by Kalayna Colibri

The conditioning is deep around what we’ve been taught real love and care is and looks like. It’s challenging to feel it in different ways, to take a deep look at how we’ve related to love and how we’ve been convinced we’re supposed to embody it.

So often what we think of as loving or caring can have more of a negative impact on others than a positive one. False apologies, empty promises, tugging and grabbing at others… these frequencies can be obvious or subtle. And in any case, we aren’t genuinely caring about our impact on others, only what parts of us want and are afraid they won’t get or look like on the outside. I so know this one from my own process too, and learning to see and feel even the subtle ways in which this happens is illuminating and invites you to shift these patterns for good.

I think so often we (or parts of us) are actually terrified to deeply feel what it would be like to be someone else and genuinely feel our impact on them, whether or not we feel we’ve been ‘loving’ toward them.

This is tricky… and hard to feel too. It can be hard to look inward and challenge how we have been holding love and what it means to love another, whether in official ‘service of love’ or in everyday relationships. It’s amazing what it illuminates within though… which is so often an untouched inner reality of how we ourselves, and parts of us, have felt incredibly unworthy of real love, abandoned somehow, and in a void space that has never been filled by genuine self-love and the journey of unfolding that within.

So what does it look and feel like to actually care and love another person?

To me, it feels like giving space for another’s growth without tugging on them to join in on yours. It feels like inviting someone to share with you what they need and want, but not with a commitment from you to make it happen for them. It feels like the overflow of good inner-parenting, of relating to yourself and getting to know your own quirks and shadowy aspects and energies within you as well as your gifts and growth and flowing this energy to another to support their own inner-parenting to grow and blossom too. It feels like being willing to let go even when your heart really doesn’t want to.

It’s a lot to feel into these pieces and truth be told, I’m not sure any of us can truly master this skill of loving another in the purest way… we and parts of us all have understandable investments in relationships of all kinds and hopes that they will last too. We all have desires and dreams and don’t really ever want to feel lonely (though really landing in the loneliness has so many gifts too)… we all have what we want to experience from others and in our lives in general. Yet love asks us to trust… to invest in the process yet divest of the outcome. To feel what we want most and understand that it won’t always come to us in ways we can control.

Above all, love wants us to remember that it is never against us or anybody else, though it can feel that way at times. It only ever wants us to experience more of it within so that we can share it with others. This flow of love is really all the ‘service of love’ is anyways, though it can be dressed up in many ways and be given many labels and is not always easy to truly embody for ourselves, let alone others.

Much love to you as you continue to experience your own journey into more and more REAL love, and the path of learning to embody love in the most authentic way possible. ❤

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Kalayna Colibri is a SoulFullHeart co-founder, soul scribe, and poetess. Visit https://www.soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information about space holding sessions, group calls, videos, community, etc. Visit our Patreon page to offer a money donation to support our offerings at https://www.patreon.com/soulfullheart.