The love we think we want from others does not come from them

Have you ever been aching from a breakup or an unreciprocated love when someone else told you they loved you? These words spoken by someone else did not heal the ache, right? No, only the person for whom we were pining could “fix” the ache.

This means it is not love from the outside that we need. Rather, it is healing our own specific wound around rejection or abandonment that will heal our pain.

The fact is, we shut off our own love supply when someone rejects us. Often, that feeling of rejection is what our ego-mind jumps to in a familiar mind loop, sourced from our past. The actual situation may not even be a rejection, but our own perception of what happened, filtered through our baggage, which leads to the familiar feeling of unworthiness that shut off our love supply the first time the wound happened.

How many of us actually understand what Rumi meant in his beloved words:

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it?”

Self-sourcing love is empowering. Reestablishing the connection with self, we remove the obstacles to the love supply within us. We can then share ourselves vulnerably and give love generously through an open heart and the resulting sense of abundance.

Continue reading my article for Elephant Journal: “There is only One Way to Find Love—Unlearn Everything.”