Mind tricks about love that could hold you back

By Denise Turney
Love is the most wonderful thing in the universe. It can’t be fully described. Words simply can’t give it definition, limiting it with vocabulary and human perception. Yet, we try.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Where there is love there is life.” Lao Tzu shared, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”

Invisible to the naked eye, love defies the logic that asserts that physical size and strength translate into courage and insurmountable resolve. Perhaps Barbara de Angelis stated it best when she asserted, “Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible – it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.”

Is it any wonder that we all yearn for it our entire lives, can’t get enough of it?

Yet, there is a flip side to love’s equation, a regrettable side, and it is this. Love is the very thing we often feel we’re lacking. More regrettably, it’s also the thing we feel we can’t trust.

Don’t think so? Listen to your favorite songs, one refrain after another about how love comes at a high price. As if to reinforce our fears about love, we fill our sweetest poems and novels with warnings, alerting others about the risks of loving, how it sets us up for heartache. Is it any wonder we turn away from the very thing we yearn for, can’t live without?

To feel safe, tucked away from love, we might start playing mind tricks. For example, we might practice self-deception, trick ourselves into thinking that if we sacrifice what we really want, our one true love will magically appear. (This person is generally someone we believe would never, under any conditions, cause us to feel hurt.)

That, or we might spend hours daydreaming instead of being present. We might avoid using vision to create the life we truly want.

Another mind trick we might practice in order to feel as if we’re receiving love (while we’re actually running from love . . . trying to feel safe) is telling ourselves we’re comfortable about a job, relationship, etc. when we really aren’t. Does this sound familiar?

But, the number one queen size mind trick we play is waiting for something outside of us to move, to give us what we want. We keep waiting for magic to happen rather than taking responsibility for our own lives. It might feel good, safe, but it won’t help us move forward.

This was a hard lesson for Brenda to learn.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com, or any other online or offline bookseller and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! Consider Love.