Let The Love In

You cannot be hurt, angered or upset in any way, by anyone or anything…unless you allow yourself to be. Neither can anyone make you happy, unless you let them.

Please give yourself a while to absorb this. I remember not liking it one bit when I first heard it, so I completely understand if you feel the same, but it is essential to your success that you let it in.

I agree that it can look incredibly real, that you feel hurt because someone is angry with you or your day is going badly…or that you feel blissed out because your partner does something romantic…but it doesn’t work like that.

If it did, everybody would feel hurt by the same things, amused by the same things, and offended by the same things. They would always feel jealous when they see their partner talking to an attractive person, yet many people trust their partners completely, and wouldn’t feel in the least bit insecure if they spent time with someone else. All people would also always feel thrilled if their partner arranged a surprise party for them, but in reality, some people hate surprises!

How you feel about anything is unique and personal to you.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you really didn’t have to wait for something out of your control, to make you happy; that you could always be happy….whatever was happening? Awesome not to have to place the key to your happiness into anyone’s or anything’s hand?

Well, I can promise you that you can; you always, always have the capacity to be okay and choose to feel love over fear in any situation. That choice is completely and utterly under your control… however much you currently feel that it isn’t.

If things on the outside of us, could make us feel a certain way, celebrities who seem to have everything we think would ‘make us happy’, wouldn’t suffer from depression or commit suicide yet, very sadly, they do.

Even though I’m sure you can accept my examples, I expect you still think your mood can be affected by outside events. You believe you’ll be happy at the weekend, when the sun shines or when you get promoted…yet I’d bet you can remember days when the sun shone and you felt unhappy, right?

Where do our feelings come from?

We think they come from people and situations, outside of us, things that we have no power over. For instance:

“I am worried because interest rates have gone up”

“I am really happy because we went on a lovely date”

It is not money, or the lack of it, that causes your concern, but your thoughts surrounding money. Your thoughts about increasing interest rates have been formed by your experiences and what you have been told and have believed. They are also affected by your mood at the time you think them; you take them as fact and have no reason to question them, yet how could money cause you upset? It is inanimate and cannot cause you to feel anything at all.

Your thoughts around money could be saying something like:

“I might need to stop spending so much money on clothes, shoes and holidays if my mortgage is going to go up a lot’”

It is your thoughts that cause your distress. Another time, in another mood, your thoughts could just as easily say:

“I am so lucky that I have a roof over my head and enough food to sustain me”

Equally, it is not the date you had that is making you feel so in love, it is your feelings around having this special time…your connotations about that. Your thoughts are actually saying something along the lines of:

“It is such a relief to think we’re getting along so well when I have had such dreadful experiences in the past”

It is that thought that leads to whatever you’re feeling.. In another mood, your thoughts could tell you:

“I’m suspicious that we’re getting on well. How soon is it going to go very badly wrong again?”

Some of our feelings seem much more important than others:

“I don’t think I can trust my partner to have my back any more”

However sad you feel, it is still your thoughts surrounding your aloneness that are making you unhappy, not being alone itself. In stronger times, you might feel that you don’t actually need a partner to validate or ‘save’ you in any way.

We innocently but incorrectly believe that our feelings tell us about the world around us. It looks, to us, like our feelings come from things on the outside of us but, in actual fact, we live in the feeling of our thinking; this means that our feelings only and always come from our thinking. Not only do we attribute our feelings to outside circumstances but we also often believe we have to act upon those feelings.

For instance:

“I feel sad when I fight with my friend; we’re not compatible, I have to end our friendship”

“I feel very anxious at home; I must move out”

“My new partner makes me so happy, I’m going to move in with them straight away”

It is not the relationship or even the fights that are making you feel you have to walk away, it is your thinking around your relationship and arguments.

You may hate arguing, like I do, but some people think that the excitement or passion of arguments keeps a relationship alive and that it would be boring if they and their friends always agreed.

If your thoughts are telling you that your relationship is ‘wrong’ in some way because you don’t always agree, it will look like you must end it.

If your thoughts are telling you that your relationship is not ‘wrong’ because of this, it will look like you must stay.

I am sure there are times when you can only see bad in the people and situations around you, and some when you can only see the good.

