Happy Valentine’s Day
“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” – Rumi
I asked my sister, the artist, “How do you get the light to play in your paintings so well?” She explained, she looks for where the colors are brightest. And she continued, light also plays where the colors are darkest. And I thought to myself that it is also true about personality shadow and vulnerability. The more we have ease in our own insecurities and learning curves, the more lightness of being we have in life. A poet once wrote, it is in the cracks that the light shines through.
Have you wondered how Valentine’s Day started? Valentine’s Day is named from a Christian martyr from the 5th century and originated from the Roman holiday Luperclia. It was known as the Feast of Saint Valentine, so called from Saint Vanentinus who was sent to prison for marrying soldiers and for ministering to Christians who were persecuted during the Roman Empire. During the time he was imprisoned according to legend he healed the daughter of his jailer and before he was executed he wrote “Your Valentine” as a farewell” (Wikipedia).
Love is our natural state and yet fear makes a prison of it sometimes. Researchers John Bowlby and Eleanor Ames published landmark studies looking at attachment styles seen in neonate bonding and children who have been adopted from orphanages. These and other studies, show us that our first relationships with our caregivers during our critical stages of development are so fundamental to our lifelong capacity to make loving attachments in secure, insecure, or avoidant styles.
If you have had the constancy of nurturing care in your childhood, you were set up to make secure attachments with your future mates. This means you can easily express your feelings and needs. You can cope when those needs are not met. You can self-sooth and self-regulate. Even if you have had great childhood experiences with your parents, however, the wounding of your heart in your teens or adult life can start with someone who comes into your life carrying the emotional baggage of unresolved insecure attachment styles from their own childhood care deficit.
Love can become so complicated by these experiences that you then develop avoidant attachment styles, not wanting to risk being hurt. If you have a pattern of self-sabotaging by pulling back when you sense you are getting too close for comfort, talk about your feelings and needs with your partner. You might let your partner in on your patterns of withdraw and invite him/her to let you know when he/she senses that is happening. Invitations for change can be so powerful because they say:
1. I accept perfectly imperfect me
2. I accept all of you unconditionally
3. I don’t know what I don’t know
Our yoga instructor here in Sayulita reminds us today is a powerful day. There is a full moon AND it is Valentine’s Day.
Where will you see love today? How does love live in you? Are there spaces for love to show up more in your day? Life is your own box of chocolates. Take care of yourself today.
Love, kindness, compassion radiate from you.
