New Love - Hold The Glass Slipper

Okay. It’s time to burst another love fairytale bubble. I must warn you this may be painful at first and then hopefully it will be liberating.

Ready?

No human relationships last forever. None.

Ouch!

You know this on some level. Nobody is born at the exact same time and nobody dies at the exact same time. Those are facts.

You come in with yourself and you leave with yourself.

So why not begin to love yourself?

Oh, I know. You have been told that you must love everyone before you love yourself. Everyone is worthy of your love before you are. And you wonder why love seems to hurt.

Enter oversweet romantic social conditioning. You have been taught in subtle and obvious ways again and again that someone will swoop in and rescue you, anticipate your every need and treat you like the perfect diamond we all know you are.

Remember happily ever after?

What exactly is YOUR happily ever after? Do you want to find and be completed by your other half? Do you want to love and be loved forever? What is your love vision?

I am here to help you shift out of fairytale thinking into what feels better. I help you clarify what you want in your relationships and why. And then get it (yay!).

Think about it, fairy tales can be damaging and destructive. They can encourage you to compare your love life to other people’s love life and relationships. They might make you question your actions and your life.

That does not feel good!

Will it feel better to stop missing a perfect romantic partner and start living your life like only you can do? Or will it feel better to stop feeling misunderstood by your partner and start understanding yourself on a deep level? What does it feel like to trust yourself and know that you have all the answers you need inside?

I am here to encourage you to step into more of your power and strength to become responsible for your own emotions and actions. To use them as guidance to choose to feel better. To know that you can handle and adjust and change to what your life brings to you.

To connect with your core abilities and love.

This is empowerment. Genuine, beautiful, authentic taking care of yourself because that is what you are here to do. Honest strength and freedom.

So, if you ever have bought into the fairytales, the toxic social conditioning or your friends and family’s well-meaning judgment or your own judgment of you, STOP! Stop right now.

You can make a shift this instant. Or as soon as you decide that you get to call the shots in your love life.

You are responsible for your own happily ever after. You get to create love how you want it!

Blend your amazing qualities and quirks to create and share love as you see it.  You can do it on your own and take the long way, or you can use fresh strategies that work begin working now. I can help. If you want to get more of this delicious way forward, schedule a free 30 minute call with me here: https://calendly.com/optimizedrelationships/lovecoaching

Until we talk again-

Love On,

Risa

p.s. - Also have you checked out my free Face Book group?  We have a lot of LOVELY fun in there…. It’s called loveologists, check it here: : https://www.facebook.com/groups/1503456919702692/

Photo by Joshua Reddekopp on Unsplash 

Not Going Down the Lonely Road

Alone.

Few words trigger as much emotion as the word alone.

Being alone motivates people. It motivates some people to go off on their own, get quiet and enjoy themselves as they rest, relax and recharge. Solitude is precious.

Being alone motivates other people to search high and low for another person or people to spend time with. Being alone feels lonely. Being alone is to be avoided.

I have felt both. And here’s the thing – once you learn how to love yourself on a deep and authentic level, you can enjoy being alone without feeling lonely. You know how to feel connected while being alone.

Okay, so it starts with self-love. To me, self-love is accepting, appreciating and treating yourself as you would your best friend or a lover. It’s embracing the fact that you are with yourself always, so why not enjoy it and treat yourself as a loved one? Lighten up, you are a loved one!

What makes this so incredibly difficult is that most of us have been taught, told and sold that it is selfish to love our self. It’s not humble. It means you don’t care about other people.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Self-love is where all love begins.

Self-love starts inside by learning to stop judging yourself. Judgment slices open your heart. Judgment scars. Judgment is the opposite of love.

When you remember to release self-criticism, you begin to step towards self-love. When you begin to appreciate all the light and the shadow that make you different from everyone else on the planet, you begin to release the toxic social conditioning that tells you to put everyone else first.

As you stop putting everyone else first, you become responsible for your own emotions and happiness. You learn how to stop filling up from the outside in. You go within and appreciate all that you are and have. And when you master this genuine self-love, you give yourself a wonderful internal foundation and compass to live by. To trust.

When your internal universe is filled with unconditional self-love, you are centered in love. A love that bubbles up to you and then naturally flows to everyone else. And everything. With this comes peace of mind and an ease that other people feel without you forcing it. 

True love.

By loving your self on a deep level, you show other people how to do it too. You model it. You invite them to love who they are. Share who they are.

Imagine this: we have self-loving people that take responsibility for their own emotions and happiness.  No more blame or trying to control.

Then we choose to create love relationships or not. No judgment. When we become people anchored in unconditional self-love that consciously create the relationships we want and release the relationships we don’t want, we are love naturally.