It all depends purely on your unique set of experiences and values and the mood you’re in at that moment.

At different times you can feel anxious, insecure, jealous, lonely, and many other ‘unpleasant’ feelings in your life, and these feelings aren’t telling you anything at all, except that your thinking is a bit off at that time. If you wait, your thinking and therefore your feelings will change because that’s what they do.

Just as sometimes you now feel your current job/friendship/home etc. is ‘wrong’ for you, when they’re not, I’m sure you have felt, in previous times, the excitement of a new hobby/friendship/love affair/job etc. and remember how all consuming it was….and how, a short time afterwards, you found that you’d got carried away and it wasn’t as good as you’d thought after all!

Yet those wonderfully excited feelings, were very real at the time; your feelings about it being the ‘best thing ever’ and that there was no time to lose, couldn’t have felt more true; but they weren’t, and had you acted on them and made life-changing decisions, it would have been a mistake you would have regretted.

Again, all your feelings ever do is let you know the quality of your thinking in that moment…and your thinking changes all the time. So if you feel unhappy, insecure or angry, and do nothing, you’ll naturally feel okay in due course. Unfortunately because you think your thoughts are ‘real’, you often feel you need to act upon them, and cause yourself a lot of needless suffering.

There is never a reason to attach to any feeling you don’t like. If you simply let it go, you will find you enjoy every other part of our life, a lot more.

“When things go wrong, don’t go with them”

The purpose of this exercise is not for you to concentrate on pain but so that you can gain an insight into how you need never feel that pain again.

I’d like you to think back, as an observer, so without attachment, judgement or discomfort to times when you have been hurt, angered or anything else you didn’t enjoy.

Spend time on each experience on your list, and see whether you can accept yet, that it was you who, albeit innocently, let the pain you felt in.

Revisiting this exercise regularly will help your understanding grow.

We each have, within us, the capacity to choose love rather than fear in any situation. Unfortunately, most people inadvertently choose fear because they don’t realise they have a choice.

Connecting to your innate ability can be challenging enough in situations that aren’t majorly important to you, but when faced with highly emotive sets of circumstances, you tend to fall back on your tried and tested method of believing your thoughts, and that works reliably each time; you get the same old result – you suffer.

The reason you are in difficulty is that you have attached, indiscriminately, to many of the unhealthy, knee-jerk thoughts that have entered your head and overthought them until you were practically paralysed with negative stimuli; your mind became so filled with anxiety…anger…resentment etc. that you could hardly function, let alone choose love and happiness. You became flustered and desperate, panicky and frightened; your reasoning and judgement became unreliable and inefficient. I know because it was exactly the same for me.

When you understand that you can simply decide whether to attach to a thought or not, you become free of fear; you can choose love every time and just knowing this is a complete game-changer.

When you’re focused upon how good the good is, the good gets better; life is like a mirror, it smiles at you if you look at it smiling.

You are not born a winner

You are not born a loser

You are born a chooser

Occasionally, you will come across people who do not behave in nice ways. I am reminded then of the wonderful Mahatma Gandhi quote:

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty”

It is easy to think, sometimes, that the world is going mad and that the position is irreversible; ultimately that there is no hope and no point trying to make things better.

I understand that fear, of course, I just don’t think that adding hate to hate can ever lead to peace. I’m not naïve enough to think that our love will have an immediate, direct or complete affect on the perpetrators of atrocities worldwide. I do believe, however, that if you reside in the peaceful space you always have access to, the more contagious that serenity will be; it will have a ripple effect out to your nearest and dearest and then further into the world.

Being happy is the most natural thing in the world; it is simply a matter of deciding, in each moment, that you are in a good mood. Whilst this may not be available to you right now…please accept that it soon will be.

Success comes in cans not can’ts.

When you keep a clear head and a warm heart, not only does it help you, but it

demonstrates to others that if you can do it, so can everybody else.

I believe that we have to be the peace and the love we want to see. The more of us who choose love over fear, the more people there will be, who hear our message. The less you feel that love can help, the more love will help.

You cannot directly change anything on the outside of you but you do have control over yourself and you can therefore choose to be anything you most want to see around you. You can also choose the amounts of love and fear you send out into the cosmos…what will you choose?.

