Love More, Love More, Love More

Many years ago, when my children were thirteen and ten, we moved together from where they had been born to a new town. I was uprooting my family for love. While they were sad about leaving family and friends, they were right along with me, trusting in our new life. When the love in this new life wasn’t going easily in the way I had imagined it would, I spoke with a wise woman about it. Hedy Schleifer, now an internationally known master relationship builder and motivational speaker, was supportive and loving and smart, smart, smart about relationships. I admitted that I knew I had to be clearer about limits and boundaries and standing up for myself. In response, she assured me, contrary to my view, what I really needed to do was love more.

Hearing that I needed to love more was a total surprise to me, even a shock. I thought I already was a loving person myself and I liked to give to others. Sometimes I even twisted myself into knots to please the people in my life. But as I went further, I learned that trying to please comes more from fear than love. Love doesn’t flow so well from a person twisted in knots. Wanting to please is not the same thing as loving. From there I consciously and intentionally began a journey of learning to love more.

At 70, close to 30 years later, I was humbled at the depth of love that I found possible, and wondered still how much deeper it could go. How much deeper I could go. Romantic love? Yes. But more than romantic love. Love of the life around me. Love in the face of a person I pass in the grocery store. Love of the surprise of finding a flower on our miniature camelia bush, along with buds all over it, ready to burst open. I expected then to find that love could expand and go deeper and further, as much as I was willing to learn to allow it. And I was right. It has expanded. Then, three years later, I was aware that this expanding love is a life path. Nothing about expanding love is finite. As in many places in life, love is not a place we arrive, but instead is a journey in itself.

Included in this expansive love, of course, is loving myself, too. (See? So much to learn.) A person who is judging themselves, cannot be expanding love. Read that sentence again. I’ll write it again for you to read: A person who is judging themselves, cannot be expanding love. The two simply do not go together. A person who is filled up with love, though, naturally and easily has it overflowing. Of course, important to remember is that it is not possible to fill up with love only from the outside. Outside love, even pouring in, seems to go into a bottomless pit or through holes in a sieve inside the receiver if there isn’t already self-love there. Love begins as an inside job, a solid foundation.

Imagine the feeling of your upper chest, your heart area, being emptied out. Feel that empty feeling right now as you read here. Can you feel it? Then see yourself looking around outside of yourself to fill it with something from somewhere or someone else. Maybe you know this feeling and have felt the emptiness. Stay there for a minute or two more in that lonely, empty place. Then take a deep breath and imagine that same heart area feeling full of good feeling, so full in fact that it is pouring out, not from someone else, but from you to you. Perhaps you know that feeling, too. Now imagine that the pouring out feels so good, you want to even expand it consciously with intention, and then beyond that. Focus the expansion anywhere that comes to you … like sending beams out of you through the space around you.

Perhaps some people find the idea of expanding love in that way impossible. Sending beams of love through the space around you? Ridiculous. And yet, for most of us, we would not deny the feeling of entering a room and feeling tension between people there, even saying that you could cut the tension “with a knife.” We also, for the most part, admit to feeling the excitement around us at a sporting event or a concert, or a child’s birthday party. It is not hard to tune in to those circumstances that seem to happen on their own. So why not do that consciously? How much can you do that? It seems to me that it’s really no different than a naturally talented tennis player still having to learn to practice her skill. We came into this world naturally talented at loving. Babies see people smiling at them and they smile back in big, happy smiles, spreading good feelings. They are naturally talented spreaders of love and delight. We were each of us one of those little ones. And if we didn’t learn how to expand loving in our families, we can still learn it now. Consciously.With intention. Connect with Spirit. Love. It’s worth the time.  —Dale Midgette Smith, 2017

July 2023 addendum:

Now at 79, I happened on this musing in my “to edit” file. I was curious about what I had said back then. After the six-year speculation about love, I can attest to you that my earlier premise of loving as a life path was and is true. Loving is a continuing journey. It is not a place to arrive. Apparently, I still remain human with my many human foibles. I do have times, many times, with other perfectly normal human emotions like anger, fear, impatience and more. Sometimes, although briefly, I don’t care about loving at all, let alone loving more! I try to let myself be and accept those moments, those feelings. “It’s okay, sweetie. Feel what you feel. And when you’re ready, you can make a different choice.” And so eventually I do. Over and over again. Love is a path that I want to be traveling. I do stumble and often get off track, and that is okay. I don’t stay off the track for very long anymore. The truth is that love feels so much better. Looking at life with love continues to offer more and more possibilities, some of which even surprise. And what fun it is. What joy it brings … and then gives and gives.

With that in mind, with this musing, I included the ocean photo from a few days with family at New Smyrna Beach. I love the ocean. Expanding love seems to happen easily for me there. The ocean seems to on forever and ever. It is much bigger than me and anything going on in my life. It just is. The sky is wide and far reaching. I feel an automatic energetic opening in my chest at the ocean. When I was in my teens through my thirties, the first thing I would do down the beach was cartwheel after cartwheel. I was good at cartwheels back then, and the beach energy I felt was so huge. Also, the Florida beaches were mostly empty. They almost called for cartwheels.Sometime later, my children and I would do the “off to see the wizard” dance together down the same beach. Now, well past my cartwheel days, I consciously breathe more deeply as I look at the ocean. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe out stress, breathe in peace … and joy … and love. And soon it is spreading out and beyond. May you also find that feeling for yourself. Maybe you already have … with this thought, let’s smile together.

Amen.

As always, as you read here, I send you love and wish you many blessings…