Mastering Love

In my 21 years of practice as a family life coach, I have concluded that the most difficult question to answer for many people is the question of Love.
What is love? This should be a simple answer since most of us have spent our entire lives looking for love and that we have consistently taken love decisions that may have backfired is the clearest feedback that we may not actually know what we are looking for.

Ask anyone around, "how will you know someone who truly loves you" and pay attention to the answers they give. You will be shocked that those answers are mostly answers any manipulator or pretender can act out until they get what they are actually looking for.

How many times have you met someone that you sang to high heavens as the love of your life only to discover after a few months that they are not who you thought they were? They can show up as friends, lovers, sometimes family members and even in some cases religious leaders. I once told someone that you may not truly know if those you are very useful to today truly love you until you experience their response to you when you are no longer directly useful to them.

Few years later she called me that a simple change in her place of worship made her experience the level of hatred she had never seen before and it made her remember what I shared with her.

Truth is not many of us fully understand love because the art of loving yourself was not taught to you or you were never socialized to love yourself or experience true love.
Let’s play a game today. I want you to stand up wherever you are at and attempt to praise yourself for 10mins non stop. Here are the rules;
- You must never use any word from the Holy Books (Either Bible or Quaran)
- You must never repeat the same word twice
- You must not pause or drop the intensity of your voice.

Let me know how long you went before you ran out of words to praise yourself. It may be the clearest feedback to you on how well you have come to know, love and accept yourself.
How well can you attempt to love or be loved when you haven’t mastered how to love yourself?