Let’s Talk About Love, Baby
Last week you received an invitation to talk about love. And I sense that you’re a little apprehensive in talking about love. That’s why this post will talk about:
- Why talking about love is natural
- Why talking about love can be beneficial to everyone you love
- 4 Scenarios Where You Can Influentially and Safely Talk About Love
- 35 ways to talk about and communicate love
Perhaps you’re interested in talking about love, or perhaps you’re simply interested in hearing about love because you feel you’re not prepared, you feel you don’t have the knowledge or the courage to talk about love. Or if you do have at least some ideas about what you’d like to say about love and to whom, you’re simply embarrassed to talk about love. You question how people will react to you, and thus, you’re uncomfortable doing so. You perhaps believe you are going to inconvenience people by talking about love. But you know what IS an inconvenience? Not talking about love and not communicating with love. Why? Because whenever you speak or communicate, there are three ways you can come across. You can either come from a fearful/hateful mentality, an I-don’t-give-a-darn mentality or a loving mentality. In a nutshell, you can respond to the world badly, indifferently or kindly.
As you’re starting to see, if you hadn’t already, speaking from a loving place doesn’t mean speaking in flowery, poetic and falsely sweet language. It’s about speaking your truth while honoring yourself, other people, the circumstance you’re in and the world at large. Believe it or not, talking about love and with love is a way to provide service to the world. Not doing so, negatively affects yourself, those around you and the world. Think I’m exaggerating? Imagine a world where everyone communicated with love almost always? We wouldn’t have the social or political issues that we have now. So that little thing called love, isn’t so little, anymore, is it?
4 Scenarios Where You Can Influentially and Safely Talk About and Communicate Love
While it’s important to talk about love and with love almost everywhere, there are four scenarios in which that doing so will yield the best results. These are: when you talk about and with love to yourself, with your family, with your community and with me.
Speak Lovingly to Yourself and Lovingly Take Care of Yourself
The relationship that you have with you is truly important and even though you KNOW that intellectually already, if you’re like most people, you often are more inclined to listen to or help someone else than to help yourself. While it’s very commendable that you’re so generous, the more you are in tune with yourself the better influence you’ll have on others and the more help you can be for them.
When you think of how you can love yourself you think you can love your body, your personality, your achievements, your mind and your soul. Guess which one you should take care of the most? Your mind. And it’s the hardest one to positively impact… yep, even harder than loving your body… because:
You don’t feed your body even half as much junk as you feed your mind.
And of course your soul is important… but if you took good care of your mind, you wouldn’t affect your soul. Besides, your soul is the brightest part of you anyway.
It’s especially important that you radiate love to yourself when you:
- see yourself in the mirror
- make a mistake
- are sick
- feel lonely
- feel hurt
- feel wronged
- failed (whatever that means, anyway)
- forget something
- are at your wit’s end
- are trying to relax
- accomplished something you think is insignificant, but others are grateful for
- are in your own haven such as your bedroom or entire house
- you lose/gain weight
- you find an internal or a physical imperfection in yourself
Avoid judging yourself, because it’s impossible to judge and love yourself simultaneously.
You most likely can relate to the fact that you’re your worst enemy… which you are. But guess what? You’re also you’re only enemy because in sum, you teach the world how to treat you and if you’re not willing to treat yourself right, why should anyone else treat you right? It starts with YOU. The more genuinely you love yourself, the more empathy you’ll have for others and others will have for you.
Be Especially Loving to the Crowd that’s Most Likely to Retaliate When You Do Things Out of Love
Talking to your family and friends about and with love may seem like it’s all going to be give-give-give, peachy and well received. Let me tell you it’s not. Above anyone else, and because of the influence you have on your family and your family has on you… the best way to love your family is not by giving them all they want simply because they want it. It’s a matter of giving, withholding and taking away in the manner that most closely matches what they need the most for their most beautiful evolution. For example, if you have a child, a niece/nephew or a grandchild, you know that giving them everything when they want, where they want and how they want it is not going to allow them to flourish, instead it will, as we say, “spoil” them…. not in a way that implies that they’re bratty, but rather in a way that truly does not allow them, their character, their intelligence, their emotional intelligence or their empathy to expand.
It’s especially important that you radiate love to your family when they:
- Want something that you’re pretty sure is not in their best interest
- experience negative emotions toward you or toward others
- experience positive emotions toward you or toward others
- are seeking your approval in a positive way
- are sad, whether they’re verbally or nonverbally expressing that sadness
- experience confusion
- don’t share their emotions with you
- are too self-sufficient and “strong”
- share too many of their emotions with you even though it may be overwhelming for you
- are not in the “stage” you’re in, whether developmentally, intellectually, mentally, spiritually or emotionally
The reason why talking to your family and friends about love isn’t as easy as one might think is because they expect the world from you. They love you, and therefore, want to feel unconditionally loved, supported and understood by you. They want you to witness their pain in a way that honors their soul and their individuality.
