SELFISH vs. SELFLESS LOVE
Can you choose yourself over others and still call it love?
When you feel love for yourself, it is sensed in the electromagnetic field of someone else. Their field then ATTUNES to your field to match the frequency (i.e. the vibration of love you are emitting), enabling that love frequency to flow back to you. In this way love begets love and you both benefit.
Why can’t we see this more readily - that love of self is a spring from which to quench the needy thirst of others?
It doesn’t always have to be do do do for others, as though every selfless act might propel you into some promised redemption, some knowing that you have played the game correctly and will be justly rewarded.
What if you started putting yourself into the equation? I mean REALLY in the equation as the entire sum and parts all rolled into one.
What if the greatest expression of love wasn’t setting yourself aside to cater to others’ needs, but it was standing squarely in your dignity, gifting yourself priority at the center of the universe? What if the adage were “I am deserving of all things, all love, and all of my own efforts and attention...FIRST...before anyone else”?
Not to ignore others or let them slide away in suffering and need, but to lovingly grant yourself your deepest wishes, needs, and freedoms and FROM THAT sourced center within yourself, you reach in and decide what, when and how much you will do for who. What if that is actually just as good a way to unconditionally express love as any act of charity toward someone else? Especially those who are pathetically needy, or constantly working outside of your requirements for fairness, and therefore toxic to you in their own special way.
A word on toxic relationships. They’re easy to identify in the abusive boyfriend or the gossiping girlfriend, but what of it when your ‘toxic relationship’ is your mother who can’t push past her own discomfort to offer you emotional acknowledgement? Or what if your toxic relationship is your adult child who disrespects your requests, yet feels entitled to your energy and care?
I wouldn’t frame these as toxic necessarily. I would probably first turn to some solid excuses: mom is an old lady – it’s a generational thing – she’s never been in touch with her emotions – it’s just how she is. Adult child is just acting their age – learning as they grow – it’s tough for them – I can cut some slack – does it really matter if the dishwasher is unloaded in the big picture as long as they feel loved by me?
Sure, it MIGHT be loving to put your family members’ emotional vulnerabilities over your responsibility to teach them accountability. It’s what I have thought at times. Be the adult in the room. Be the one who can say it doesn’t matter anyway – just move on. But when I die a little inside each time I’m met with dishes stacked up all around the sink, and I know I’m the one who will clean them up, or when my anger rises into my throat after the death of someone important, and mom lets opportunity after opportunity pass to look at me with soothing eyes and ask “how ARE you?”
What I’m suggesting is that by wiping my own needs out of the picture, pushing down the anger that arises each time I try to be the bigger person who avoids conflict, and tries to retain that higher frequency of peace, I am actually not being loving at all.
Withholding love from oneself by asking oneself to swallow her feelings or continually water down her own importance by seeing all sides for everyone else, or grant leeway to those who “aren’t able to ____” (fill in the blank), is not an act of selfless love.
Rather, it’s a devastating blow to an honest soul.
In the majority of what I’ve read about the expression of human love, it’s usually directed at how deploying kindness to others lands you in love consciousness.
But I am calling that premature. A half-truth. An incomplete picture.
How can you authentically be in the service of others, in a state of love, when you feel sucked dry and lacking of that very thing? You deny giving it to yourself. You don’t expect it from others. Does love spring forth from a loveless or a love-fed being?
Isn’t the most efficient way to fill yourself with love to let it fill from within? Instead of hauling buckets from some source outside of you?
Love consciousness starts by directing it towards ourselves. I want to hear more people talking about self-centered ways to express love. It’s not all about service to others. It’s also about realizing your best, most selfless plans where others are taken care of, may not be in your best interest, or theirs.
For goodness sakes, what am I saying? Didn’t we all think that service to others was the pinnacle of love? Is that why we so devotedly revere Mother Theresa?
Going back to the mom and adult child situations, love could be the courage that it takes to stand up for yourself. Taking steps to make changes for your own happiness, sanity, and peace is OK.
Even if you strive hard to serve others , and do it well, knowing deep down that it didn’t start with a loving gesture toward yourself, will sour the love.
Love doesn’t root well in inauthenticity.
Let’s let the me-first version of love surface. Let’s give ourselves permission to feel great in our lives and not be straddled by the duty of what we thought we needed to do in order to be deemed good and loving. It’s a lie. There are other roads to good and other acts of love.
By putting yourself first in line to receive your love, by filling yourself honestly and completely, you become this almost limitless source of love for others.
Because a being that’s vibrating in that high vibration of love for self, creates a beautiful, self-sustaining, toroidal heart-field that others can bathe in and be nourished by sweet love too.
Tell me how you prioritize yourself. Or if you think it’s OK to love yourself up first before extending it to others.
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LOVE, LOVE, LOVE,
Julie
What beautifully expressed deep well water wisdom. Thank you. Your personal examples and authenticity talking about them touched my core.