What is Love?

How do you know when you’re experiencing love?

 (Painting by Gaia Orion)

You feel more spacious and light.

You feel more joy and delight.

You feel more openness and comfort.

There may be a warm sensation in your chest.

You may feel more ease and flow.

It’s easier to access more love when love begins.

You want good things for other people.

Love is always about win-win.

The essence is connection and freedom.

When you lead from love, what follows is love. 

Love is often defined through a romantic lens, and yet, the truth is, love is all around us all the time. Love is inside us all of the time. 

When I ask clients how they define love and experience it, they say things like, "It's comfort." Or, "It's a warm hug." Or, "It's being accepted for who I am." Or, "It's being able to depend on someone."

What if you were to experience love as an essence, always accessible to you, within you? 

Try it.

* Bring to mind a time when you felt love. It need not be romantic. It could be with a pet, a child, a friend, or in the midst of nature. Focus on your heart. Putting your hand there can help remind you of where to bring your attention.

You might experience a warmth or tingling in your chest. Or, a spaciousness and an ability to breathe more deeply.

Take a deep breath. And, some more.

Allow yourself to relax into this feeling, fully for at least 5 minutes, breathing into the warmth and spaciousness. Allowing it to flow throughout your body. Relax into it. You deserve this.

This is love! 

This is at the core of your true nature.

When you know that love is always inside you, does this change how you view it?

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Dr. Heather Schwartz is an Integrative psychologist in Portland, Oregon who delights in working with kind and expressive people who want to experience greater inspiration, joy, and connection in their lives.

* This exercise is drawn in part from the HeartMath Institute and Dr. John Welwood's work on love.

 

Six Ways to Prime Yourself for Joy

      1. Create a happiness playlist. Include your favorite, joyful songs that have no negative memories attached. Try playing this playlist for 5 days and see how you feel.

   2. Remove everything in your house associated with negative memories, relationships, or hard times. Photos, furniture, or those tax papers lying around! Put them away if you don’t want to remove them.

   3. Gather together images or quotes, like on Pinterest, that give you a sense of joy to look at. Look at them every day for a week. Keep adding to them. Make a board specifically for joy.

     4.   Get outside or near nature. We live in a beautiful world! When we stop and notice the trees, the blueness of the sky, the breeze, we give ourselves a chance to slow down, and we give our minds a break. Try walking without a plan, purpose, or destination. Allow yourself to notice at least 3 beautiful parts of nature. Recommended dose: at least 5 minutes a day.

5.  Gather a list of people who inspire you. Read their blogs – at least one – per day. Meaningful, heartfelt blogs – to me --- are the best. As human beings, we all seek meaning. I love Panache Desai, Oprah, and Openhand. Just reading their writings gives me an energetic boost of joy.

    6.  And, lastly, take note of how you feel. A huge part of feeling joy is bringing your attention to when you do feel it. Allow yourself to really savor the feelings, the sensations in your body. Whether you’re drinking a cup of tea (I’ve recently started making iced cinnamon tea), or sitting in the sun, allow yourself to really drink in the feelings of pleasure which emerge in relation to the world. 

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    Dr. Heather Schwartz is an integrative psychologist who delights in working with kind and expressive people seeking more inspiration, joy, and connection in their lives. 

Afraid of the Deep

(photo by John Petrak, 1999)

Sarah paused and looked at me with definite discomfort. Her face had the taut look of anxiety, and, no wonder; we were talking about whether she could stay in her relationship with the way things had been going. As I asked her to slow down and take a deep breath, she paused and suddenly became aware of how hard it was to breathe. 

Taking a deep breath while feeling grief is one of the hardest things to do.

Take a moment now, and notice how you’re breathing. Is it high up in your chest or deep in your stomach? If you try right now, what gets in the way?

So many of the people I talk with tell me that breathing deeply is hard, scary. There’s a fear that if you take in a deep breath, you won’t be able to handle all the feelings. The depth of feeling. And, there’s a fear – especially for women – of taking up too much space, even in themselves. As though your lungs are a space you can’t inhabit.

The thing I experience and hear over and over is that once you get over the first 3 deep breaths, it’s easier. There may be a pressure. Notice that. Allow the pressure. And, then see if you can push yourself over that. 

Often, it’s when you’re fearing what you’re feeling, or when you’re feeling hard emotions and don’t want to feel more. The fear is that more emotions will occur. 

The problem is that we’ve been taught as a culture that the solution has to come from the outside, that we are not enough as ourselves. We do things like do more, get busy, drink more coffee/caffeine to push past the feelings, rather than allow our natural ability to soothe ourselves. 

The irony is that everything you need is within you. When you breathe deeper, the anxiety fades. The sadness expresses itself and moves on, and calm begins. 

When Sarah breathed, she noticeably calmed down and it surprised her! Despite her longer-range fears about her relationship, she was able to find solace in the moment, in her body, the same body that housed fear, regret, and shame. This was the beginning of her deepened trust in herself. 

Try it.

The next time you want to drink coffee, or find yourself feeling tight in your chest or rigid in your jaw, take 3 deep breaths. 

Allow the breath all the way in. 

See if you can fully allow the feeling, noticing the way tension and softness mingle.

You’ll be amazed at how good you feel. :)

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Dr. Heather Schwartz is an integrative psychologist in Portland, OR who specializes in working with warm and expressive people seeking more balance, connection, and empowerment in their lives.

Guidance From Your Future Self

Back when I was a fledgling graduate student in clinical psychology, I had my first class on doing therapy. We were asked by our instructor to imagine our future selves. Though I felt very nervous about doing therapy, I saw myself in a smart suit, doing therapy in a bright windowed room, smiling (wisely, I’d hoped), and nodding with clients. I could only see the edge of the room, but I knew the desk was wood and the window was big. I imagined my future self extolling the wisdom of perseverance, feeling the pleasure of FINALLY making it.

Graduate school, especially in the doctoral programs in psychology, is a seemingly endless confluence of intellectual and emotional growth, with one goal leading to the next and no end in sight. (Just the thought of listing them here makes me sweat!). So much of the ongoing classes, dissertation, required therapy, applications to get into unpaid internships, being appraised by future and current supervisors and peers can bring up deep insecurities about yourself as a person, as well as as your ability, and whether this ongoing process actually leads to success.

The thing about becoming a psychologist that no one in the field tells you is that if you stop along the way, your skills don’t translate to other careers, including masters-level counseling! The classes are different. So, if you stop, you’re stuck. 

But, amping up can feel exhausting (working at paying jobs while in school while interning at unpaid internships for years just to earn the privilege of accrued hours and a chance to take a national exam of 9 subject areas as well as a state exam). Yeah. Not fun. You have to really want it!

And, whenever I had hard moments where I thought of giving up, I’d think of my future self, almost like a helpful friend, gently encouraging me along. I could see my suit and imagine a great appreciation in having made it!

From these visualizations, I began to see the end goal: the privilege of feeling whole. 

The office I have now is not so different from the one I imagined 15 years ago. It has huge windows. The wooden desk faces the window rather than away from it, and I wear casual rather than formal clothes. And, though the person I’ve become has been shaped by that guided visualization, my true therapist self has emerged even more deeply comfortable and whole than the person I imagined. But, if it hadn’t been for that image of myself guiding me years ago, I doubt I’d be as comfortable as I am now, with a private practice built of invisible years of struggle and visible years of success.

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Where are you struggling?

If you were to imagine your future self, what would s/he look like and say about this time?

What would it be like to come back to this image when times are hard?

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Dr. Heather Schwartz is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice (Yay!) who specializes in working with kind and expressive people seeking greater authenticity, connection, and empowerment in their lives.