by Amina Tumi, Age 31, Hair Salon Owner, London
Is it possible that we struggle to let Love in and in fact reject it?
This sounds crazy I know as all we want is to feel loved, (I know that is all I have ever wanted). Is it possible that part of us have been hurt so much in past experiences that we resist letting this happen again?
I have lived a life doing just that, not letting love in and I started to realise this recently, which made me ask the question “well, where has this gotten me?”.
I have isolated myself from people, telling myself that it is easier this way and when a person (friend, partner, family member, work colleague) hurts me, I would just cut them out of my life without a second thought, telling myself that it is great that I can walk away. However, the hurt does not go away and then I walk around with it along with the guilt of the way in which I had treated them.
I got to the point where I did not speak to any family members, did not have any friends and just had a partner where the same ongoing dramas would happen between us. If there was ever an argument or disagreement between us I would often purposely hurt him to make myself feel better, but I never actually felt better by doing this.
I was struggling with life and the people in it. I had ongoing issues with staff and family and felt that life was just too hard. There were good times but they never lasted and then there were the forced excited times that just felt fake and looking back they absolutely were, but at the time they gave an artificial lift and something to focus my energy on.
But with all of this going on I could feel that there must be more to life than this. Looking back now I can see clearly that I overrode so many opportunities of being the true joyful loving me I know I truly am. In the past I did not feel good about myself and would use my looks to get attention from boys/men so that I could feel better, but this never lasted and so I had to try harder and harder to keep this up. I spent a lot of time making myself look beautiful and sexy so that I would be looked at and this meant I would get my fix and then when I needed another fix I always knew exactly what to do, this became like a drug to me and one that I would use often.
I had moments of feeling naturally beautiful not about the outside but just when I let myself be, but I would then let the ideals of what society refers to as beautiful override what I knew was true, which is that true beauty comes from within. Most of what I was seeing around me was showing me you need to look beautiful on the outside in order to be beautiful on the inside. These messages from society are without a shadow of a doubt so far from the truth. Even though I could feel this, I scarily, even strongly considered getting a nose job and a boob job. Thankfully I did not have money at the time for this and was scared about the pain that this would entail. But what this does expose is how far away from my own Self-Love I had walked away from.
Now looking back I can see that had I been loving towards myself, many of my relationships with family / friends / partners / colleagues would have been very different, so different in fact that I may have saved myself and others some huge hurts that I am now working through.
What if feeling loved was as simple as just being the Love that we are and expressing from that place – wouldn’t we then be able to recognise when Love was coming our way based on our own understanding of what Love truly is?
The Truth about Serge Benhayon 
If I find myself looking outside of myself for confirmation I’m ok then I know that’s a clue to stop imposing on others to love me and start appreciating myself, reconnecting with the love I already am.
Amina this was my life story too not letting people in or cutting them off and holding them to ransom for ages. When we look at humanity this is the common trend, so everyone is holding grudges. At some point we have to make a decision to change this otherwise we remain on this continuing cycle and we will have no friends. It is from making these decisions that my life is so different and it is by no means perfect. The thing I appreciate the most is the fact that I am simply making different choices.
Love is a word like many others that has in some ways lost its true meaning in our current society and current use of words. When a word is bastardised from its true meaning it can be very misleading as it no longer represents what it once was. This can mean a long delay from connecting to the truth of the word and hence our own development or connection with Truth. Reclaiming words is a process, and one to be valued when resurrected again. Other words have lost their meaning too such as Health – where health used to mean vitality and natural energy but today is understood as someone who does not have cancer or who is not bedridden. How many other words have you found to also be taken very far away from their true meaning?
Henrietta how true in how so many words have been bastardised so their true meanings have been lost. God, religion, education and many more have all been lost to a system that owns people instead of allowing them to be nurtured from their true meaning.
Life needs to be looked from a different pair of spectacles…
Finding True Love has been amazing and when we do it becomes the start as expanding our essences, then this foundation becomes our path of fully re-connecting to our essence.
Letting love in starts with ourselves and I know that I spent so long being anything but loving towards myself that it was no wonder that I struggled with receiving it from others and therefore shut down opportunities to experience it. As my love for myself has grown it has transformed all of my relationships and brought so much joy to my life.
That is key, building a strong foundation of love for ourselves first, ‘As my love for myself has grown it has transformed all of my relationships and brought so much joy to my life.’
I have found exactly the same Elizabeth. The more I appreciate and love myself, know my inner qualities, and offer myself loving understanding, the more I can connect to and feel others inner qualities and hold them with loving understanding as well.
Thanks Amina for your honesty and for sharing so openly. I can relate to not knowing how to deal with hurts in relationships, and I am still learning, but rather than reacting and walking away I’m opening to more honestly communicate with others and share how I feel. Not everyone is open to this honesty, but it’s definitely better than feeling I’ve hit a wall and there’s no where to go but walk away, to stay with love instead to the best of my ability and talk and let go of outcomes. A work in progress! This is a really great conversation and surprisingly it’s not a common one to find even though it’s a very common situation in life.
I too am learning to let people in, to let go of my protection, to be love and express honestly, and so saying no to this old pattern, ‘I have isolated myself from people, telling myself that it is easier this way’.
When we see ourselves and others in our true essence, we just cannot but be love, our body knows that. Yet, we can so easily go like ‘But, seriously they cannot like me. I’ve got this horrible personality/behaviour/past etc.’ – like, at any cost, as long as we can be recognized as an individual. In love, we are no one.
Thank you Amina for sharing your truth.
Feel(ing) loved and feel(ing) love are very different things. The first is a flow coming to you from a specific direction. The second one is spherical; its flow knows no end and cannot be otherwise.
I realised that I hadn’t been allowing myself to feel the love that was there. It is to be appreciated that I could feel from my body what ‘feeling the love that was there’ truly meant and that was feeling the love inside of me, not looking for love from the outside.
A beautiful sharing Amina and I love this sentence particularly “I had moments of feeling naturally beautiful not about the outside but just when I let myself be”. We try so hard to be someone and yet all we need to do is be ourselves. We do not have to change our shape or form or looks to be, we are already, and all that we are lives within us so all we need to do is express it and with that step by step we can let go fo the many pictures we hold we think we need to be.
Do you have to be beautiful on the outside to make yourself feel better? Or could it be that we have got this totally the wrong way round (and by that I mean society, our culture, humanity). When we feel amazing inside, the light and sparkle that comes out is more gorgeous, magnetic, and sexy than anything we can apply.
Every young person needs to hear this, and everyone for that matter. we know this to be true when we can feel the beauty in people.
There is no greater beauty in this world that the beauty of the unending love that we are within. For it is this vibration in which the light of God is known.
Thank you Amina, great to read this again. Self love is the key to so much in life, as when we are connected to and living from our own love we take care of ourselves and can let go of the demands and needs of others to fill the emptiness that can only truly be healed by reconnecting to ourselves. Through self love we then have love to share with others. We all do want to feel loved and I liked your line on this “What if feeling loved was as simple as just being the Love that we are and expressing from that place.” It’s a total game changer for relationships, as once the need is removed then it’s about sharing the love we innately are and understanding that the relationship has a greater purpose for evolution and for the all.
Once we let go of our neediness for love then we open up the space for truly loving relationships.
How true is that, Helen
Self love is how we grow and evolve, just in the same way we give water to our plants to grow and blossom.
You are a gardener of the inner-heart and soul.