“Perhaps we should love ourselves so fiercely that when others see us they know exactly how it should be done.” – Rudy Francisco
We often find ourselves waiting for someone to love us the way we want to be loved. We wait with the belief that, once that happens, then we’ll feel good, we’ll be happy and our lives will be complete. Then, we will have arrived. Then, everything will be ok. But the truth is, nothing matters more than learning to treat and love ourselves the way we’d want someone else to treat and love us, and here’s why.
We spend our time waiting for someone to love us the way we want to be loved, but often we can’t even articulate how we want to be loved. We think that, when we are truly loved, then we’ll feel happy, complete, full, free, satisfied – whatever – and that is how we’ll know we are being loved the right way. We’re waiting for someone to love us the way we want to be loved, and we are judging whether we’re being loved right, by whether they make us feel a certain way.
“When they love me right, then I will feel happy, turned on, free etc.”
This leaves other people guessing – throwing spaghetti at the wall – about how to love us well, and it means we are abdicating the responsibility for how we feel over to that person/people.
We can begin to unravel this by figuring out what truly has us feel loved. This is less like a checklist because our feelings are much more whimsical & (frankly) irrational than that. However, it’s valuable to know, for example, that you feel loved when someone cooks you a meal, sends you a spontaneous love-text, or brings you flowers for no reason. What is far, far, far more powerful, is to embody the love for ourselves that we want to receive. The former is useful for communication & relational data, and for creating structures & frameworks for a long term relationship, but developing the capacity to truly treat ourselves the way we long to be loved is the bedrock for all other relationships to be built on.
It’s our capacity, willingness and ability to practice loving ourselves the ways we want to be loved that provides the solid foundation for us to create those structures in a relationship with another. So the more important questions to ask are: Do you care for yourself the way you’d want somebody who loved you to care for you? Do you actively treat yourself the way you’d want someone who loved you to treat you? Do you love yourself the way you’d want somebody else to love you? Do you speak to yourself the way you’d want somebody who loved you to speak to you?
In order to do this, we must clear away the layers of ‘shoulds’ & ‘have to’s’ & ‘but that’s silly’s’. We must be willing to become truly silent & listen to the (often quiet) voices of our heart & body. We must take the time to actually feel what our body longs for.
We must be willing to return to the source of who we truly are.
To both fill our own cup & drink from our own never-ending well-spring.
To be the woman you believe you would be if you were being perfectly loved – even before you feel perfectly loved. In this way you can create a relationship where both you and your partner treat you like a precious object. You can be your perfect partner.
Watch the full video:
This is an extremely important idea!
I’ve discovered for myself that my capacity to allow another to love me rarely exceeds my capacity to love myself. And if my perception of their love happens to exceed my own self-love, it doesn’t last long.
Not only that, the withdrawal symptoms are horrible!
Many of my recent practices have been aimed at expanding my sense of my own worthiness, so that I can allow more good stuff to happen to me and around me.