By Books Author Denise Turney

Love is so deep and vast, so all encompassing, it’s impossible to describe love. It’s in all that lives. Ask someone what love feels like and you might hear words like: freedom, power, warm, inviting, comforting, dependable, limitless, eternal and good. Everything alive is touched by love. Babies rest in love. When babies coo and smile, it’s as if they are within love’s embrace. Yet, you can get lost in this world’s maze and need to find ways to open love pathways.

What’s Blocking Love Pathways

As babies, trusting love seems natural. It’s easy to rest secure in open love pathways as infants. Then, we get older. We experience disappointments. Fear based emotions like jealousy, hopelessness, anger, disgust and sorrow start to jab at us, maybe filling our days. Before long, we start to perceive love as evasive, hard to find, reserved for a select few, weak, painful and undependable.

Yet, we still want love, and we always will. We know that we need love to thrive, to live, but we’re scared.

It’s this fear that can block us from not only seeing but also receiving love’s blessings. If you’ve been hiding from love and want to stop, check out these seven ways to open love flows:

• Raise your hands, lift your head toward the ceiling and say, “Thank you!” when you wake in the morning. This single act can shift you into a healthy mood and set your day on a positive course. Furthermore, if you’ve been in the habit of feeling angry or frustrated as soon as your feet hit the floor, this could create a new pattern that you may appreciate for years.
• Play music that you love at least once a day. For example, you could listen to smooth jazz while you go for a walk or bike ride. Or you could listen to relaxing music while you enjoy a soothing bubble bath at the end of the day. Another place to listen to relaxing music that you appreciate is in the car. You could turn on your favorite music while driving to and from the grocery store or while running errands. See if you don’t feel better.

Techniques to Open Love Pathways

• And this brings up another technique. Get outside and move. If you don’t like to exercise, tell yourself that you’re taking a stress relieving walk. See the experience differently.
• Eat a healthy diet that agrees with your system. Also, pay attention to how your body feels when you eat sugary foods or when you consume too much protein. After all, the aim is to love yourself.
• Practice awareness. Actually, observe emotions and thoughts that you experience. Slow down and notice what those emotions and thoughts are linked to. Ways to move through upsetting emotions and thoughts include journaling, painting, talking with a friend, writing yourself a letter and getting out in nature and seeing what surfaces. Also, pay attention to what surfaces in your dream world.
• Meditate. Simply sit still and focus on your breathing. As simple as it sounds, meditating is a good way to calm racing thoughts. And it’s a good way to reduce and eliminate stress.
• Say “I love you” to yourself and one other person each day. While you’re doing this, make sure to visit or speak with a friend once a week. In today’s online age, it’s important to nurture in-person relationships.

Stay Open to Abundant Happiness and Love

To keep love flows open, incorporate these techniques into your daily routines. After all, experiences in this world can jab at the brightest day. You may have experienced this numerous times. At the start of the day, you feel excited, hopeful, empowered and relaxed.

Then, a number of unwanted experiences occur (e.g. traffic jams, disagreements, late appointments, weather storms, coffee burns) and, before you know it, you’ve shifted from feeling excited, hopeful, empowered and relaxed to feeling emotionally fatigued, frustrated, unable to get the day that you want and tense. The shift can happen in seconds.

That’s why it’s beneficial to incorporate self-love techniques into each day. Doing so, helps to keep you balanced and positioned to continue recognizing and receiving love flows. Even more, it may have a positive impact on the people who you live and work with.

Say Yes to Love

Other ways to stay open to love are to read articles and books that encourage you to love. Listening to deep meditation tapes that focus on the power of love is another way to stay open. Spending time with people you know love you is a real gem. But that means you may have to exit from the lives of people who are abusive toward you.

And that means saying good-bye to people who abuse you emotionally, psychologically, financially or physically. After all, accepting abuse is another way to abuse yourself. It’s another way to block love. Admittedly, turning toward love and away from abuse, especially when abuse comes from people who have been a part of your life for years, may not be easy.

You Deserve to Thrive in Open Love Pathways

To ease that pressure, exchange your image for the abuser’s. In other words, instead of seeing the abuser cursing you, see yourself engaging in that behavior against yourself. Then, ask yourself if it’s a good way to show yourself that you’re loved.

Be honest. If the answer is ‘no’, it’s time for a healthy good-bye. And yes. You may miss those people whose lives you exit. But, as you continue to practice daily self-love techniques, you can realize more and more that you did the right thing. After all, the more you love yourself and others, the stronger you become.

The same applies to putting yourself in position to be loved. And it’s this that opening to love pathways is about. Put yourself in position to receive and give love. Then, watch how you feel, think and perceive life. See if you don’t open to more goodness, experiencing an inwardly rich life.