Welcoming 2011 - The Year of Love

Wishing you a Blessed and Joyous 2011! I declare 2011 to be the Year of Love. In the photo to the left, I am with my friends Elaine and Megan in Sydney, Australia. Elaine is one of my best friends and our friendship has spanned across the time of 25 years. She is so very loving and always takes great care of me, when ever I visit her. A wonderful example of Unconditional Love and genuine friendship. In that spirit, I would like to share a message about love with you, written by my friend Nick Ralls.

WE JUST NEED TO LOVE MORE.. AND IT BEGINS WITH OURSELVES!

I love myself more.. I love others more... I know that there is no limit to the amount of love I can pour onto either myself or others. I shed false beliefs that loving myself is wrong or to restrict love to just some others. I am love and I reveal it.

WE can never love ourselves too much.

Our reluctance to like ourselves.. or love ourselves even... comes about because of a sense of feeling unworthy or not lovable.

For too long we have blamed ourselves when people turn away from us or when a love affair dies.

For too long we have bought into false ideas and beliefs that not only do not serve us in our life but also are simply not true.

For too long we have felt almost guilty or shameful when we have started or taken on a practice of loving ourselves.

Yet for every moment we are not loving ourselves or not liking ourselves we are also denying our essence which is pure love.

Because we are love we can love ourselves unconditionally as we so much hope to love others.

If we find it hard to love others or some others it is usually because we have not done a good enough job in loving ourselves.

Our love life always begins with us.

To the degree we cannot love and accept ourselves for who we are we cannot love and accept other people for who they are.

If we cannot behold our own divinity, we simply will not see, hear or feel the divinity in others.

Put another way, if we cannot see the sparkling diamond that glows in the hearts of all those in our life then it is because we are not fully recognizing or appreciating the diamond that shines so brightly in us.

What happens when we love ourselves so much?

For a start, nothing bad happens.

We do not become selfish, arrogant, egotistical, self serving or show up as a bad person. Those who sadly do not love themselves demonstrate negative behaviors.

What happens is that we connect with the truth of who we really are and acknowledge that we are love.

And as we love ourselves so much our overflow of love spills over onto everyone around us.

Most of our false beliefs, bad patterns stem from bad programming that we are simply not good enough, do not deserve this or that, lack this or that or that life is somehow a trial to be undergone, a battleground.

This could not be further from the truth of who we are and why we are here although our ego mind will perpetuate these myths to keep us in a state of isolation and individualism.

It is simply not true that we should deny ourselves any amount of love.. as we should not deny any other person any amount of love also.

It is simply not true that we can love ourselves too much..just as it is simply not true that we can love others too much.

The opposite is true.

Our problems come about because we simply do not love ourselves enough... that we do not love others as much as we could... that there is a limit or lack of love.

But when we realize that loving people is for our own good as much as theirs our life can change.

Each time we pour love either onto ourselves or others we are giving a message to the universe: I AM LOVE, I love and receive love

And so it is... with love.