I realise that you may not yet believe your thoughts can affect even yourself, let alone anything else. Maybe you could concede, though, that if there is any possibility that sending out love can help, then surely you should do it? And if you don’t believe it can help, there’d be no reason not to send it out, right?

Adding more fear to an already unpleasant situation doesn’t seem sensible to me, sending thoughts of peace, does…and if it only feels better to us then it is still an absolute win.

When I first saw the amazing Masaru Emoto water crystal photographs, where he shows that crystal formations, in water that has been shouted at, are chaotic and messy and the crystals from water that has been prayed over, are beautiful symmetric patterns, I was spellbound. It reminded me that love always trumps fear. Our bodies are sixty percent water; I can’t see, therefore, how we cannot be affected by thought.

If you don’t have love, you have nothing; remember that no one can take away your love or your well-being, unless you let them.

Through this program, I am going to take you to a place where you will consistently and reliably see that just because you have a thought in your head, you needn’t act upon or even follow it. To a place where it is more natural to be connected to your innate love, clarity, peace and wisdom than to live in the feeling of your fearful thinking. To a place where there is only love.

Rather like on an aeroplane when you put on your own oxygen mask, before you help anyone else with theirs, before you can think about fixing your relationship with anything in your life, you need to fix the one you have with you first. You need to get to know, and learn to love the amazing, beautiful and loveable soul you are.

The most important relationship you will ever have is the one with yourself. Until you can accept, love and appreciate yourself unconditionally, it simply isn’t possible for you to extend a pure love to anyone else, or to be easily loveable. We will go into this in more detail in section 3.

I know this can feel a bit cringe and as if you’re being conceited and showing off, but the love I’m talking about is a gentle acceptance of the you that is trying your best under, sometimes, difficult circumstances, the inner, authentic, ego-less, beautiful you. The you that came into this world perfect, the you that is still perfect; the you that just is and doesn’t need to define itself with anything after ‘I am’, doesn’t need to add ‘a fabulous wife or husband’, ‘a rubbish mother’, or anything else. The real you, the soul you. The you I’m pointing at is the you that doesn’t need to justify itself, the you that has no need for a label, the you that is in competition with no one.

The words that follow “I am”, follow you….

Many people have a long-established discomfort with the idea of loving themselves, some may be unsure if their perfect self is still there under all the life stuff or if it ever existed. This is sad.

The perfect you is always, always there; you don’t need to go off searching for it, it never leaves you and never, ever gives up on you. It waits patiently until, which time, you are ready to acknowledge it.

Once you have reacquainted yourself with this perfect part of you, you’ll find it easier and easier to stay connected to it all the time, but, at first, it’s easiest to find it when you take time to still your mental clutter…when your mind is quiet, rather than filled with its usual thinking and overthinking…and this is what you’ll learn next. I recently saw and liked the other Serenity Prayer.

“God, grant me the serenity to stop beating myself up for not doing things perfectly, the courage to forgive myself because I’m working on doing better, and the wisdom to know that you already love me just the way I am”

If you’re in a relationship, you probably often think that your partner or the relationship has changed. I hear it a lot, and each time, I’m amazed that people are surprised.

Life is ever changing; nothing stands still for long and situations can alter in the blinking of an eye. The people around you have equally shifting landscapes and their experiences have a knock-on effect on yours. You can choose to react to these changes by bending and bowing, like a sapling in the wind, adapting comfortably to the differing backdrops, rolling easily with the punches. Or you can fight against them, standing firm against the odds, ultimately being broken down by the relentless battering.

In reality, you will probably, because you don’t know there’s a choice, react in different ways at different times. The result is, that you feel you are continually fire-fighting; enjoying some successes but suffering too many defeats.

Change, growth and development terrify most people, who would rather stay miserable, than dare step out of their comfort zone. They also often report a dread that they may somehow lose themselves.

I was recently reminded of the statistic that of people who are told they need to make changes to their health or die, 90% won’t change! They “choose” death over change.

Yet, the lives we want and the relationships we’ve dreamed of, are just the other side of that invisible line.

Shedding old ways of being, is change.

It comes down to how much you want and are committed to the change, whether the situations you desire are worth stepping away from a comfortable place.

