Imagine opening up your heart and allowing love in.
Imagine feeling more confident in who you are. Confident enough to be open, honest, and kind in a relationship. To be willing to listen, understand, accept, support, and forgive.
But the very idea of opening up and letting love in can bring on the wrong kind of palpitations.
Saying yes to love that’s like standing naked, bare naked, every inch of you on show. Completely vulnerable.
“The greatest asset you could own, is an open heart.” ~Nikki Rowe
Love doesn’t grow and flourish because you dress up or make yourself up. All it needs is for you to show up, to be fully present. To let love in, you need to believe you’re worthy of love, that you truly are enough for another’s heart to fall for. Love is a powerful force, but you can’t share it if your heart is closed.
Love doesn’t have a complicated vocabulary. All it wants to hear is “That’s okay. I love you for who you are.”
Each relationship is unique, just as each person is unique, so how your relationship unfolds will be unique too. You can’t plan for it to go a particular way. You have to engage with the process of it and with each other, and then make decisions as you go. There is no one-line you can say, no one-action you can take, that will lead to a particular result.
All you can do is live your life more fully, learn to accept and love yourself more fully, and you will love and be loved more fully.
“Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.” ~Ram Dass
But I learned, you just need to let your defenses down long enough to let someone else in. Accept that in a relationship you’re one of two wonderful, separate, yet intertwined individuals. You can be the amazing you that you are, and they can be their wonderful self too.
Whenever there are two people involved, there are going to be miss takes and miss understandings. That’s a given.
“Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.” ~James E. Faust
Love needs to be heard to flourish. But it took me years to figure out that it was as much my responsibility to listen as to talk. Because love is a conversation, not a monologue.
I had to learn that I didn’t need to be perfect. And I never could be. And doing my best was plenty. I had to accept that about the other person too.
Although I know my own work of self-love and acceptance will continue, I see now the rewards of opening my heart. To let love in we must practice not shutting it out. In the end, it’s all we really want, and we can have it, if we open up to it.
