Love Songs - You are the love of your life!

What’s your favorite love song? Is there one that speaks to your heart and soul?

Maybe as a teenager you belted out the words passionately while holding your hairbrush as a microphone while perched on your bed-stage?

Perhaps the song speaks to your hopes, dreams, ideal love, love lost, love found, unrequited love, obsession, passion or desire.

We can learn a lot from how songs resonate with us! We are energy and vibration, after all.

Try this: Pick one favorite love song that feels like it speaks to you now. Or pick one that felt particularly resonant for most of your developmental years.

Find a time to listen to it when you can really focus on yourself. As you listen, how does it make you feel? Write those feelings down. Those are the arrows pointing the way toward knowing and loving yourself.

For myself, as a child and young adult, I gravitated toward love songs that spoke of the promise of devotion, desire and personal fulfillment through that love.

I had attached to the story that I could fill the “hole in my soul” with love from another person. When I look back at the romantic songs that resonated, I can see how I connected to the cultural expectations of the "princess and knight" fairytale. I was suffering, and if only I could find that “love of my life”, I could be saved, carried off to a castle and taken care of in the happily ever after.

After trying to fulfill that story and realizing that it wasn’t the answer after all, I experienced a dark night of the soul and ended up having a spiritual awakening aided by plant medicine (psilocybin and ayahuasca). More on that in another blog.

Through my spiritual awakening, I realized that I AM THE LOVE OF MY LIFE. All the promises, hopes and dreams I clung to in the love songs were things I could give myself. I could fill that “hole in my soul” by going inward instead of seeking it through external sources. 

With this concept in mind, try re-listening to your chosen love song and switch the pronouns to sing it to yourself…Sing yourself some love songs. It’s liberating.

This song by Bryan Adams, “I do it for you” is a perfect example. Oh, how I used to pine for someone to feel this way about me. Someone to scoop me up and save me. To take me in their arms and carry me over a threshold and call me theirs. Read it to yourself as if you are singing it to your own soul, and see how it feels:

“Look into my eyes
You will see, what you mean to me
Search your heart, search your soul
When you find me there, you'll search no more

Don't tell me it's not worth trying for
You can't tell me it's not worth dying for
You know it's true (you know it's true)
Everything I do
I do it for you
Yeah, yeah

Look in to your heart, you will find
There is nothing there to hide
Take me as I am, take my life
I would give it all, I would sacrifice

Don't tell me it's not worth fighting for
I can't help it, there's nothing I want more
You know it's true
Everything I do
I do it for you

There's no love, like your love
And no other, could give me more love
There's nowhere, unless you're there
All the time, all the way

You can't tell me it's not worth trying for
Just can't help it, there's nothing I want more
Oh, I would fight for you, yeah, I'd lie for you
Walk the wire for you, yeah, I'd die for you

You know it's true
Everything I do
I do for you”

- Bryan Adams

How does it feel to sing that to yourself? There's no love like your own love! Take yourself as you are, and you are worth trying for. You are enough, and you are worthy!

It’s an excellent practice, because it helps shift our awareness from “What can I get from others or externally?” to “How can I give myself what I’m looking for? Can I meditate into feeling the way I want to feel and embody the love I am looking for?”.

As we become more in love with ourselves, our WHOLE selves, and we integrate our shadows, and find our love within, we also become more in love with the world around us. We feel more connected to everyone and everything. By doing the work, becoming more aware, and growing as a spiritual being, the light and love that we already are shines more brightly. We see love all around us and feel that love reflected back to us. We realize that All is Love.