THE SEARCH FOR LOVE
THE SEARCH FOR LOVE
17/1/17
So it turns out that I have been looking for love in all the wrong places, basically my whole life.
Upon reflection I have spent almost 30 years looking for love outside of myself. I have been looking for that “Fairy Tale” love that we get told about growing up, that we read about and that society expects us to achieve in order to know we are loved.
I have been looking for love on social media.
I have been looking for love through making my body look a desirable way.
I have been looking for love through spending a large chunk of my time feeling like I need to ‘fix’ others in order to be worthy of their love. This is a long pattern that I have recently discovered.
I was looking for love so hard and for so long outside of myself, it was exhausting, draining and to be completely honest, all of that did not bring me any closer to feeling love. In fact 9/10 it resulted in me feeling less loved and less worthy of love. I felt rejected, sad, not good enough… the list goes on. I thought that the people in my life and situations were making me feel this way, when actually it was myself and perception of self that was making me feel this way all along.
This pattern of searching for love outside of me started as a young child (this is as far back as I can consciously remember), always being the one to hold the family together when we argued, always aiming to please everyone around me, make others happy and make others love each other. I was afraid of fighting and losing my families love, so I clung to it ever so tightly, and thought that if I was the one to always show extreme amounts of love to others, then I would be worthy of receiving their love back in return.
This pattern continued with me when I became a young woman. At University I would binge drink and go out to get attention from guys. I felt shit deep down inside, but the short moments of attention that I was receiving and validation from others was masking this feeling. It was a short fleeting moment of gratification that then left me in an even lower slump when love never followed.
From this I turned to Body Building, day in day out spending hours sculpting my body to look a certain way. I won all of my first competitions. I got complements and so much attention, unlike I had ever felt before. Once again this was instant gratification, comments on Facebook, in person and people who never wanted to associate with me before did. I felt significant, and worthy and finally like I was “popular”. But love never came. In fact a strong sense of self loathing, lack of compassion and strong feelings of never being good enough was accompanied by my search for love during this phase.
Post competitions I got super sick (that is another story) but I was in hospital for a week, this was a scary time and a massive literal “wake up call”. A call to get out of my “sleeping state” and literally AWAKEN.
After this I fell into a time of deep sadness, I felt guilty for how I had been treating my mind, body and soul for all of these years. I wanted to make a change. Life is too short. This is when my journey to finally find love started.
I started talking about my feelings and found that so many other women and men felt the same. One particular bond I formed that has lasted a lifetime is with my soul sister Awhina (check her out at @coach_awhina). Her journey had been much like mine, and we started our “awakening”/self development process together.
I started at this stage to realise that I was searching for love, I was aware of this behaviour and started my journey of BODY love. This was a great milestone and a time I started to live my life with more care and compassion for myself. However, during this time I was still searching for that “Fairy Tale” kind of love. That love that society and your family expect you to have. To find that perfect husband, have the perfect family and live in a perfect house.
This search for my “Fairy Tale” brought nothing but heartbreak and once again feelings of not being good enough. I was searching for this perfect guy, feeling pressured from others to find this lifestyle, otherwise I was seen as a “failure”, not successful, not good enough and literally I felt unloved. As a result I closed my heart.
Very recently I discovered a pattern in my life that has been recurring and stopping me from finding that true love. I had been constantly spending my whole life trying to “fix” others in order to feel worthy of love from them. I thought if I spent my time investing my love and energy into someone else that they would love me in return… and once again how wrong I was!
I am at a stage in my growth that I can look at this realisation with a massive sense of gratitude, and even laugh about the situation, seeing the lightness in what others may just see as a big black dark hole.
I have a great deal of gratitude for this realisation, as even though I do think “fk I have been literally wasting my life and energy doing and thinking this”, I am actually so grateful that I have finally come to this place of realisation. As when you reach a place of awareness, acceptance and ownership, cool shit can really start to happen.
From my day of realisation I truely feel now that I have found love. I have taken complete ownership for where I am today, no blaming society, family, friends etc I take ownership that it was me searching for love in all the wrong places this whole time. That “wrong place” was a place outside of myself.
“The day I stopped searching for love was the day I fell in love with myself, the day I fell in love with the world and every living being.”
I am developing a new "template" of what love is to me. My heart is now opening and it feels pretty amazing!
I can promise you this, when you finally realise that the love you have been searching for your whole life, is actually right there inside of YOU is when you feel completely free, liberated and can feel as sense of so much love inside and around you.
YOU are LOVE, you always have been love and you always will be love.
A wise woman (Helle Weston, that you can follow @helle_weston) said to me “what if you didn’t have to invest in another to be worthy of love? What if all you had to do was show up and be your good enough, loveable self and meet half way?”
I thank her so much for these words of wisdom. Words that have reformed my entire outlook on love.
“What if the effort you put into finding love outside of yourself was a sign that you felt you had to overextend yourself in order to be worthy of receiving love? And what if you could use that energy and effort and pour that into loving yourself?”
When you love yourself and put your energy into YOU, that is when you truely find LOVE.
My hopes is that by reading this if you resonate you come to a realisation that it is time to recreate your "template" of what you believe love to be. A time to peel back the layers of social conditioning and a time to remove any thought patterns or limiting beliefs that no longer serve you. A time to STEP up and take ownership of your life, your love and happiness.
It is a time to see the LIGHT & LOVE within YOU!
My last words of love and guidance are…..
“Don’t search for love outside of you…. simply BE LOVE”.
With love & light,
Mandy xxx