Any strong influences in Pisces bears reminder of airline safety guidelines: In case of a sudden change in cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop. Please place your oxygen mask on first before placing the masks of others around you. I have learned the hard way –as it is on airplanes, so it is in life and therefore, so it is in love.
We all live to give and receive love. Even those of us who live to ‘destroy’ love are living for the presence of love, for without love’s presence, there would be nothing for them to battle against. Everything comes from and back to love. Our emotions, thoughts, and actions are all born of our desire to find love, avenge love, or to make up for the love we don’t believe we ever had or maybe that we perceive to have lost. Yet notice how all of these examples tend to place love outside of ourselves…and that is the problem. Love is not outside of us for us to find or claim or seize it, though we’ve been led to believe that to be so.
Love starts within us, and that is why many of us have such a difficult time embracing it from others. And this is why we have such a difficult time loving ourselves – because we have been conditioned to believe that love is not within us or that love something we should not give ourselves. We have been conditioned to believe that someone or something else should give it to us, and that it must come from outside of ourselves to be valid or real. Yet even when we do get it from external sources, we often end up feeling disappointed, empty, and longing for love- regardless of if we received what we said we wanted or not – because we are looking for someone or something outside of us to fill us emotionally rather than filling our own emotional wells and overflowing them with an abundance of love from within.
When we don’t have our internal wells full of love, we may also resist love from external sources. This is likely to occur because we erroneously believe that we must give something in return or exchange for the love and contribution we receive.
- We may fear any expectations of reciprocation from others because we haven’t discovered what we have within us to share, or we are afraid to share what we have found within ourselves because we haven’t accepted it in ourselves yet.
- We may sense on some level that we are worthy or deserving of love or success, yet we seem to run from opportunities to have those elements become real for us in our lives.
- We may have others chasing us around desperately wanting to give us the fulfillment of our deepest desires, yet we won’t accept their gifts or contributions…or we may receive them, only to figure out a way to sabotage them to prove that we “never should have had them in the first place” or that we are “always denied what we want”.
- We may invalidate our feelings of self-worth and positive self-esteem by saying that they aren’t right, aren’t acceptable, or that it’s selfish to feel the way we feel.
Of course, by judging ourselves and our feelings and writing ourselves and/or our emotions off as unimportant or self-important, we try to disguise and justify all of these denials and excuses as “acceptable” behaviors, but really they are expressions of our true feelings releasing themselves on not-so-honest terms and not-so-pleasant ways.
Instead of discovering and expressing our contributions to others, we find ourselves dealing with feelings of jealousy, envy, angst, frustration (and our actions rooted in them). This is not to say that arrogance, superiority, vanity, and entitlement are self-love. In fact, they are behaviors which usually cover up deep insecurities about one’s lovability or worth. Self-deprecation, false modesty, self-sabotage, martyrdom, and victimization are not self-love either as they play up those same deep insecurities and fears. They are all ways we deny ourselves our emotions and evade taking responsibility for the fact that we are likely out of alignment with our true and deepest desires for ourselves- they are all ways we can avoid our emotional and spiritual truths.
Love isn’t so much about give-and-take or tit-for-tat as it is about recognition of how we all can give and receive to each other, and how we all have the capacity within us to do so. And it’s definitely not all about money, stuff, position, rank, fame, or social status. It’s about choosing to see whatever it is that we have to contribute, and making our contributions to others. In doing so, we find strength and confidence and we are open to receive contributions from others. And note that what we believe is our strength may not be our strength for others – it’s important to receive feedback from them as to what they value about us. We may be surprised by what others see our strengths to be.
Recognize and understand that:
- our jealousy and envy are born out of our fear of or our failure to recognize and express our greatness within ourselves while watching others making the most of theirs
- our angst is born of our holding back our truths due to fear of rejection; that our frustrations are born of our censorship of our own full self-expression in any and all forms
- our self-deprecation is out of our fear of being perceived or judged by others as arrogant or conceited
- our self-sabotage is born of our false beliefs that we aren’t deserving of success or love…
When we grasp all of that, we understand that we no longer have to feel those negative emotions. We find that we are indeed capable of unconditional and ever-present love, and that unconditional love is available in all of us and to all of us all of the time.
The foundation of true and unconditional love is to choose to love yourself first and to love yourself from the inside out – to put your oxygen mask on first so that you have a life from which to contribute to the lives of others. You can only make a difference for others if you are alive to do so. You can only love others if you have love for yourself to share.
How do you contribute in loving ways to yourself each day? Do you allow yourself to acknowledge your emotional truth? Do you put your oxygen mask on first in your everyday life?
Remind yourself to breathe this week…and enjoy the oxygen.
Until next week…
~Light, Love, and Blessings,
Grace
