of a healer who came to see me because she wasn't making enough money in her business. She was thinking of closing up shop and going back to her corporate job. What I picked up in our conversation was that she was so focused on the lack of money coming in from her business that she had fallen out of love with what she did and what she's here to do. Her sense of purpose. She was in fear and this is actually quite common. Fear comes in and love goes out. So I did a meditation with her to get her to come back to her calling, her mission and to feel the love she has for that and also align her to the idea that if she has come to be of service there must be people in need of her service. That which I seek is also seeking me. And I asked her to send love out to all those who are seeking her services and this of course opened her heart and her open heart shifted the energy and business began to flow again. New opportunities began to flow in. I also got her to practice gratitude for every client both existing and new because the law of gratitude deems that whatever we are grateful for will expand and grow. My third example is of love healing a relationship and I'm going to use my own life as an example and it happened only recently. My partner is a builder and I've wanted a new fence built at the back of my house for ages but John, my partner, has been very busy and this task has dragged on and on and on. The materials were delivered and hanging around but no fence and I found myself turning into a bit of a nag and every time the topic was brought up he looked frustrated and defensive but then I noticed that my heart was shutting down on him when it came to the fence. My voice had an edge to it so I thought, what would love do now? And I consciously opened my heart chakra when talking to him even if he was saying, I'll do it when I get time, I'm very busy. And something happens when you open your heart chakra your voice softens, the energy changes. That afternoon I looked out the back of my house and the fence was half built and so I lavished more love on him and by the next day the fence was fully built. By this stage I was so back in love with the man I took him out for dinner and we celebrated our new fence. And here's the thing, it takes just one person to open their heart and like flowers blooming the other will likely open theirs too. When it comes to long term relationships be aware of how conditional your love is. It's easy to close off your heart when there are challenges. And also this goes for our long term relationships with our family members. Ram Dass said, if you think you're enlightened go spend a week with your family. There was one really important point I'd like to make here particularly when it comes to life partner relationships and long term relationships. The law of love will work in all relationships however not in a way that you necessarily expect. Most relationships will be transformed for the better through a loving open heart but some will not. The law of love will always reveal the truth. If you are consciously being a force of love in a relationship but the other person continues to respond without love then that is an indicator that the person is not capable of giving you the love you need. And so sometimes you must love yourself enough to move on. Being in a long term relationship that is not loving is soul destroying. And when it comes to loving our children I recall reading in a quote years ago that said, a mother is only ever as happy as her unhappiest child. And at the time I really related to it. How many of us worry about our children and even our adult children? While this is accepted as normal what we're actually doing is not trusting that they have all the resources within them to live their lives well. I recall one of my sons saying to me well actually he was yelling at me will you stop worrying about me because I feel like you're stealing my problems and they're my problems. The philosopher and poet Khalil Gibran writes in The Prophet Our children have so much to teach us and not the other way around. When speaking with your kids look into their eyes and convey the message that they have everything within them to live well. Believe in them. Worrying is the opposite of believing in them. Worrying stems from our deepest fears. We all have them. But continue to choose love over fear. So how do we keep an open heart? How do we keep love flowing? It takes awareness. Awareness is the bridge between our old self and our old ways and the new self and the new ways. Without awareness transformation is impossible and this is why I do recommend regular mindfulness meditation. Through regular mindfulness meditation you become more present and your mind becomes more spacious, more observant and you become aware of your reactions and your old responses and aware of a space where you can choose differently in that moment. You can choose love and you can ask yourself in that moment what would love do now? I'm Nicole Bayliss and thanks for listening.