Fly ty and Jacinda Challenge You To Make Love is a Choice [Video]
Love is a Choice
There is no joy in doing everything for another and calling it love. Even if you believe you are making intelligent choices. It’s simpler to do it myself! He needs my help! I just want to keep the peace! If I don’t do it, no one will!
The burden of codependency will cause untold misery in your life and in the lives of your family members. Is codependency at the root of your unhappiness?
There are ten proven stages to recovery from codependency, introducing a new dimension: the important stage of seeing God’s unconditional love as the answer to your deepest emotional needs and your hunger for love.
Love is more about us being loving than about other people being lovable.
How?
Start with someone that’s easy to feel love around. Relax a bit. Take a breath or two and come home to yourself. Sense into the area of your chest and heart. Be aware of what compassion and kindness feel like; perhaps call up the sense of a time when you felt very loving. Ask yourself, Can I feel loving now? Open to a natural warm-heartedness. Choose to love.
Take a dozen seconds to open to feeling as loving as you can in your body. Take in this experience, let it sink into you. This will strengthen the neural trace of the experience – a kind of emotional memory – and make it easier to call up the next time. Also register the sense of deliberateness, of choosing to love.
Then try these methods with someone you feel more neutral about, such as a stranger on the street. Eventually try this approach with someone who is difficult for you.
It could help to be more aware of the other person’s stresses, worries, and longings. Without staring, look closely at him or her for ten seconds or so. Can you let your heart be moved by this face?
Get a sense of the different external and internal forces pushing and pulling the other person this way and that – perhaps leading him or her to do things that hurt you or others. Let your eyes relax and get a sense of the bigger picture. Disentangle from the parts, and open into the whole.
Let love be there alongside whatever else is present in your relationship with the other person. There is love . . . and there is also seeing what is true about the other person, yourself, and circumstances affecting both of you. There is love . . . and there is also taking care of your own needs in the relationship.
Love first. The rest will follow.