Open Your Heart

You are not alone if you want a little more love in your life. Yet you may be forgetting the one person who can fill your whole life with love – you! By opening your heart to life, to others and to yourself, you’ll grow love in every corner of your world.

Love life
If you want to get the most out of life, you really have to love it. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by challenges and lose site of the beauty and joy life has to offer. But you don’t have to let painful issues in your past or present get in the way of happiness. Part of embracing life is changing your expectations and realizing that problems in life are not always able to be “fixed” – but they can be managed. Through therapy, supportive relationships and self-love, you can learn to cope with your problems in a way that makes your life happier and healthier. And once you’ve learned to overcome your challenges through managing your issues, you can finally begin to appreciate life as a gift and really learn to love it.

Love others
Loving others isn’t necessarily about serving soup at a homeless shelter or donating money to your favorite charity. Those things are great, but they aren’t the only ways you can love others. Loving others means seizing opportunities in your daily life to be more thoughtful, helpful and caring. It means taking the time to consider how someone will feel before you say or do something. It means being sensitive to people who have different needs than you.

It’s also important to find the best way to love our friends and family. Some people like to hear words of love, while others appreciate small gifts as gestures. Others want to see the love expressed in thoughtful action. And still others value physical affection above all. Take the time to discover how they are comfortable receiving love and then make an effort to share it with them in that way.

Yet the greatest challenge really is remembering to be loving every single day. It’s sometimes difficult, but you must approach all things with a loving attitude. Whether you’re dealing with a stranger who cut you off in traffic or a partner who really hurt your feelings, try to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just as light changes when viewed through a prism, a situation can be completely transformed when viewed through the prism of love. Try to see the world through a prism of love and all aspects of your life will be transformed and made more beautiful.

Love yourself
But before you can really love life and others, you have to start at the center of your world: yourself. It sounds so simple, learning to love yourself, but it’s really one of the most difficult challenges of life. Learning to love yourself is not just about treating yourself to an ice cream cone after a bad day – though that’s not a bad idea! Loving yourself is being at peace with your flaws and gifts. It’s forgiving your mistakes and cherishing your triumphs. It’s taking care of yourself for the short and long term.

Loving yourself is the most dramatic way to bring love in to your life forever. When you love yourself, there’s always someone who will love you unconditionally: you.