101 ways to have True Love in Your Life (Part 2)
A page in the diary "Accept, Adapt and Appreciate: How?"
Written by nw4m Jun 20 2008 12:02 PM
As promised, here's part 2.
Allow Your Needs to Be Your Guide (Chp 1, Pg 13)
When you allow yourself to be guided by your needs, your needs become the path that can lead you to yourself - and also to your beloved.
Conversely, denying your needs or endlessly serving others to the detriment of fulfilling your own needs are both ways of not discovering who you are and of not allowing yourself to be loved.
Not needing is an inauthentic state. It's a denial of your human-ness. That's because one of our most basic human characteristics is that we are creatures of need.
To deny this - by being brutally self-sufficient, by manipulating others into serving you, or by pretending to have transcended need - is a form of hypocrisy.
No one who's alive on the planet - not even avatars or saints - has totally transcended need. To be human is to need; and to need is to be human.
We need food. We need loving arms. We need air and light and the sun and the glistening fine white shine of the moon.
We need to be listened, to be heard. We need empathy, to be feelingly felt with. We need work that is a true expression of our spirits. We need company, compatriots on the path.
We need witness: friends and strangers to reflect to us who we are. We need success - at something. We need peace.
Our needs are like weeds that spring up between the rocks on our path - insistent, organic, demanding. They are the barest, boldest truths of ourselves, the essential grit at our core. But often we don't treat them as such.
We tap them down, shut them up, and talk ourselves out of them; and by the time someone's ready to meet them in a relationship, we don't even know what they are.
The opposite of not knowing your needs is becoming conscious of them - discovering what they are and then finding the words to express them.
As their size, shape and content are all gradually revealed, you will gain a map of yourself.
You will see who you are, what you really do need, and what joy it will give you to have your needs fulfilled.
So discover what you need; speak up about it; and be open to receive.
For knowing what you need and asking for it - clearly, strongly, directly - is an act of personal strength.
It will allow you to be honoured through the meeting of your needs, and it will allow the person who loves you the joy of loving you well.
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nw4m: Coming up next will be Part 3, Final: Practise Loving Yourself