The Only Tool you Need to Make your Relationships Thrive
You may have heard it said that love is the answer. Love is not only the answer, but it is also the only possible answer. Of all the human traits, qualities and possibilities, love is the only solution that never fails. It works 100% of the time. Love works to keep us safe. It eases conflicts. It satisfies our need to give and to receive. What other answers could you hope for?
Love is Safety
Our souls long to be in communion with others. One of our primary goals in interacting with people is to give and receive love. Our bodies, minds, and souls are happiest when we connect lovingly with other people. When we hold a mindset and emotional state of loving, we feel safe. And so do the people around us.
It is easy to stay in a loving state when someone is being nice, praising or supporting us.
Yet, our relationships and interactions with others are often fraught with conflict. We feel vulnerable when others disagree with us or seem to treat us disrespectfully. All too often we step out of a loving space and react either aggressively or defensively when we think we might be hurt by someone. Aggressive and defensive reactions, though they are normal, never get us what we want.
Our less-than-loving reactions take us away from our goal, not towards it. So, although we may feel a momentary vindication in a sharp comeback or a witty, sarcastic remark, in the end, we miss out on the love we seek when we react aggressively or defensively.
Whether someone is praising you or blaming you, or behaving in any way that seems hurtful, filling your soul with love is the only real way to stay safe. When you remember that everyone’s goal is love, it becomes easier to internally step away from defensive or aggressive reactions and to not take things personally.
When you stay in love, no matter how another person is behaving, you will be sure to find a response that is in the best interest and highest good for all parties. Love does not play favorites. Love acts for the best for everyone.
Love Eases Conflicts
It is easy–when we forget that love is the answer–to get lost in feeling at odds with our loved ones. Disagreements turn into fights with a winner and a loser. Our needs and desires seem to be in conflict with the needs and desires of other people.
One of the greatest challenges we face in our relationships is the struggle to balance the needs of each individual. Sometimes you get your way and sometimes you don’t. Relationships seem to be a never-ending negotiation, and it sometimes seems that the best you can hope for is a compromise that you can (sort of) live with.
Disagreements turn into something completely different when we come from an inner space of love. As always, love changes everything. Coming from love, we are not negotiating. We are not looking to win or to have someone else lose. Instead, we are using our interaction to learn more about the other person and to express more of our own inner reality.
Coming from love, the idea of compromise takes on a new meaning. Instead of giving away something that we hold dear in order to get something else, we are now looking—with our partner—for the solution that will meet the most needs, given everyone involved.
When we fill ourselves with love, every one of our words and actions come from that space and express love.
Giving and Receiving
In our transactional culture, we have the habit of keeping score in our relationships. Even if we realize that both giving and receiving are important, our relationships can suffer from this tendency to keep a mental accounting of how much we have given and how much we have received. We look for balance and judge other people and our relationships by this score.
Love is not concerned with a score. It gives and receives naturally. In fact, in a loving state of being there is very little difference between giving and receiving because an act of love is one of the most satisfying things we can do. We receive every time we give.
It takes time to discover which relationships will last, which are balanced and which are better to let go. There is no need to step out of loving to make this discernment. If you keep your heart open and loving, relationships that are not reciprocal will gently fade away over time.
How to Love
There are scores of tidbits of advice that might help you stay in a loving mindset. But the most effective and simplest is to remind yourself over and over again about how good it feels to be in that loving space, and to remember that you love the other people in your life.
Remember that love is a two-way street. If you think you are in love with another, but you are suffering or not taking loving care of yourself, you are only halfway there. You will know that you are truly in love when you feel a profound love for yourself AND the others in your life.
Guest Author Bio:
Mike Bundrant is the author of Your Achilles Eel: Discover and Overcome the Hidden Cause of Negative Emotions, Bad Decisions and Self-Sabotage and co-founder at The iNLP Center which offers online certification in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and life coaching.
