Love was always an important subject in my life, because I’ve been missing it so much. I’ve always been a bit shy and I had no circle of friends like everyone else around me seemed to have. I thought I was just not fitting in, too boring for others to be interested in me, so I gave up trying and settled for isolating myself more and more. I can see now how I got trapped in a mindset of anger, blame and judgement.

First, I blamed my parents for my perceived inadequacy – wasn’t it their genes and the way they brought me up that had produced this lacking person that I was? Then I blamed everybody else for not loving and liking me as I was – turning it all around. Now something was wrong with the world, not with me, and I could feel angry instead of sad. Finally, I blamed God for creating this whole mess where there is this good but helpless me, surrounded by a loveless, hard world.

It was no surprise that when I later actually had a partner that loved me, I could not let him in. I could not really believe that he loved me, always wondering what it was about me that he felt attracted to. For a long time I thought that he must simply be too lazy to go out and make the effort to find somebody better than me. Maybe he had the same lack of self-worth as me? At the same time, I adored him, every little bit of him, and I never stopped loving him to this day. But why couldn’t I believe that he loved ME? I obviously had some issues with love, and with particularly the way I saw myself.

On one hand, I craved love and felt that I deserved it: on the other hand I had so much self-doubt as to whether I was lovable by anyone.

I was filled with so many ideas, wishes and concepts about love. I wanted it to be given to me, someone had to come and fill me up with it.

 I had no love for myself.

 And no matter how much I craved for it, I couldn’t let my partner’s love in either – what a dilemma!

After many years of living, or rather hanging on like this, unsuccessfully trying many kinds of conventional and spiritual healing therapies to sort out my unresolved issues and emotions, I landed with Universal Medicine. There I started healing sessions with an esoteric psychologist, which was supported with other esoteric hands on healing modalities to address the tensions and contractions in my body. And what unfolded in me with this is nothing short of a miracle.

After the initial working through my anger and resistance to feel the deeper layers of sadness and self-neglect, I started to accept that nobody but myself was responsible for my state of being; no more blaming of the world, my parents or God. This was hard at first, but also turned out to be a great relief. I started to claim my power back, step by step, no more being the helpless victim of the world, other people or outside circumstances.

Then it was time to look at the issue of not feeling lovable. I could readily give a list of reasons why I wasn’t up to scratch, but the list of the opposite, why I deserved love, was surprisingly much longer. And strangely it was more uncomfortable to express that list than the negative, self-criticising one.

So I got some homework to do – to look into a mirror every day and tell myself that I love myself. Sounds easy enough, but it wasn’t. It was quite confronting to feel the initial embarrassment, the squirming and trying to get away when I said “I love myself” or “I love you” to my face in the mirror. But I persisted and gradually I could accept that I am deserving of being loved. Looking deeply and openly into my own eyes I could see and feel that I am actually really full of love. The more I allowed that to be, the more this love expressed through my eyes, it just kept growing and flowing, so much that I sometimes freak out a bit and had to look away.

It is incredible how much our eyes can shine and overflow with the expression of love.

The effect of this daily ‘exercise’ was that I discovered what love really is.

First, I realised and accepted that I can and do love myself in full, unconditionally. Then I felt that this love is my natural inner essence, a state of being that is and was always there, and that it needs no input from outside, no confirmation or justification from anyone. And I felt that this love is like a well that just keeps flowing endlessly, filling myself, my body, and it is the same love that fills the space around me, encompassing everything and everybody else. As within, so without – it shines in and through everybody and everything equally, without judgement or measuring.

I realised that if we truly love ourselves completely, we cannot help but love everybody equally. In fact, we can only know true love by loving ourselves completely and unconditionally. When we fully accept and surrender to that endless unconditional love that we feel deep inside, we simply are love and see that in truth there is only love.

It took a while to fully integrate my newly discovered self-love into my daily life due to my stubbornly habitual, self-doubting thought patterns. Occasionally I still get caught in them today, but the depth of love as an almost tangible foundation in my body has been steadily growing with the support of the Universal Medicine philosophical teachings and healing modalities.

And as I expand in my awareness of myself and life around me, I realise more and more that this endless supply of love that I feel inside is not from and for me personally. It rather flows through me, coming from a universal source that is the same in everybody. It’s up to us to allow it, feel it and live it at any moment. Then this love will guide our movements and actions and this will bring harmony into our lives, our relationships and affect everybody around us in a healing way.

There is no failure, never a judgement or punishment in love. I can be lost in a state of despair, stuck in negative thinking or unpleasant external circumstances or feeling hurt by something, and all I need to do is remember and come back to love, allow it and feel it – and it will be there, unchanged and forever holding me and everybody else. Pure love. 

By Regina Perlwitz, committed student of Universal Love and Truth

Related Reading:
Expressing Love – I Love You
Why are we so Afraid to Truly be Loved?
Accepting All of You