Hello, hello, this is Sabrina Amina. I am the host of the feelings pod and I'm
recording this on July 8th. The weather is very hot and I turned off the AC just
so I could record this transmission. It feels important to me, maybe it'll
resonate with you. We'll see. Today's episode is on love and rejection and I
have talked about rejection. I've talked about love in the past. If you're
curious about what I've said about those topics in previous episodes, feel free to
take a look at those episodes. Today I am feeling called to bring together just
some of my most recent learnings on the topics of love and rejection. I feel like
rejection is something that I've gotten a lot of practice at. Also I've
learned a lot about its relationship to love. If rejection feels like
something that you struggle with lately, maybe there's some medicine, maybe
there's a bomb here. Bomb. I feel like when I say bomb people think I'm saying
B-O-M-B, but I'm saying B-A-L-M. Bomb, a bomb, like bomby. Okay, I just felt I feel
like I had to make that explicitly clear. So in my morning pages today I had a
lot to say about this topic and I think what I'll do is I'll just say a few
words and then I think I might just read from my writing. But basically, like I
said, it almost feels funny to me now to say, oh I've dealt with a lot of
rejection because maybe what I've always perceived as rejection was just
like something else. It's like misalignment or misunderstanding or just
like the connection you thought was here is not or the connection you desire is
just not available. So kind of having these shifts in understanding has given
me a lot more like, I mean it still hurts but it also creates a little bit
more ease and like, okay my sister does not want to talk to me. Ouch. I haven't
heard from her since 2019 despite my efforts to like reach out and connect
and there's just a wall there, at least what I'm perceiving to be a wall, what
feels like rejection. And that's painful because my sister is someone that I love
and care about but she's not someone right now who wants to be in connection
with me. And so the loving piece that I'm practicing is like honoring her
sovereignty, honoring that she knows what's best for her and honoring that
like what she feels is best for her right now is not being in connection
with me right now. But in the past and I think what a lot of us do with rejection
is like we make the other person wrong somehow. Like we make them the enemy or
the victim but then like what happens to the love? Like you said you love this
person, I thought I love this person. How can I have these like feelings of like
malice and rage and hatred toward this person just because they're not loving
me or looking at me or paying attention to me in the way that I want them to?
That seems a bit tyrannical to me and I think in a lot of my relationships
I've been quite the tyrant. I've said I love you so this is what you have to do
and the fact of the matter is no one owes you a reciprocal love. No one owes you
the specific quirky freaky weird idiosyncratic way that you like to be
loved. Ouch right? Like ouch that hurts. Like you mean the people I love aren't
supposed to like aren't obligated to love me in the way that makes me feel like
my most beautiful radiant adored self? No. No. No. Actually and to think that they
do and to insist that they do is kind of a bit of a narcissistic trait.
Now I know that's like a trigger word for a lot of us so I'm not telling any
but I'm not like it's normal and natural to want love reciprocated. It's normal
and natural to want to be loved in the way that you want to be loved but if all
of a sudden you're not in a... if you can't love someone if they're not loving
you in the specific way that you want to be loved and all of a sudden like you're
just like moving to manipulate and coerce and punish the the person who's
supposedly the object of your love that's not love. We're not practicing
love there. Love is this expansive freeing... I don't know. I mean are there
really words? I don't... are there really words? What love is not it's not control
manipulation, coercion, punishment. Love is source. Love is... love is everything.
It's... I mean there's a reason why people have such difficulty defining it but if
there's a feeling of contraction that feeling is when we're separate from love
or when we forget our connection to love. Love is not about controlling. Love is
not about placing heavy expectations on the people that you love. What's loving
is allowing people to be just as they are unless of course their way of being
is in some way causing you harm or is abusive in some way. But otherwise a lot
of the pain we experience or that we attribute to love is actually our
disconnection from love. I can still hold love for my sister. I can still love her
deeply and immensely and want all of the good things for her even if I feel
rejected by her. Like that doesn't go away because she doesn't want to talk to me
or answer my texts. I can make her wrong. I can make her a villain. I can call her
like terrible names. But I like to work with my hurt feelings in a more
generative way.
I might not understand the reason why this person can't be in connection with
me but I don't need to understand it to take full ownership of the love that I
have and experience. The care that I have. I don't have to understand why someone
I care about doesn't want me in their life. I had another experience where I
offered my friendship to someone I love and care about and this person was not
available to be in friendship and that hurts you know. But it's it's actually
more loving to tell someone or make it clear to someone that you don't want to
be in connection with them. Them pretend to be to spare their feelings. I think a
lot of us do a lot of things to spare other people's feelings but we're just
causing more harm than good by forcing a connection that doesn't feel true for us.
And it's it's not easy work. It's not easy work because we're we're beings that
want to be held in love and cared for and sometimes the people that we want to
be held in love and cared for by like they're not available for that. So how
can we turn towards the folks who are available to hold us and love us and
witness us and care for us and tell us how amazing we are. I think that's how we
deal with rejection by really honoring everyone's sovereignty just because you
love someone doesn't mean they owe you shit. So yeah coming to terms with this
realization is has been pretty powerful for me.
