“Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you.” Loretta Young
When we don’t have the love we want in our lives, many times our efforts will go toward finding the person that we can love and that will return that love.
When I was healing my own broken heart years ago, I thought the answer to my emptiness and loneliness was to simply fill that hole with a man. And because I so desperately wanted to avoid those feelings, I wasn’t as particular about who that man was as I should have been.
The problem was that I was trying to skip over the most important step. I was so busy trying to find love that I forgot that I hadn’t yet prepared myself for love.
I hadn’t yet done the work to be able to attract the kind of love that I wanted, recognize it when it showed up and then be able to sustain it over time.
So, honestly, even if “The One” (I kinda hate that phrase) walked through the door, I wouldn’t have recognized him until I did the first step of actually preparing for love.
- Preparing for love is when we are able to look at our past relationships and understand the patterns.
- Preparing for love is when we are able to see how we actually helped create our experiences that we’ve had in relationships; not from a place of judgment, but from a place of compassionate curiosity
- Preparing for love is forgiving and releasing all the people who didn’t treat us right (that forgiveness, many times, needs to include ourselves).
- Preparing for love is when we are able to dance with our fears a bit and loosen the grip that our stories about love have on us.
- Preparing for love is gaining a deep understanding of our value and the precious gift that is our heart.
Most people want to avoid this step. That’s because it’s not easy and at times, it feels a little prickly.
But it is the only way to not carry all the crap (technical term for patterns, beliefs and fears) from the past relationships and experiences into future relationships and experiences.
It’s the only way to create a future that looks dramatically different than the past.
In my opinion, it’s the only way to find the love that you really want in your life.