Are You Looking For True Love?
Start With Yourself
Everything in your life stems from you and your relationship with yourself…You are the foundation. When you learn to love yourself, that is when you will attract true love into your life.
We have all been taught that the love that we seek lies in the outside world, and that seems to be true, but it is just an illusion, albeit a persistent one.
I was on a quest to find true love for so many years. I swear, I feel like it began way back in childhood. You know, we grow up as children hearing so many fairy tales, and I think that is where a lot of the misunderstanding starts. Time and time again the story is the same. The maiden who is being tortured by her evil stepmother finally meets the prince, he chooses her out of all of the eligible maidens in the kingdom, and after a bit of conflict, he whisks her off to his palace where they live happily ever after. That’s the gist of it.
In all of these tales, there is a primary villain, and that almost always takes the form of an evil stepmother or wicked witch, and frequently the two overlap. The stepmother is extremely cruel to the fragile, gentle, and kind maiden, and it seems as if she is trying to break her will and steal from her the essence of her power, which is her gentleness and her light. The stepmother does this because she has no true power of her own, for there is no real power in cruelty and evil.
Through her abuses, the stepmother wears down the maiden and does manage, at least for a short while, to make the maiden forget her light and her true nature. The maiden forgets who she truly is and begins to shut down in hopelessness, as there seems to be no true escape from her plight of imprisonment. She believes that she must live as a prisoner until or unless some prince charming can come and save her.
And so we have this idea instilled in us from a very young age. To be fair, the idea that we may be rescued does not just come from fairy tales, it comes from many places. The point is that we are turned away from the truth of who we are sometimes by a wicked stepmother, sometimes through self-hatred, and sometimes life just wears us down. In the process, we forget our true power, that we have inside of us everything that we truly need.
Why is this? In our world, we are usually not told that our power lies within us. We generally do not receive messages like this in our culture anywhere, never mind in fairy tales. We are taught in many ways that what we need exists outside of us, that all of what we need is in the outside world, and that we have to work hard to get it. We are taught that we have to earn it and even that we must be the person that others want us to be in order to have even our most basic needs met, that we must conform to some standard. This is how it’s all set up. We receive this conditioning first through fairy tales, our caregivers, and then through TV, movies, books, school, and other authority figures. This is just how the world seems to work at this moment in time. We will evolve to a better way one day, I believe.
In the meantime, we look outside, as we have been taught to do, hoping that the prince will someday come and rescue us from our plight, our miserable or empty life. If we are desperate enough, we may take any prince who comes along, any who appear to be charming at first glance, but in fact, are dark underneath, as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We accept what comes along so that we can escape the horrible stepmother only to find ourselves in the hands of an evil man who only wants to own us and control us too. Now we are in another situation not so different from the one we just escaped, we are like prisoners, having our very life force energy fed on by someone who only wants to own us for their own benefit. There seems to be no true escape.
In our modern culture, most people are carrying the incorrect belief that they are not enough or even that they are worthless. This is to be expected from living in a world that teaches us that we don’t have what we need, and that we must strive and work hard just to survive, and that our happiness must take a backseat to our survival. To get to the point of thriving in this kind of world is a challenge, to be sure.
Thankfully, there is another way to live, a better way. We have simply been looking in the wrong direction all this time as if we have been living turned inside out. While we have been taught that we do not have what we need within us, the exact opposite is the truth. The truth is that all that we need lies within us, all of it.
Does this mean that we don’t need anything? Of course not. We still must work so that we can eat and house ourselves, and if we desire companionship and the intimate love of sacred partnership, we must certainly look in the outside world for that.
What it means is that we turn first to the source, which is within ourselves. Since we contain within us the entire universe, which is an idea that has long been taught by ancient spiritual paths and even now is supported by quantum physics, we must first look within for that which we desire without. We are the foundation for our lives, meaning that everything in our lives stems from our primary relationship, the relationship that we have with ourselves.
“You presume you are a small entity, but within you is enfolded the entire universe.” Imam Ali
If we look within ourselves and dislike what we see, or if we have unhealed wounds that still block us from the truth of our own brilliance and power, then we must do the work necessary in order to see ourselves clearly. Once we are able to see ourselves with clear eyes and with a new perspective, we begin to fall in love with who we are. We start to appreciate all parts of ourselves, the light and the darkness within us, and we come to see that there is beauty in all of who we are.
When we begin to truly fall in love with ourselves in this way, amazing and beautiful changes start to take place in our lives. When we orient to this new way of living, and to this place of self-love, we begin to access our true power, and everything in our lives expands, deepens, creativity flourishes, and we attract love into our lives in many different forms.
It is from this place of self-acceptance and self-love that we are ultimately able to find the true love of the other, a true sacred partnership. This is the kind of partnership that we have always dreamed of having. This is the kind of love where we are accepted, honored, and loved for all of who we are, where we can show up as we are and be adored and cherished.
Once we truly love ourselves unconditionally, we can finally, at long last, attract the true love of our soul mate. The irony? Now that we offer ourselves the love we so desire, we become love, we are filled with it, and we now can live from the love that is our true essence. While we may be grateful to have at last found our soul mate, we know that we would be content without that love. We are complete within ourselves, at last. We are a living embodiment of love.
What about me? Well, I have to tell you that I thought I found my prince several times, and some happened to be wolves in sheep’s clothing, all right, and that was because I didn’t love myself just yet. I was still living my life from a place of self-rejection and worthlessness.
Once I healed that rift within myself enough, and decided that I would be just fine if I found the One or not, there he was, just like that. I finally found my true love, and you can too. Look no further than your own reflection.