Be Generous With Your Community
Of all the scenarios where you can express your love, this is for many, the most difficult. As you know, you can support your community by volunteering your time and donating money, both of these require some degree of love… but in case you’re thinking you have neither time or money to give…you do have an abundance of one thing and that is simply love.
There are many different ways to serve your community with love. You can:
- Encourage and support your community leaders
- Be nice to every community member regardless of socioeconomic status everyone from the homeless to the mayor
- Contribute to Fundraisers
- Smile
- Hold doors for people
- Respect and/or beautify public places by at least keeping them clean
- Abide by laws and regulations that promote the enjoyment of the community environment
Not only is it good to do the positive things for everyone as much as possible, but it helps tremendously if you
- don’t gossip about them
- don’t plot with others to humiliate them
- don’t sabotage them.
- If you don’t like what they’re doing propose something better and investigate whom to talk to so that your ideas don’t fall on deaf ears.
In the process, be humble. Some of your ideas will make a difference… and others, will sadly be too “utopic” for them to be implemented… at least for now. But keep dreaming, and keep acting in your own life as someone who moves forward and maybe, just maybe, people will notice. Even if they don’t, you’re still doing what’s best for you and your family…. and your family can someday in some big or small way be the messengers of your vision.
Talk About Love With Me
Talking about love isn’t easy, but I definitely know that it beats the alternatives. Since this site is focused on love, and there is a tremendous need for us to talk about love with ourselves, with our community and with our family and a whole lot of openness and courage that is needed for this, I am encouraging you once again to feel free to contact me via email, snail mail and social media to talk about love. If you’re having trouble or you’re having successes in talking about love and with love,.I would LOVE to be in the loop about what you have to say, therefore, you can use the hashtag #loveandtreasure in any of the major social media forms.
Here is a list of links that you can use to stay connected:
My website contact Form: https://loveandtreasure.com/contact/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LovenTreasure or at @LovenTreasure
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/loveantreasure/
Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/110616610046451190088/posts
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Love-and-Treasure/145521552320630
Time for You to Share Your Wisdom Treasures
- Which of the 4 scenarios do you prefer for starting to talk about love and communicate with love? Why?
- Do you have additional ideas for how we together can talk more efficiently and effectively about love and express revolutionary love to others? If so, please leave a comment below.
I feel that Loving myself is where I am starting. I wrote a post about rediscovering myself recently and I appreciate this post. I feel loving myself is the best place for me and will trickle into all my interactions. Thank you for this post.
Hello Tracey! 🙂 Thank you for your heart-felt comment. We all start there… loving ourselves… then we come into this world… and our love for ourselves diminishes, and we have to go back to that love. As you said, we need to rediscover ourselves every step of the way, because we do reinvent ourselves. I am positive that by you loving yourself, your light will trickle into all of your interactions. It was my pleasure writing this post and I hope that you continue being a reader of my site. This week I’ll be posting a post which will help you notice that it’s not your fault that you’re where you are. Loving ourselves is a work in progress that is sometimes made more difficult because of our surroundings. Looking forward to interact with you more. 🙂
I agree that the first place to start is within yourself – if you can’t love yourself, how can you love others? It is perhaps the most challenging as we tend to be most critical with ourselves. I would also add, as a religious person, love of Gd, and the challenging areas would be when He seems to be doing us wrong, loving Him because we know only He knows what’s really best.
Hello Menucha, thank you for your comment. I believe in God, too… so much so that I don’t think he ever does anything to us that is negative. We do it to ourselves. 🙂 I read a great quotation recently and posted it on my Pinterest account, which said, “When you feel like giving up, remember: God is cheering you on and holding out is hand to offer what you need to keep going.” I loved it… especially the last part… because God always gives good things…. to propel us forward… not to hold us back. 🙂 And when we love ourselves, we love God, because you, and everybody is God. 🙂 Looking forward to continuing to connect with you.
This was a wonderful post to read. There are many great suggestions. The fact that you begin with self, move on to the immediate friends / family and then community is a perfect tier of influence to start and grow. I love this sentence: “In a nutshell, you can respond to the world badly, indifferently or kindly.” Just as we have heard so many times, thoughts create our world. Therefore we must begin with thought or our mind. As we change this, other items will fall into place, like our heart, soul and body. Do you ever believe that at times feelings can great thoughts instead of thoughts creating feelings? Do you think it can be interchangeable at times or only a one way path?
Thanks for your wonderful comment, Connie! 🙂 I love the questions you pose. To me, when we use the phrase, “it’s all in your mind”…. that includes not only thoughts that allow you to move forward or not, but also feelings associated with those thoughts. An easy example is procrastination. You may think that you don’t want to do something, but the thought “I don’t want to do it” is loaded with feelings— which are powerful, yet sometimes erroneous.
