Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. When I was younger, this used to be the day to tell the person you fancied that you were interested in them – anonymously, of course. One year, I got my mother to address the envelope and my brother to write the card to a certain someone so they wouldn’t guess it was from me. I was so successful that I later discovered that the boy thought someone else had sent it – and asked her out! I suspect I took the anonymous part a little too literally…

These days, it seems to have morphed into a festival for couples to make a public reaffirmation of their love. It doesn’t matter how much you might know that this is nothing but a cynical commercial ploy to profit off romance, if you’re single and surrounded by people going on about how much in love they are, it’s hard. It doesn’t matter if you know that the couples around you aren’t nearly as happy as they say they are, hearing about other people being together can be a difficult reminder of your single status. 

I’ve been married for almost 20 years, so I’m not going to say that I know how you feel. I do remember what it was like to feel like nobody would ever love me. I felt I didn’t deserve love and I certainly didn’t deserve happiness. It was horrible. 

Having done a lot of inner work over the years, I’ve gone from thinking I’m a terrible person to seeing that for the lie it was, a story put on me by people around me who were externalising their own issues. It was their problem, not mine. 

So to quote the inimitable RuPaul, if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love someone else? All love starts from within. It becomes an energetic exchange between you and those around you until you are living in a continuous cycle of love, regardless of whether you have people around you telling you how much they love you or not. 

Here is one little journalling exercise you can use to explore your relationship with love to identify any blocks so you can start working through them. It can be a wonderfully meditative experience which will take you around 45 minutes. 

Set a timer for two minutes. Write at the top of the page “I am loved.” Then write whatever comes up in response to that. It might be “No I’m not.” That’s okay. This is all about letting the words flow without judgement so you can discover your true feelings. 

If you get nothing, then write “nothing, nothing, nothing” until you come up with something to write about. The important thing is to keep writing to build that connection with your subconscious. 

When your timer goes off, write “I am loved” again and reset your timer for another two minutes. If you find yourself repeating what you’ve written before, that’s fine. Let whatever comes up come up. 

Do this eleven times. When you are done, you will have gained a valuable wealth of information about how you think and feel about love. 

This might be enough for you, but I’ve found that if you really want this exercise to pay off, you should do it every day for eleven days. One session will scratch the surface and give you useful feedback, but I’ve found that it takes 4-5 days before you start really uncovering your issues and eleven days to fully work through them all. 

 We will be working with a form of this exercise as we go on our Journey Through the Chakras on 26 February. If you would like to learn more about your relationship with love and what’s been holding you back, come join us!