Five Things I Learned About Love
While rushing around the kitchen, hurriedly putting away dishes, I smashed my finger in the drawer. Ouch!! Oh no, I don’t have time for this! But instead of fussing at myself for being careless, moving too fast, and not paying attention, I decided to try something new.
I put my attention into my finger, and felt the intense sensation of throbbing. I grabbed ice from the freezer, wrapped it in a cloth, then sat down in the living room. Encasing my finger gently with the ice cold cloth, I hummed a bit while breathing deeply and pouring loving attention over my finger in the way that I would a small child who needed comfort. The pulsing soon subsided, and I was able to continue my tasks.
This way of being with myself is just one of the practices that I’ve learned in my Heart Coach class with Annie Lalla. I was drawn to Annie’s dynamic class because I wanted to understand and develop what Annie calls emotional fitness. I wanted to bring more intentional love and aliveness to my coaching, my work and my life.
Inspired by all that I’m learning and applying, I want to share five things that I learned about love this month.
1 – Keep your awareness and consciousness in your body, otherwise your body feels abandoned. The story that I shared above shows how I kept my awareness in my body instead of fleeing to my mind to shame and blame myself for smashing my finger.
2- There’s a difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings are sensations that happen in the body. Annie calls them raw data. Words for those sensations include tingling, tightening, constricting, loosening, needling, throbbing, pulsing, heating, cooling. Emotions are the sense that we’re making of the feelings together with the context they’re happening in. You can play with this notion of feeling your feelings by taking a moment to bring your attention like a spotlight to the top of your head, then move that spotlight down through your body. When you notice areas of tightness, you could practice imagining the tightness softening just a bit, or breathing into it to create a little space.
3 – A lot of relationship drama comes from us not knowing how to regulate our own nervous systems. Many of us have grown up believing that someone else – often our loved ones – are supposed to know (and provide) what we need to feel better. But the truth is once we’re adults, that puts an undue burden on other people, and leaves us frustrated and dissatisfied when they fall short. We must learn to be our own most cherished loved one, able to generate a feeling of safety and calm in our own bodies. Whew! I certainly didn’t learn that soothing and calming myself is one of the MOST important things that I can learn to do to live a successful life.
4- There are many ways to soothe and calm ourselves. We can use our breath, we can slowly stroke our arms (havening), we can lie on the floor and feel the earth come up to support us, we can run or take a brisk walk, shake out our fingers and shake out our feet. We can rock or we can hum. And that’s just to name a few practices you can try.
5 – When you’re feeling disconnected from or arguing with a loved one, instead of getting into blame, shame or making a case about what they did wrong, you can pause, and simply describe the sensations you’re noticing in your body. I tried this one day with my partner when I noticed the sensation of needles bursting through my body. That got us both to pause and shifted the energy in our interaction.
I want to share this reminder from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. about love: “We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.” Practices like the ones I’ve described give us concrete ways to embody his call.
