Lovable You

You are powerful, intelligent, and lovable. Your essential nature is pure love, pure spirit. You are worthy of love and you deserve happiness. As you read these statements, if you hear an inner voice objecting, piping up to tell you what’s wrong with you, why you’re unworthy and undeserving, realize that the criticism is an illusion – the result of conditioned thought-patterns, negative core beliefs, and mistaken assumptions.

The poet Robert Bly describes how we come to forget who we really are. In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, he observes that as very young children, we have a 360 degree personality. We are like radiant balls of light, sending out energy from every part of our being. We soon notice that our parents don’t approve of certain aspects of ourselves or our behavior. Maybe they tell us that it’s not polite to get angry, that we shouldn’t ask so many questions, or that we shouldn’t want what we want. In order to keep their love, we stuff these qualities into an invisible bag. As we go through school and get more feedback from our classmates and teachers, we continue to fill our bags, which become a heavier burden with every passing year.

We split ourselves into the parts that seem acceptable and okay to show the world, and those we feel we must hide. We lose our sense of wholeness and we begin to identify with the internalized voice of the ego, telling us that we are too much of this, too little of that, never enough, and never quite right. These are stories we have been telling ourselves for years, but in every moment we have an opportunity to let go of the story and experience our true, brilliant, loving nature.

No matter what has happened to us, our essential self is infinitely worthy and lovable. In Free to Love, Free to Heal, David Simon writes, “We are innately creative beings capable of writing a love story worth living, and we cannot afford to miss out on the opportunity to experience nourishing relationships. If we are willing to shed the constricting skin that keeps us from knowing our true nature, we can recapture our birthright as beings of love.”

While many of us may be willing to shed our constrictions, we might not know how to free ourselves from negative core beliefs and accumulated emotional pain. We may try to make a major change in our life, let go of long-held anger or regret, or finally forgive ourselves and move on – but find ourselves feeling stuck, repeating the same self-defeating patterns, and listening to the internalized voice telling us that we don’t deserve happiness and love. The belief that we are unlovable is not only painful, it also contributes to many physical illnesses, including chronic pain, digestive problems, autoimmune disorders, cancer, obesity, and heart disease.

Recognizing the need for a powerful program to help people heal their emotional pain and the physical illnesses that often accompany it, the Chopra Center has created Free to Love, Free to Heal. This transformative nine-day program combines the proven five-step emotional release process developed by David Simon with a mind-body healing immersion that includes daily ayurvedic massage treatments, panchakarma cleansing and detoxification, and instruction in yoga, meditation, and other practical tools for balance and well-being.

The experience of love is healing. Numerous scientific studies show that when premature babies receive loving touch, they develop faster. Men who believe that their wives truly love them have a higher survival rate from heart attacks than those who doubt their spouse’s devotion. Love strengthens immune function, improves digestion, and can even lower cholesterol. Patients who believe their doctors and nurses genuinely care about them recover faster than those who don’t. Love awakens the innate healing power of our mind and body. As Deepak reminds us in this month’s Agni, love isn’t an elusive prize that we have to search for outside of ourselves; love is who we are. In the beautiful words of the poet Rumi, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Taken from The Chopra Centers' Agni Light e-newsletter, July 2009