Because self-love feels natural and joyful, more people want to participate in it. Like laughter, self-love is contagious. As we become centered in self-love, fewer and fewer people will be judged and taught to feel lonely or unwanted because they are not coupled off or paired with someone.

Toxic judgment will be released and replaced with true connection.

People that feel true joy will connect with people that feel true joy. We will help each other. And the planet. Through love, we are unstoppable and unlimited in our potential.

The definition of grace.

It starts with self-love and where it ends, I don’t know. We can figure that out together. Take feeling alone and transform it into self-love.  

Love On,

Risa

Photo by Bryan Minear on Unsplash

Backwards and In High Heels

Tony Robbins.

I have watched, read and listened to many Tony Robbins videos, books and audios. I usually agree with a lot of what he says.

Then his #MeToo videos went viral. The videos of a female at one of his seminars asking him about the #MeToo movement. Robbins responds that it is a play for significance and then goes into an explanation of how a few of his powerful male friends are having second thoughts about hiring attractive females because of the #MeToo movement.

Say what?

This is so far from the empathy he usually espouses.

It’s his experience and I respect that. I don’t respect equating sexual abuse survival struggle with making it hard for his friends to hire qualified job candidates.

Robbins subsequent walk speaks volumes. He uses his tall, intimidating frame to walk this female backwards in an “exercise” to me that physically demonstrates his lack of empathy for her experience.

I am reminded of the Ann Richards quote: “Women have been doing everything men can do, backwards and in high heels.” as Robbins walks her backwards literally and figuratively.

Sorry Tony, to me that is bullying.

Next, I read his polished public apology on Face Book. I am baffled once again. I don’t know if this is a heartfelt apology or a clever attempt to do damage control and/or win back lost followers.

And to me, it doesn’t really matter because how can we ever know for certain someone’s intentions and motives in any relationship? We have their words and their actions. Talk and walk.

What now? We move on with a little more knowledge. We move on with more information about ourselves.

With more clarity about what we want and what we don’t want. To me, now is not the time to draw a line in the sand. Yet again.

It’s not about being right. It’s about learning from each other.

Can we begin to respond in a new way? Are you game? Instead of taking a side and bolstering our opinions with convincing information and arguments, let’s pivot.

Let’s stop identifying with and defending our points of view.

Let’s send all parties involved compassion, empathy and non-judgment. Let’s go further and send compassion, empathy and non-judgment to everyone viewing and consuming this information, rather than picking a side and clinging to it.

Human interactions are messy and imperfect. We all have fucked up interactions every day and yet we do our best. We pick ourselves and each other up.  It’s time to dust ourselves off. Judgment stops here as soon as we decide it does.

Are you listening Tony?

Love On,

Risa

p.s. - You are worthy of less judgment and more love. Absorb that. Check out my free love guide to help you get started: https://optimizedrelationships.com/5steplgbridge

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Love Fairy Tales Expire

Snuggly stories read at bedtime and incredible animated movies linger in the back of your brain long after The End.  You drift off to sleep with neat endings and all is well tucked safely in your amazing heart. You carry the stories so long, you hardly notice they are still there. . .

You continue to learn in subtle and not so subtle ways that you need someone to love you, save you and understand you on a deep level. A prince goes with a princess. Sunsets are for lovers.

You dream of the One, your soulmate and your other half.

But, nobody is coming to save you.

It’s time to gently awaken from the fantasy. You have been lied to and misled.

It’s on you to save you.

It’s on you to love you, save you and understand you on a deep level. It’s on you to be responsible for your emotions and actions. It’s on you to feel complete.

It’s your right and responsibility to give yourself the love you were taught to give to others. Give this love to yourself first.  Love yourself fully and first then unconditional love organically ripples out from your heart center to all.

Self-love doesn’t make you selfish or uncaring, it makes you indestructible. It’s giving yourself permission to become deeply happy with all that you are now and sharing it in a way that feels comfortable for you. In ways that don’t look like the old fairy tales.

Self-love is treating yourself as well as you treat others before you care for others. It’s eliminates people pleasing. It’s realizing you don’t need to be fixed and the only time you are broken is when you believe it. The only time you are alone or separate is when you think or believe it.

It’s beyond time to stop believing in the toxic social conditioning and comparison that hurts. You are worthy of big love.

It’s time to stop waiting and save yourself. 

Start with unconditional love.

Start with yourself.

Start now.

Self-love is the gift you give to yourself that we all feel love from. Self-love is a new empowered ending for your love story.

Love On,

Risa

p.s. - I have new information, exercises and approaches to self-love.  You are worthy of more love, joy and connection. Absorb that. Today is the day you flip your painful love script to your pleasant new love results. Check out my free love guide to help you get started: https://optimizedrelationships.com/5steplgbridge

Photo by xiaole Zheng on Unsplash