These are statements I hear quite often in my practice: I feel like I’m lying when I say I love you to my partner. I feel like a fake, an imposter, like I’m leading him/her on. If I don’t feel love, how can I say it? And I’m not always feeling it. In fact, it seems like more often than not I’m not feeling in love, or loving feelings at all. So how can I be genuine and say I love you?
When you say I love you even when you don’t feel it you’re acting from who you really are. Yes, you are lying: You are lying to the fear-based part of you. You’re lying to the gatekeeper that wants to protect you from getting hurt… again. You’re being untruthful to your small-minded ego who is defined by its separateness and, thus, is terrified of losing itself in the oneness of real love.
But you’re honoring the deepest places of your heart: your place of truth, wisdom, softness, and open-heartedness. If you could peel away all of the layers of fear that have hardened there like a wall of tears to protect your tender heart, the “I love yous” would come pouring out on a waterfall, like the song of angels unleashed in one symphonic expression. Maybe not at first. You might not feel a rush of love, but when you act from love instead of fear you will start to notice small openings, and when you string together the small openings you will live more and more from a place of expression that feels authentic and true.
Every time you say I love you even when you don’t feel it, you’re being truthful to the part of you that does love your partner. This is how we grow love and shrink fear: by action. We take action against fear and send it the message, “I hear you but I’m not listening to you.” It’s the action itself that sends fear the appropriate message that will put it in its place. We rarely shrink fear by talking about it or arguing with it. We shrink it by walking directly into the thing that terrifies us – heights, airplanes, social situations, intimate relationships – and realizing that on the other side is love.
This mindset flies in the face of every single thing we learn about love. We’re so inundated with the belief that love is only a feeling, that when the feeling is absent we assume that we don’t really love or love enough. What we fail to learn – and this is the key sentence to brand into your mind – is that when fear enters the heart it creates a barrier that traps the feeling of love inside. The love is still there, but it’s trapped beneath the barricade of fear. Fear is the protector. Fear’s job is to prevent you from getting hurt by love. And when you learn to to shrink fear by taking loving actions that diminish its power, you unlock the prison bars and unleash love’s offerings.
We can take loving actions every single day that shrink fear and grow the part of your heart that longs to give and receive love. Would it help to know what those loving actions are? Would it help to have the roadmap that would offer you the exact Love Laws and Loving Actions you need to shrink fear and grow love? I would love to share this roadmap with you and guide you on an exciting journey to this end. Once you have this information, the work then is to practice it for the rest of your life. We don’t miraculously heal in thirty days, but we can certainly break ground and create a new foundation on which healthy habits can take hold. We plant the seeds together over thirty days, and then you commit to watering them, day by day, for the rest of your life. This is how we grow a love garden.
This is the last week to sign up for my fifth round of Open Your Heart: A 30-day program to feel more love and attraction for your partner. The program begins on Saturday, and I look forward to seeing you there.