Though it's painful it really has been empowering in the sense that realizing
that no one owes you anything because you love them you can let go of the
rigid expectations because those are limiting for all of us. Maybe if you were
able to let go of the rigid expectations we have of the ones we love
perhaps we could have deeper more enriching connections with the people
we love. Maybe those expectations feel really heavy and burdensome for the
person that you love. Wouldn't you want someone you love? Wouldn't you want to
free them of heavy burdens instead of putting more on them? And that's not to
say that your needs and desires are not valid but not everyone can honor your
needs and desires. No one can meet you not everyone can meet you there. And if
you see the person that you love as this person who owes you something or
someone that's you're entitled to something because you love them I mean
I don't know about you but that's not a kind of relationship I'd like to be in.
I don't want somebody to give me something because they owe it to me.
Love is not a debt. Love is something that you give freely and with you know it
comes from a place of of excitement and desire and expansion. It's not something
you can wrestle out of someone. And if you're trying to please stop. Please notice
where you're trying to wrestle love out of somebody and just stop that for a
little bit and see how that feels. See if you can hold yourself a little bit
better and notice what your needs what needs you're trying to get met and
learn more generative ways of finding these connections.
It can be really freeing to think of love in terms of I love you because you
are a person who inspires the experience of love in me. Thank you for offering me
this experience of love. And wouldn't it be nice of course if love was reciprocated?
Of course. Of course it would be. It would be more than nice like when love is
reciprocated. It's euphoric and intoxicating and just beautiful. But guess
what? We can still be in the practice of experiencing love without placing burden
or expectation or obligation on another person to love you back in the very
specific way that you want to be loved. When you demand this from the person you
love or the people you love, love gets tainted again by like that impulse to
control and manipulate because we throw a tantrum right? There are inner child
like throws a tantrum when we don't get the thing that we want and then we want
revenge and then we think of well if you don't love me back then I don't love you
and like if love is really that fragile it's maybe not really love to begin with.
And the person that inspires love in you may, I'm gonna say something that might,
it's not gonna feel good to hear but there might be a person who inspires love
in you but you don't necessarily inspire love in them and that's perfectly okay.
It's really okay but our humans sometimes get confused about these kinds of
experiences and then think oh this person doesn't love me then it means that
I'm not worthy of love. The person I love doesn't love me back so that must mean
I'm a piece of shit. What kind of madness and thinking is that? What, I don't
wonder people think love is, love makes us, it's not love that makes us crazy it's
our misunderstanding of love that drives us crazy. It's our thinking that
possession and control and manipulation and you know these ways of relating
that are actually not love that somehow our patriarchal capitalist structures
have kind of confused us about what love really is. So of course we experience
pain when we think love gives us the right to control or coerce or dominate
or manipulate in any way. I love fiercely and have experienced deep pain from not
being loved in return or feeling unloved because the person I love doesn't
seem to love me in the way I like to be loved. Does that make me wrong for loving
or does it make them wrong for loving in a way that doesn't align with what feels
loving for me? It's really not love that drives us to madness but our
misunderstanding of love that brings us confusion, hurt and loneliness. It's our
separation from love like true love that is painful. So how do we practice being
in love and embodying love and loving others in a way that's freeing and
expansive? Well this this might come as a surprise to you but I've been using the
tools of mindfulness and meditation to learn how to more deeply experience love.
So let's get into our practice for today. Find a comfortable seat and today's
practice we're just gonna focus on the heart space, opening the heart chakra and
just really visualizing like the love that emanates from within us that is
ever-present. Take a deep breath in, let the eyes rest. Really tune in to the
miracle that is you in this moment. Take a deep breath into the belly and let it
out with a sigh. Just find some stillness here. Allow the jaw to soften, allow the
shoulders to kind of melt down your back. Imagine your head is as light as a
feather floating towards the clouds and if there are any sticky thoughts that
feel a bit burdensome in this moment just allow them to float up into the
clouds and you know just give them to God for a little while while we focus on
our body and our breathing and our beautiful loving hearts. Take a deep breath in, let it go.
I'd like to invite you to imagine that each breath is a breath of love, a breath
that is going to fill you up with love and every exhale is an exhale that allows
you to let go of some burdens, allows you to let go of some heaviness, allows you to
let go of anything that is weighing you down in this moment. Take a deep breath in,
and let it go. Go ahead and just rub your hands together, create a little bit of
warmth between your palms. When you feel ready, when you feel that friction, when
you feel that warmth, bring that warmth to your heart space and firmly place your
palm right above your heart, right over your heart and just like feel your
heartbeat into your palms. Breathe in and out at your own pace with the beat of
your heart and imagine that each heartbeat
expands this glow, this pink glow around your heart. With every inhale and exhale,
that glow expands outward filling the chest. Take a deep breath in, let it go. And
that glow continues to radiate outward, expanding through your torso into your
neck and shoulders. That pink glow starts to envelop your entire body. This pink
glowing light flows over,
flows over your hips and your legs and your feet. And imagine this pink glow is
just love holding you, love radiating from your heart space and allowing you
this moment of rest, this moment of wholeness, this moment of remembering the
miracle and magic that is you in this moment. No one like you has ever existed
in this way, in this expression, in this moment. Take a deep breath in, let it go,
let that radiating beautiful pink light continue expanding outwards and
enveloping this entire room that you're in or the space that you're in, your
immediate surroundings. You can rest here in this glow and you'd like to
continue. Imagine allowing that light to keep expanding towards the people you
love, the people you feel challenged by, the people you feel neutral towards, the
people you don't know and have never met.
Imagine allowing this love to radiate towards all living beings. Take a deep
breath in, let it go. You're welcome to sit here in this glorious gorgeous pink
glow for as long as you like. Thank you so much for practicing with me today.