Love as a Verb
We love ice cream. Love watching movies. Love our parents, children, friends and partners. But what is love? No search engine is shy about revealing the definition of love: “an intense feeling of deep affection” or “a person or thing that one loves”.
What is love as a verb? Merriam-Webster says it is to “hold dear”. But how? Psychologist Daniel Richo, in his book How to Be an Adult in Relationships, describes the key elements for loving as the Five A’s: Attention, Acceptance, Appreciation, Affection, Allowing.
Our deepest need is love, and we seek love from the time we are born. First, we look for love from our parents and caregivers, and later, our extended family, friends, teachers and society. Receiving love teaches us how to love others as well as ourselves. Love from outside helps many of us connect to love within. If our need for love is not met, it can interfere with our ability to connect to the source of love within, says Dr. Sheila Patel.
We hear so many stories about successful entrepreneurs and other overachieving adults who were once attention-starved children of neglectful or completely absent parents. They prove themselves worthy of adoration by pushing the limits of what someone else before them has done. But we don’t have to experience trauma to discover that love is sometimes conditional. In less pronounced ways, some of us learn that certain behaviors get us the love we want – from our parents and later, from friends and partners, we learn that relations could be transactional.
However, being an adult gives us a chance to learn how to love ourselves. Acknowledging and unlearning our patterns and old behaviors can be more challenging than learning something for the first time, but as adults, we can take ownership of our lives. We can start by initiating an intention to mend the broken love that exists in our minds and bodies, but do we know what to replace it with?
Self-love is as elusive as any love to define, but we can apply Richo’s same Five A’s to loving ourselves.
Let us start with the first A: Attention. Instead of looking for someone else to listen to us, we can learn to listen to our inner voice. It’s easy to hear our inner voice’s louder messages. Sometimes it’s as if they’re playing on repeat or drone on and on, and we want them to be quiet. When we are successful at quieting them, we have the chance to hear the softer, more subtle messages. But sometimes we don’t want to hear those either, and we bury them deep inside ourselves to try to forget they even exist. But other times, if we listen closely, those softer messages can come through, starting as a knot in our throat, a cramp in our stomach, back pain or a headache. If we focus all of our attention to the part of the body where the signal is triggered, rather than taking a painkiller or numbing ourselves another way, we might be able to decipher the message. We also can tune in through drawing, writing, listening to music, dancing, paying attention to what we hear in the silence in between the lines, random thoughts or meditations that bring those subtle messages into our radar and consciousness.
I think the first A is the most arduous. It is the call to pause the life we are used to living in which we react all the time. It is the call to listen to our inner voice without judgment, without shushing but a willingness to listen, no matter what those messages say, and accept that we heard them. As with any practice, it gets deeper when we do it from our heart and brings us closer to self-love.
The second A is Acceptance. Are we comfortable with embracing ourselves fully – not just our sparks but also our shadows? Bringing awareness to our millions or billions of pieces (the number gets bigger as we get deeper in self-love) that show our light and our dark aspects.
Without darkness there is no light. Darkness and light are just two extreme points in the same spectrum. Each aspect of ourselves falls somewhere on the spectrum, and we don’t have to label any as bad or good. We may need all of them. For example, when we are sick, we may need to be selfish to recover. Selfishness is often labeled as bad, but we sometimes need it to do our body good.
Pretending that we are all sparks does not hide our shadows. On the contrary, our shadows get darker and stronger when we push them aside and fight their integration into our being.
The third A is Appreciation. The need for appreciation for who we are does not have to come from outside either. If we don’t appreciate our own talents and gifts, how could we expect others to do that for us? If we don’t see the changes we are creating inside ourselves, within our circle of closest friends and family and beyond, how could we make a greater impact?
The fourth A is Affection and refers to taking care of ourselves, as we are adults. If we don’t know what is good for our wellbeing, who else could know?
The last A is Allowing – letting ourselves be who we are without intentionally choosing what to show or what to hide. It is not easy to be in the moment by allowing whatever is in our mind or heart to exist but it is being. Nobody else has our past, present or future; nobody else has our family; nobody else has our body; nobody else has our emotion. That is our signature. Allowing ourselves to be who we are makes us live our lives. We do what we could do in the moment – no right or wrong. Regrets or afterthoughts are irrelevant.
With this practice, there’s good and bad news. The good news is that when we perform the five A’s for ourselves, even for the first time, we experience a change within ourselves and the change might be reflected in our other relationships. Some of our relationships may get stronger, but others, the ones that are not serving us, will falter and fall away. That might feel like bad news at first but trust that it is for your good. The other hard news is that this practice creates a cycle, so it never ends. But more good news, every time we listen to a quiet message, we get better at hearing them and deeper in love.
