Feeling Love, Loved, In Love, and Loving 24/7

by Gary Vacca (spiritualliving.net)

From the start let me state my basic premise and that is... feeling love, loved, in love, and loving are gifts you give your self, by becoming consciously aware of the presence of God in, through and as you. Since God is love, and he is expressing himself as you, love and all of its forms is expressing Itself as you right now. The question is, do you realize it? To think that some one else can make you feel love, loved, in love and loving is naiveté. These emotions may seem to be coming from another, but in reality they are coming through another.

The best scenario for a loving relationship is when both people are in-tune with God (love) within themselves. Then they both are open channels for sending and receiving. The love you feel within yourself is the love you have to give to another. Love-filled people feel love within them and then let it flow to others. Feeling love, loved, in love and loving are all states of your consciousness, built by your thoughts and beliefs and therefore becoming a manifestation of your thoughts and beliefs.

Whatever you live in conscious awareness of, you experience. What you are aware of internally is what you experience externally. For instance if I am thinking thoughts of being separated, distant and alienated from another, that will manifest as my experience with that person. On the other hand if I am feeling loved, connected, and at one with someone, that will become my experience. The principle is... as I am within, so it will be without.

The great illusion we have all bought into is thinking that these experiences of love, loved, in love and loving are dependent upon the “right person” showing up in our life. The second illusion we have fallen for is to think that even if the “right person” did show up, that he or she would possess the power to make you feel love, loved, in love and loving. No such person has ever been vested with those powers except you. You are the only one who can make yourself feel love in any of its forms. The experiences of love, feeling loved, in love and loving are all internal experiences... something you feel within yourself. They originate within you. They don’t come from some other person external to you.

We have probably all been in a situation where we really wanted a person to feel loved, but for some reason the other person never really got it. Perhaps the opposite is true also. Maybe someone has told you and shown you that they love you, but for some reason you just didn’t feel it. The point being you can’t make someone feel loved, and no one can make you receive his or her love. It’s an inside job that begins and ends with you.

These loving experiences are not gifts from someone else, but rather are gifts that you give to yourself. Then when someone does show up in your life, that you want to share yourself with you aren’t putting pressure on them to give you something that they can’t give. Depending on some one else to make you feel loved is simply an unreal expectation. When someone senses that you are depending on them to make you feel loved, valued, and appreciated, it literally pushes them away; because in their heart of hearts they know they can’t deliver what you are demanding.

So the solution is to give these gifts to yourself in silence and meditation. By sensing the Presence within you, you most definitely will experience the feelings of love, being loved, in love, and loving. Once you have experienced these feelings within yourself you now have something to give to another. Only that which you discover within yourself, can you give to someone else.

The key is to do within while you are doing without. In other words you can experience love even if you’re in a loveless relationship. You can feel loved even when the other person is not making the effort to make you feel that way. You can experience the joy of being in love, even though there is no spark left. You can feel loving toward another even when there is a lack of logical reasons why you should.

Until you do create these loving experiences within your self, you will never experience them with others; at least not on a long-term basis. The spiritual Law of Attraction states that “like attracts like.” That means, loving people attract loving people. And cold calculating attitudes attract others with the same.

The key is to experience God’s presence. Since God is love, when you experience His presence you experience love in all of its many expressions. It is damaging to your mind, emotions, and body to be in a prolonged period of loveless-ness, or a relationship lacking the consciousness and feeling of love. Since what is in your consciousness is always being manifested, a deficiency of feeling love, loved, in love and loving will manifest itself as a deficiency in your body’s health in one form or another. It may show up as a lack of energy, absence of joy or apathy for life in general. In order to feel completely satisfied and fulfilled we need to feel all four aspects... love, loved, in love and loving.

Since God is love, when you are “in love” you are living in a conscious awareness of God; expressing Himself as you and as the person you are in love with. Being in love means you live in a consciousness of love. Unless you are living in a consciousness of love within yourself you will never feel in love with someone else. It is absolutely possible for you to feel love in a loveless situation, because the feeling of being in love, like all other feelings originates in you. However it is also possible for your relationship with another to be void of expressing love. You can personally be experiencing love within yourself, while at the same time your relationship is not expressing love. The reason being, you cannot control the consciousness of another person. Relationship means... relating to each other. If you are relating love to your partner, but you partner is not relating love to you then the relationship as a whole is not expressing love; even though you may be experiencing it within yourself.

Scriptures teach, “So long as it is possible with you, live in peace with others.” The same can be said of love... “So long as it is possible with you, live in love.” But that doesn’t guarantee that your partner or the other person will accept it or that they will relate in love back to you. Therefore your experience of love in the context of the relationship is lacking or void.

To understand that our true nature is love will lead us to the next factor of life’s equation, and that is the importance of loving. Loving is simply the act of giving who and what you are. You can’t give what you’re not, or what you don’t have. The nature of love is that it must express itself. Love that doesn’t express itself usually withers and dries up much like a rose bloom which never opens; its simply misses the opportunity to come into full bloom, naturally expressing itself and bringing beauty and joy to others. Much like an arm atrophies, which is inactive for an extended period of time, so our ability to love tends to loose its power. Scriptures tell us that “God so loved the world that He gave.” It seems in spiritual and human reality that love and giving go together.

In summary it is possible to feel love, loved, in love, and loving, once you realize that these feelings are already within you and they are gifts you give yourself. They are available to you 24/7 as you become consciously aware of the presence of God within you, manifesting Himself (love) as all that He is, as all that you are. When you are consciously aware of God, you are simultaneously of love, expressing itself in all its many forms and faces.