How much are you in love these days?
Many people experience romantic love at least once in their lives, and hopefully most of us know familial love and the love of friends. We’ve been in love with our pets, or our projects, or the ocean, or chocolate.
Whatever the object of our love, the best part about loving is how it makes us feel, even before we know we are loved in return. The simple act (state?) of loving dispenses huge benefits for mind and body.
I love to love, don’t you?
So it makes sense to cultivate our involvement in loving, to nurture it so that it grows. Surely, the more we are in love, the more peace and happiness we can know.
And it occurs to me that when I become stressed, or depressed, or overwhelmed, maybe the best way out of it is to focus on loving.
• First, make a sketch of your love. This might be an image of the object of your love, or a picture of your feeling of love, what it looks like to you.
• Then, write for a full 20 minutes about your love. Again, this may be about the one you love or about the state of loving. Time this one so that you’re forced to go the edge of your imagination and then go even further. Dig deep!
• From your sketch and your writing, develop a brief mantra that you can carry with you to sooth tough moments in your day. Repeat the mantra whenever you begin to feel stressed.
Here’s an example.
Between work, family, social obligations, and a ton of other responsibilities, you have become used to constant stress. By mid-week, you’re always exhausted and you even wonder if that spell you experienced while driving the kids to soccer practice might have been an anxiety attack. You’re smart enough to finally close the door and insist on some quiet time with your journal, knowing that if you do not, something’s gonna explode.
But rather than recounting your woes in your journal, this time you focus all your thought on something you love, conjuring the full sensation of your loving, perhaps in the way outlined above. You spend a full half hour in love.
Here’s another example.
You’ve been dissed, hurt in some way, and you’re having trouble getting over it. You think about it all the time and cry far too often. The world is ugly to you. You use your journal to describe your despair.
Then one day, you use your journal differently. Your attention has been drawn to a tree in the yard, or a song, or a happy memory. You allow your love to play around its object, sketching it, describing it, and then consolidating it in a single saying or mantra.
In both these cases, you go back to your life after journaling, and all the same stresses are there. But no doubt you are stronger and less vulnerable to their ravages. It won’t take many more such journaling sessions before you know with certainty that your love can conquer anything.
You’re going to love our 27 Days Self-Discovery Journaling Challenge, starting this coming Monday. It’s still not too late to sign up!
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/eelssej_/390295937/
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