Before Christmas, we published a sneak peek of Sandy Newbigging’s article – ‘The Love Lesson’ – from our Winter 2018/19 issue, and today we are pleased to share it in full. Sandy has many words of advice to share on how we can learn how to give love without limits.
The Love Lesson
Giving love without limits
by Sandy Newbigging
Many of my relationships ended in tears because of one core misconception in my attitude towards relationships, which led to either my partner or me reaching our final straws sooner or later. I believed that relationships were an opportunity to get love, when in reality, all relationships offer unlimited opportunities to give love.
This simple yet significant problem in my perceptions of love and relationships meant I had to ‘perform’ to be deemed loveable by the outside world. I believed the amount of love I experienced was down to them, and as a result, I didn’t feel the love that I yearned for. Not because people didn’t love me, but because I was withholding love by waiting to be loved. Consequently, I didn’t experience love and frequently felt hurt: playing the blame game and defaulting to being the victim of an unloving world.
Wise people don’t pin their hopes for peace and love on the actions of others. I love this quote by Anthony de Mello: ‘If peace is what you want, seek to change yourself. It’s easier to protect your feet with slippers than carpet the whole of the earth’. This a super reminder to be more empowered within relationships.
Instead of being a victim to the actions of others, look for opportunities to give love wherever love has been lacking. Seek to see what button within you may have been pushed, then be willing to ‘heal thyself’ so that you can become the most peaceful and loving person you know. You’ll be amazed by how much better you feel when faced with people that you previously perceived as being problematic.
We feel love when we are giving love, so if you are really giving all of your love – with no eye on whether it’s coming back – then there will be no sense of anything missing.
We feel a lack of love when we are withholding love: when we have accidentally started loving in a ‘what comes around goes around’ type way. “I will only show love to you when you show love to me first.” This does not work and is back-to-front.
Play instead with aiming to be the person in the room that’s raining love, without care or abandon for where it lands, and see how it blows the limits off the love you feel for yourself, other people and life. Consider this: it’s obviously nice to hear the words ‘I love you’, but how does hearing it compare to how you feel when you say ‘I love you’ and mean it?
That’s the secret. That’s the love lesson. The people who hurt you or let you down need your love so that they may know what love is. And you need to give them love in order for you to find peace within your past and present-day life. It’s a genuine win-win. Start raining love and notice how it helps your body to heal and your life to improve.
This is an extract from Sandy’s new book, ‘Mind Detox: Discover and Resolve the Root Causes of Chronic Conditions and Persistent Problems.’ Published by Findhorn Press, February 2019.
