By Books Author Denise Turney

Love pours and flows everywhere that you are. Yet, love seems evasive, hard to grasp and experience, let alone hold onto. Could part of the reason why you feel as if love is separate from you, a place where you aren’t, be due to how you define love?

What Is Love?

For example, do you think of love as a warm inner feeling? Or maybe you associate love with intuition and a sense of inner knowing. Even more, love might feel like an adrenalin rush. Depending on your childhood, you might even think that love requires sacrifice.

Believe this and you might seek out a partner, colleagues, neighbors and friends who you deem worthy for you to sacrifice yourself for. When this occurs, you might give up your opinions, beliefs and passions so the other person can fulfill their beliefs and passions.

In extreme cases, you might become mute while around these people, judging these “special” people as more important than you are. But this route leads to frustration. Because no one is “special” or better or less than anyone else.

Love and Sacrifice

Years could pass before you realize this truth, especially if the dance of sacrifice is playing out in an intimate relationship. That’s when the relationship might be severely shaken. Why? You might feel as if you’ve given a lot more than you’ve received. Furthermore, you might feel like you’d given a lot more than the other person is worth.

And this is a major reason why love is not sacrifice. After all, what would love need? If love has and is everything that’s truth, why would love need sacrifice in any form?

Perceptions and beliefs about what love is, particularly as it regards sacrifice, can make love feel far away, like it’s only for the lucky few. Lack of forgiveness also makes love seem faraway, unreal.

Forgiveness Opens You So Love Pours

You may have heard the saying you get more of what you focus on. This alone, could be a key motivator to forgive. Focus on a wrong you perceive that someone has done to you, and you could get more chances to be wronged, definitely not the way to feel love’s presence.

I learned this lesson the hard way. When I perceived that someone had mistreated me, I told myself that I’d be dumb not to dislike her. The discomfort of carrying lack of forgiveness became a burden.

So, I decided to forgive.

But forgiving felt hard. It felt like I was pushing a mountain up a mountain.

Fortunately, I read an article filled with tips on how to open up to miracles. The writer of the article shared, to open up to miracles, spend at least an hour, no more than two hours, at one time saying, “I love you,” followed by the name of the person who I was struggling to forgive.

I tried it. And to my surprise it worked! A woman who’d mistreated me for more than a year, suddenly came up to me and gave me a hug. I was floored! She did it totally out of the blue! After that, our relationship was much better, and I actually felt love when I was in the woman’s presence. Before, I’d felt fear, anger, frustration and disappointment. Better yet, our relationship never went back to the strained way that it had been before.

When It Doesn’t Feel That Love Pours and Flows

Consider your relationships. Honestly, are there relationships with colleagues, partners, adult children, relatives or friends that find you feeling angry, defensive, afraid, depressed or small? Do you feel anything except love when you’re with these people?

What do you think might be blocking love’s flow in those situations? Could forgiveness play a role, even if it’s a matter of forgiving yourself?

For me, the experience with the woman who embraced me seemingly out-of-the-blue, was all the proof I needed that lack of forgiveness blocks the realization of love’s presence. And blocking love, leaves out goodness. You have to ask yourself if you’re up for that type of sacrifice.

Love Pours Over You

It’s a question Raymond Clarke has to ask himself in the book Love Pour Over Me. For Raymond, the struggle to forgive is rooted in childhood. The final choice he makes will do more than allow him to see (or remain blind) to love’s eternal presence. The final choice he makes will change his life and the lives of several people.

And isn’t this what is happening with your decisions about love and forgiveness? So, what do you think love is? Why do you define love this way? Are you open to seeing love as much more than you imagined? Are you ready to forgive? Are you ready to open to real love?

Here are a few tips that could help you open up to receive love:

• Write down 5 things about the person you are struggling to forgive that you appreciate
• Pen a letter to the person, sharing specific ways you feel she/he has wronged you. End the letter by sharing two things about the person you are thankful for.
• Journal how you feel, penning thoughts that surface as you work to forgive the person. In my case, I’d journal about the woman giving me a hug out of the blue after I spent one to two hours saying “I love you” to her out loud.

Truth is, we cannot exist without love. Therefore, love is always with us. If you don’t feel love’s presence, what do you think it blocking the feeling / thoughts / experience of love? Hopefully, Raymond’s story will help you to spot love blocks as well as motivate you to choose love.