In life, we might say that there are two powerful longings that we all share. One is the longing to be deeply connected to ourselves, to our energy, creativity, openheartedness, and to our connection to the greater whole. The other is to share that connection with others and more specifically with one significant other.
So often, we try to find love flow by hoping to get it from a relationship but unfortunately, unless we have a connection to our own inner love flow, the relationship most likely will not succeed.
How We Block and Can Restore the Connection to Our Inner Love Flow
Love flow is our nature. It flows inside of us when we feel connected to the energy in our bodies, in our heart, to the life around us, to feeling joyful to be alive, feeling inspired to grow and learn, to have new experiences, and most importantly, to look at our lives and to what happens to us, even when it is difficult and painful, in a positive light by seeing how we can learn and grow from every experience.
There are many activities which may give us the experience of love flow such as doing yoga or meditation, making music, dancing, singing, making love, being in nature, playing with a child, doing a sport, being deeply immersed in a creative project and most of all, creating and sustaining deep intimacy with another. However, even more nourishing is to regularly tune into and connect with the feeling of love flow inside.
To do that, we have to start by recognizing when we are not in flow. Sometimes, we are too disconnected from our body, from our inner experience, or too numb or distracted to notice its absence.
Also, we may block the inner connection by living with mental concepts, being busy, stressed or disturbed, by chronic addictive habits, reacting automatically and impulsively when we get triggered, or not taking responsibility for our choices and actions.
Perhaps the most toxic way that we block the connection to our inner love flow is by indulging negative beliefs and emotions that strengthen an identity of being a victim of other people or outside events. This can include chronic anger, resignation, or beliefs that we are deficient or that others and life cannot be trusted.
As we mature, we can learn to connect to the love flow inside by:
1. Gently encountering and embracing our vulnerability, fears and insecurities.
2. Discovering, living and nurturing our passions.
3. Following our truth in spite of the fears of negative consequences.
4. Seeing painful or challenging times as opportunities to grow and mature.
Exploring Love Flow with Our Significant Others
Alicia and Bernard came to work with us because their love flow had been chronically disrupted for some time. For the first year of their togetherness, the love was flowing, their love making was frequent and nourishing and they were able to communicate their caring for each other verbally and nonverbally. But things slowly went downhill. Bernard became more involved with his work which was requiring more time and attention and as a result, he started ignoring Alicia and taking their relationship for granted.
Alicia began feeling increasingly neglected and became more demanding of his attention and lovemaking. Furthermore, Bernard felt that he needed to spend more time with his children from his former marriage and Alicia felt excluded. All of these issues led to more conflict and distance to the point where they both considered ending the relationship.
We began by pointing out the ways that each one of them had lost the connection to their own inner love flow. We worked with Bernard’s fears of coming close to someone based on his traumas of being shuttled from one foster family to another and often abused in many of them. His journey included understanding and having deep compassion for his fear of closeness and at the same time opening up to feeling how it was for Alicia when he didn’t make time to relate with her. We worked with helping Alicia to recognize how she lost connection to her inner love flow by focusing on getting love and attention from Bernard, rather than embracing the emptiness that opened up when he wasn’t available.
She began to find inner resources to deal with the times when he was busy and unavailable. And she began to understand that because of his upbringing, he was not comfortable with feeling or expressing emotions, but she could tune into his loving heart anyway, without expecting him to share his feelings.
With this guidance, they were both able to start a new way of relating to each other and began to reconnect with the love flow between them. Their love for each other had always been strong, it was simply overshadowed by the disruption in the flow by their unconscious reactions.
As with ourselves individually, we can understand our love flow with another by noticing when it is flowing and when it becomes disrupted. In a long-term relationship, it is easy to take our togetherness for granted and forget to nourish it. Because of this, it is important to remember to regard love as precious and make efforts to keep it flowing.
The two pre-requisites to love flow with another are based on finding our own individuality and connection to our inner love flow and accepting that the other person sometimes will disappoint and frustrate us because of needs we expect to be met.
In the first case, we establish a strong sense of ourselves by learning to recognize, feel and validate our boundaries, tune into our deeper fears and insecurities, learning to be gentle with ourselves, to notice and feel when we are losing ourselves, and taking steps to realize our potential by living more fully and deeply.
In the second case, the work is to recognize how our expectations about love may be causing us to believe that the other person should meet our needs, find the inner space to let the other person be as they are, consciously learn to refrain from acting out when we are not getting what we want, and feel the anger, pain and disappointment that comes up when our expectations are not met.
To maintain a deepening love flow, both people need to take responsibility and learn to create the right space for it.
Here are some simple tools :
1. We can learn how to understand, feel, and communicate our inner experience; taking responsibility for our experience, understanding that it is different for the other person.
2. We can make time to share and spend quality time together but also give ourselves time for aloneness and permission not to share when it does not feel right to us in that moment.
3. We can learn to recognize the difference between our immature and mature ways of behaving.
4. And if either one of us has been reactive, hurtful, venting emotions, and getting lost in strategies of punishing, disconnecting, aggressing, criticizing, blaming, patronizing, or therapizing the other, we can explore the roots of these behaviors, feel the pain inside that this situation brought up and come back and make the effort to re-establish the love flow between us by sharing and taking responsibility.
5. We can understand how our wounds from the past affect how we relate and begin to take responsibility for our reactions.
6. We can commit to not threaten the relationship when triggered and make every effort to go in and be with our own disturbance first.
Maintaining love flow takes effort, learning, tools, and perseverance because we can easily become hurt or lazy. We can habitually hide in our own world, distract ourselves rather than share ourselves, and not recognize that intimacy requires being willing to be vulnerable rather than giving energy to our resistance to coming closer to the other person.
Maintaining love flow with another also means to regularly enhance it by creating time for shared experiences; remembering to enjoy life together in whatever way feels joyful for both partners.