When Is Love Authentic?
When is love authentic? Well, isn’t all love authentic? It is debatable, isn’t it? What is love? Maybe we need to start there.
Let’s start with what love is not.
Love is not rejecting.
Love is not mean.
Love is not needy.
Love is not pity.
Love is not clinging.
Love is not jealous.
Love is not possessive.
Love is not critical.
Love is not judgmental.
Love is not distrustful.
Love is not hurtful.
Love is not anger.
Love is not pain.
Love is not guilt.
Love is not incomplete.
And yet every person who has ever been “in love” has felt one or all of those emotions and reactions toward a loved one. Those emotions and reactions are not love. They also interfere with and disrupt the natural flow of love. The worst is when those feelings are turned on ourselves. When we do not love ourselves we are the meanest of all. We lash out at everyone and we are never satisfied with anything.
The worst of it is that when we do not love ourselves we cannot possibly authentically love anyone else. We simply cannot give what we do not possess. According to the law of attraction we will see who we are by the mirror image of who we attract into our lives. It cannot be any other way. If the people you want to resonate with are not showing up in your life you have to look at what you are generating energetically. If the people you do resonate with do not feel good to you then there is a need to evaluate what kind of energy you are communicating. Could it be that you do not appear to others to love your very own self?
One of the first things to do is to examine your own authenticity.
By that I do not mean that you have to try to be nicer or give more to others. Although that may be true somewhere in your life. What I do mean is this, how do you feel to yourself? Do you know who you are? How is your integrity? What are your values? Do you know what you like? Do you live in the truth of what you like and who you are? What do you like to do? Are you doing that on a regular basis or even daily? Or do you possibly not do it at all anymore? Why not? Do you at least have plans that target the changes you desire in order to acknowledge and create the life you do desire and dream about? Can you see yourself living a happy life as YOU?
An Old Paradigm
Have you sold your happiness up the river for something that made you feel safe once and now just makes you feel closed off or trapped and hopeless? Are you living a life that others have chosen for you or that is a sacrifice for others happiness and not your own? If that is true I hope you will go through whatever it takes to change that as soon as possible. No matter what, that lifestyle will rob your life of joy, longevity, health, satisfaction and creativity. How can you be authentic when you hate your life and you have all those losses?
Another way to know if you are living authentically is to ask yourself if you admire others more than yourself and wish you were more like them. I used to do that. I thought I should be more like this person or that person. That was because I didn’t know that I was already uniquely myself and that if I would simply be who I was inclined to be and trust that then it would all be fine and people would love me because they would finally see me and not my version of someone else who I thought was better. I had to see that I had my own purpose and my own divinity. I had to feel that I was worth more as myself than I could ever be worth as a copy of someone else!
I had to see that the only failure in my life was my failure to be me!
The more you love yourself the more you will love others without wanting to be them or to be more like them. I love Mother Teresa but I am not her and I never will be. I didn’t come here to be Mother Teresa. And Mother Teresa did not enter this life to be me. It is fine to admire skills and attributes and model them to learn from them. It is a very good way to learn but that doesn’t mean you want to become that person. It is important to know the difference.
So when is love authentic?
Love is authentic when it comes from people who love themselves and accept themselves as they are even if they never changed a thing. Love your appearance. Love your character. Love your abilities. Love your life and everything in it. Resistance to WHAT IS causes you pain and prevents you from loving yourself and thus others authentically. When you love yourself the way you are you will naturally change the things that do not align with the best version of you that you came here to be. It won’t be you being someone else. It will be you being you and you loving you. Then the love you express is authentic and it does not require that others change for you to love them either.
In your authenticity you will naturally gravitate to those who mirror you and we all do that every day. We are all at varying levels of learning to just love ourselves and turning off the voice that says “why can’t you be more like so and so?”, or some version of that.
It seems to me that one of the reasons there is so much change going on right now in the world is because people are changing so rapidly as our awareness of love and acceptance of ourselves and others awakens to a new level of authenticity never seen before on this planet. We are manifesting ourselves like never before! Hallelujah and amen to that!
I love myself.
I love you.
Thank you for showing up!
Alexandra Barrett on Life, Love, and the Law of Attraction 