Elenor Roosevelt told us to:

“Do one thing every day that scares you”

And Susan Jeffers urged us to:

“Feel the fear and do it anyway”

I personally don’t enjoy being scared…I don’t choose to watch horror movies or ride roller coasters…but I know that if things we wanted weren’t scary, we’d already have done them. I see it not as a case of actively deciding to be scared, but of actively deciding not to let the irrational fear of change hold us back from our goals.

However well we think we adapt to change…there is always further to go. The more we think we know something, the more we are blocked from moving forward healthily.

When you feel vulnerable and insecure, in any way, you become paralysed by panic and are frightened to let go of anything, however horrid it is, lest the alternative is even worse.

The more comfortable you allow yourself to feel in your own skin, the happier you are, to surrender to the unknown, to take the small risk of stepping away from familiarity into your very best life.

There is nothing, nothing at all, to fear but fear itself.

When people advance and alter, they rarely emerge a butterfly, a completely different character, from an erstwhile caterpillar; they don’t actually lose anything of themselves….they are simply better. Why would that frighten you?

When my clients complain that their partner or friend has changed, it means only that they perceive this to be true, not necessarily that it is actually the case.

You will also come to understand, as you progress through this program, that it doesn’t even matter anyway… For now, allow that last sentence to simply wash over you…without concerning yourself with it…so that it may settle within you.

You see your life, only, through the viewpoint of your thoughts at that moment, and these perspectives change constantly.

It may meet resistance in you, but I need to explain that you can never truly know anyone else because you cannot be inside their head. This is absolutely okay…but you don’t think it is, you feel you should know everything about them…so you fill in any blanks. Of course, you don’t realise you’re doing this, or there would be no point, so what you’ve filled in with your own brain becomes your reality of who they are.

Over time, your feelings for them sometimes change for the worse…maybe because your circumstances have become more stressful, you’re not feeling well, money is tight or the rose tinted spectacles you saw them through have become cloudy and discoloured.

Maybe the feelings of the people around you have changed too, for the same reasons, and they start treating you differently because they’re now seeing you from a different perspective.

This is simply how life works, it is neither good nor bad. It is when you attach meaning to your outlook, and you believe what you’re thinking, that you have a, possibly, life changing problem.

Why do we see change as a bad thing?

We fear change because we like to feel in control, and variation unsteadies us…or rather, it does if we allow it to.

The more secure and confident you feel, the less scary a prospect change is. This too may feel challenging to you now, but I’m hoping you can allow the possibility that not only is this true, but that feeling comfortable with shifts, is available to you.

Once you have managed to alter your outlook or actions, you’ll find that you feel comfortable again, but when you see similar changes in others, it often makes you feel uneasy and insecure…because it appears they have taken a step away from you.

A common example of this is the way we all try to impress our partner at the very beginning of a relationship.

In the infatuation of early romance, we are desperate to know everything about our partner and unfortunately this can only come with time. So, as we’ve learned, we make it up, like we do with everything over which we have no control or knowledge. We tell ourselves that they are kind, loyal, generous and all the other wonderful things we want them to be..

As we get to know them a little better, some things don’t quite fit our perfect model of them, so we make excuses for them.

They’re tired…working too hard…not feeling themselves…aren’t to blame…

As we get to know them still further, we find that they are simply flawed humans like the rest of us.

We can’t admit, even to ourselves, that we fabricated their superhuman status, so we tell ourselves that they have changed.

Something else that happens during this time of getting to know each other, is that we become more comfortable in each other’s company, more relaxed, safer, more able to be ourselves.

My clients tell me, then, that their partner isn’t as attentive and demonstrative as they were during the ‘honeymoon period’. They fail to see that this is just a natural relationship progression; they see the ‘moving away’ but not the ‘more comfortable’.

Let us choose to see the latter.

What changes are you afraid of, or feel unable, to make? Why? Notice what emotion you have when you think of it?

Can you see that you would have a better experience of life, if you let go of your fear and embraced change?

Now look at the changes in people around you. These could be anything…allow your mind to open. Again, notice what emotion this evokes in you.

Are these changes as significant as you’ve built them up to be?

Are they a deal-breaker?

Is there a more peaceful, kinder, less judgemental way of looking at yourself and others?

Revisiting this exercise regularly will help you make relevant changes in yourself and understand them in others.