I do believe that the feeling-thought dynamic can work both ways for people. Mostly, though, I think that most of us live an experience, we then feel positively or negatively to the initial stimuli from that experience, then that forms a thought, which then creates more positive or negative experiences and then we do something or let the thought (usually worry) go and turn our focus on something else (as long as we can manage 🙂 ) . I just lived an alarming experience today and that was the sequence of events. 🙂 I do think that they’re interchangeable… usually, though, when a thought “pops-up” it’s typically already saturated with a feeling, usually based on prior experience. Like for example if you say (or for the purposes of this example, I tell you), “you like cake.” it’s a thought that takes a moment to register. You conjure up your past experience with a cake (your schemata) while doing the “do I? don’t I?” dance until you settle on a “yes, I do” or a “no, I don’t” while drifting to a past feeling of a cake you had and your salivation usually increases…as you remember mmm how yummy that one cake that your thinking of (or several) was. One of the beautiful things about thoughts, I think, is that we can shut them off, a little. With feelings, it’s worth listening to…. because they are what they are– in my mind they’re useful reminders to get to the bottom of things… either to go in a certain direction (if there’s excitement and eagerness for example) but if there’s hesitation, it’s worth taking a closer look and exploring whether the thoughts behind the feeling are true- which in most cases not related to self-sabotage, the are– and then making a decision to move forward or not. I hope that is useful. 🙂 Truly enjoyed interacting with you and I hope this opportunity repeats itself. 🙂
I believe that what we talk about is less important that how we behave, toward ourselves and toward each other. So for me the focus would be on acting in a loving manor toward myself and those around me. And it does have to start with loving myself, because if I can’t show love to myself, I will not have anything to give anyone else. With enough self love, I can treat others with kindness and respect, even when they treat me badly, because I love myself enough to not engage in behavior that I may later regret. And I can see that the person who might be treating others badly is doing so from a place of fear and lack, and have compassion on them.
Hi Susan, thank you so much for your comment. I agree with you that how we behave is more important than what we say, generally speaking. But there are instances where just a few words can damage a relationship forever, no matter how well you’ve been behaving in it up until that point. This is especially true when it comes to experiences of love. As you said, it starts with you. You have to be coherent with your words and actions and love yourself with words and actions. Actions have power and so do our words. And the more conscientious we are of that, the more aware we’ll be so that as you alluded to, we practice the Golden Rule and we only treat others the way that we’d like to be treated. I too try to have empathy for people who don’t act with this awareness, and I posted several months ago on my Twitter account a quotation graphic that essentially says that the most rebellious people are the ones who need love the most. And just a little bit of background, my mission behind my site is to encourage conversations about love, which of course include the importance of the need to act with love. My rationale? If we waste time talking about the negative things in life such as news, rumors, our failures, the faults in others, etc., why not talk about love– which at least has some potential to remedy much, if not all, of the negativity in the world through systematic and compassionate action? 🙂
This was a refreshing post to read! I am from the Blog MoJo challenge, I believe that the first and best love is self love. I think that once you are able to love yourself with all of your flaws and imperfections you can than love your family, community, and others that you may meet along the way and grow your love for the world.
Thank you, Toila. Self-love is the first love and best love..indeed. It can always be with you. It is the seed to all the wonderful things life has to offer. It is the basis. It is the core.
Haydee, thanks! I needed to hear this today. “You don’t feed your body even half as much junk as you feed your mind.” – Wow! So true! We often forget how judgmental we are of ourselves and you’re absolutely right- why should anyone else treat us with love and respect when we can’t even do it for ourselves!? I do agree with what you are saying about how to radiate love when it comes to family members- that sometimes you can’t just give them everything they want because in some cases that could hurt them and really caring about someone is to have the ability to differentiate between being loving and supportive and also at certain times- critical in a constructive way. These days I am also trying to do a lot of “paying it forward” within my community of startup people and help out by giving advice and also supporting others’ projects. Thanks for the great reminders you’ve provided in this article. I really enjoyed it.
Hello Martin.
Thanks for sharing the work that you’re doing in your community. Giving advice and support is huge! No matter where we are in life we always need that.
Thank you for your kind comments.
Love is a balancing act … It requires us to be congruent… And it requires us to be compassionate with external and internal critics. It’s tough, I know. The ego or the sabateur often get in the way. Usually, it’s our “need” for type of external validation, that no matter how good it gets, will never be enough if we don’t validate ourselves first. Being aware of it can help us improve it. As the Hippocratic Oath in the medical field says, with everyone and everything, we should try to do as little harm as we possibly can. But yes, being less self-critical is also something that I have to work on. In a way, it’s the perfect excuse (not that we need one) to love ourselves more each day. 🙂