Healing With Love

My two daughters, Erin and Brenna.  

“It is not healing unless it involves compassion.”  I heard these words come out of my mouth last week.  They were said with a knowing my mind hadn’t owned yet.  “Wait,” I thought as I heard the words “is that true?”

Can we berate ourselves into growth and healing?  Can we fix ourselves or criticize ourselves into self-love and authenticity?  

Do you have someone in your life that you wish would change, evolve, or shall we say “work on their shit?”

I guess I’d be surprised if you didn’t.  I do.  And the people that I REALLY want to change…  I love.

I’ve been told “don’t be in a relationship in which your partner/friend must change for it to work.”   Meaning I must be “okay” with the person staying exactly how they are currently.  I must not require them to change.  

Okay… and yet… in my heart I do want them to heal and grow.  

In my childhood, criticism was learned as the method to motivate others.  Yea, well, I’m here to say that does NOT work.   I even have an objection to the term “constructive criticism” … is it really lifting the other person up just because we put the word “constructive” before the word “criticism”?     

What has landed very deeply in my heart recently is the power of unconditional love to support change in another.  I have seen what loving someone can do.  I've noticed over and over again that when I can drop into the space of loving my partner unconditionally, being content with who he is right now, ... magically he shifts!  Deep inside me I know that this is the only way to truly assist another to heal. 

The more we are loved unconditionally, the more we can relax our barriers/blocks and allow ourselves to evolve.  Evolution isn’t something done to us, it’s something we just have to “allow.”  Our spirit inside desires to move in a healing direction, we just need to allow it, open to it, surrender to it.  

Loving someone without condition is how we help them change.  Loving them without the need or expectation that they will change.  Loving them just as they are.  I’m not saying that is easy!   I know personally, that It is not.  (Note also that this does not mean we stay in a relationship at the cost of loving ourselves.)

I must love myself into change just like I must love others into change.  

... and love myself and them when they don’t.