How do you want to feel?

Would you like greater ability to direct your mind and heart toward less drama and more peace?

Like when you’re experiencing intense frustration? Or power struggles or when you recognize that you’ve been snapping or yelling? Or just beginning to feel irritated or impatient?

In our Healing With Love class, we are working on seeing ourselves better and more quickly using a lens of unconditional love principles to help us solve the daily challenges we are learning through.

This is empowering stuff!

Do you ever feel like the problems you are experiencing would or could be solved if your spouse would just do x, y or z or if your kids just did what they were told or if the world would calm down?

I get it. But that thinking leads to a time-wasting, soul-sucking, dead end detour!

Because with that outward looking perspective, we give our power away and then have to wait for someone else to do something or change somehow in order for us to at least temporarily feel better! And then we’re really tempted to try to control or manipulate them somehow to keep them doing or not doing what we deem is the problem!

This is the definition of codependency. Good grief! Dead end!

So how about some thought questions to use when your brain gets in a muddle trying to make sense of a perplexing situation, and all you can habitually see is how everyone else is messing things up?

Would that be helpful?

Alright, we have to remember that the red flag that starts the process off is our own anger or irritation.

A feeling of being out of control (and nothing is more frustrating than that, right??) This is the signal that we need to start running the questions….

In other words, we can look through the “love lens” to see where we are! And as we look, we may see that most likely (considering our crazy emotions), we’re playing on the “field of death” where we know neither we nor our loved ones can win!

1 Ask, are you feeling out of control because you have too much on your plate. (That’s good information for a start!)

But what would be the next layer deeper?

2 Why have we piled our plate so high and why are we on the wrong field?

3 Are we seeking imitation love? In other words, are we seeking praise? Are we wanting to feel more powerful than we do? Are we craving the safety of knowing everything is happening on schedule? Under our own hand?

So then let’s go another layer deeper:

4 Why are we imitation love seeking? Why are we attempting to substitute power, praise, pleasure or safety for filling up on the love that would sustain and nourish us?

It must be because we are empty, hurting, not feeling seen accepted and unconditionally loved.

Next layer, why?

5 Habit? Habit that makes life feel predictable (even manipulatable) which gives us a hit of feeling powerful and temporarily better and out of pain?

Next layer:

6 Why all the emptiness and the pain of fear?

7 Habitually trying to survive on our own merits and genius, vs. humbling ourselves and admitting our dependence on God!? Doing too much ourselves, not too little!

Are we not taking breaks and filling ourselves up with the real thing; love and acceptance from God and our wise friends? And with our relationship to our Heavenly Father starving for lack of priority and time and honesty……

Ah ha! Now we’re getting to the deep truth!

With practice, answering these questions can become a quick study to help us shift, by telling ourselves, God and others the truth about ourselves, so that we can quickly get moving toward “the field of life” and how we really want to feel:

Truly seen. Heard. Accepted. Loved. Cherished.

This is the work we are here to do! Of course with the invaluable help of our spouses and children to show us who we are, what we really want and where we are in our progression!

God bless us to have the humility to let go of our pain through personal honesty.

Which truth-telling will enable us to accept the invitation to come into His open, loving arms, feel His love, be enabled with power to overcome our natural selves, and live more often in peace.

We can do this Sisters!

As we rely on God’s grace and power.

Love,