Teaching Your Subconscious What Love Looks Like

What if you could never experience the love external to yourself that you so greatly want because you have never taught your subconscious what that love looks like? You know, we manifest everything that we experience. Every person, every word, and everything that we see is a manifestation. As within, so without. Every person and every experience is just our subconscious being expressed outwardly.

So, I'm thinking, why do I want a relationship? Why do I want to experience love? Why is that such a desire inside of me? I think about when I wanted to have children. All my life, I wanted my own family. I wanted to have kids. I wanted to be a dad, and I wanted to be a better dad than my own father. I wanted to show the world, show my family, and show myself that I could be a good father. I wanted to love someone outside of myself so wonderfully that they become something great.

And now I ask myself again, why do we want a relationship so desperately? More specifically, there is a certain person that I desire. But in that case, it is irrelevant, because ultimately, I'm open to anyone coming into my life and giving me the relationship that I desire. But as I was stating earlier, what does that mean? What does that look like?

Then you get into the idea that everything you are experiencing is your subconscious being expressed outwardly. If you want a specific type of relationship, that is your conscious mind speaking. But if you're not getting that, it's because subconsciously, you have blocks. Subconsciously, you may not believe you deserve it. You may be scared or frightened. So, how do you fix that? Well, you need to teach your subconscious what that love looks like. What does the love that you so desperately desire actually look like?

The True Meaning of Self-Love

This leads right into self-love. What does loving yourself look like? It's not just pampering yourself. It's not just combing your hair, brushing your teeth, doing your makeup, putting on nice clothes, or having a good job. That isn't what it's about. It's about keeping your word. It's about building your body, maintaining it, and treating it with love, respect, and dignity. It's about holding your boundaries. It's about always putting your needs and desires above anyone and everyone else's. It's about respecting the fact that you are ultimately not just an individual, but a part of something greater and bigger than yourself. You are a fragment of God experiencing Himself.

Self-love is so much more than what they say. It is a very deep and complex thing to do and experience. But I think when we start to really love ourselves—really give ourselves the attention, the love, the respect, the dignity, and the honor that we deserve, want, and need—that's when a love external to us can come and express that back to us in an outward fashion. Remember, everything starts inward. Everything starts with how you feel and think about yourself.

How you feel and think about yourself in the beginning is a product of your external life. It is a product of your parents, your friends, school, and society. But the older you get, the more you live, experience, and learn, the more you begin to realize that how you feel about yourself is completely up to you.

Listening to Your Higher Self

For example, say I hate the way my body looks. Alright, well, what am I doing about it? Nothing. I don't feel like exercising. I don't see the results fast enough, so I give up. I don't want to stop eating junk food because it feels good. All these things are you talking to yourself. It's you teaching your subconscious and telling yourself exactly how you feel about yourself. Your inner self—your higher being—is telling you, "I don't feel good. I don't like this body. This is not the body that I'm supposed to have. I feel like you're disrespecting me." And you, as the lower self, are saying to your higher self, "I don't care what you want or how you feel. I want to do what I want to do right now."

Another example: Your higher self is telling you, "I don't want to sleep around. I don't want to have sex with multiple people. I want a monogamous relationship. I don't want to be somebody's side piece or be with someone who is cheating on me." But you are so frightened of being alone, so frightened of not being chosen by the person you desire, that you just continue doing what you're doing, ignoring and hurting your higher self.

You can never experience the love that you've been giving to others because you have not been giving it to yourself. And that's the part that hurts the most. Because you've been giving that love to other people, your subconscious knows that you are capable of giving that love. It's saying to your smaller self, "I know you can love the way I want to be loved, but you're not loving me that way. You just keep giving it to other people. Not cool."

Healing the Disconnect

This disconnect is where the self-hatred, the self-anger, the depression, the sadness, and the self-loathing come from. It creates the victim mentality, the "woe is me," and the thought that other people always get the life you want to live. The jealousy and envy come from the fact that your subconscious knows it could have this. It knows it could be this because it sees you giving it to others. It wonders, "Why don't you give it to me?"

That's why I believe the only way to ever experience the external love that you want so badly is to literally give that love to yourself first. By doing so, you teach your subconscious that you deserve this love because you are giving it to yourself. You show it what that love looks like and how you want to be loved. You also prove that this love is safe. It's not going anywhere, and it will never leave, because you have been giving it to yourself consistently and you will not stop. And even when someone external to you begins to give you the love you deserve, you will keep giving it to yourself. So now, you're getting it from two separate places: internally from yourself, and externally from them.

What It Really Means to Work on Yourself

Something I think about often is what people mean when they say, "I'm working on me." What does that really mean? Lately, I've noticed a lot of people claiming to be working on themselves, but when you look at their actions, they aren't actually doing the work. Do people even understand what it means to work on yourself?

When you really break it down, working on yourself means isolating yourself. It means being alone with your thoughts and alone with that inner part of you that speaks in a whisper. It means actively working on all of your dreams, aspirations, goals, and desires.

The Practical Steps of Self-Improvement

Everyone has a certain way they want their body to look or function; working on yourself means working on your health to achieve that. If you want to go to college, change your career, or get a new job, you actively pursue that by studying, signing up for classes, and taking courses.

It also means confronting your destructive patterns. If you don't want to end up like a parent who struggled with drinking, yet you go out drinking every weekend, working on yourself means going sober to break that psychological pattern. If you know you aren't a very good reader, you start reading more books out loud and learning new vocabulary. If you recognize that you've been promiscuous—cheating in relationships or having multiple sexual partners—and you decide you want a healthy, monogamous relationship, working on yourself means choosing celibacy. It means sitting with yourself and asking the hard questions.

Doing the Emotional Work

Working on yourself is doing the deep emotional work. It's looking at your past patterns and asking, "Why do I keep doing the same things?" It is realizing that everything in your life is a manifestation of what you believe about yourself. As within, so without. Everyone and everything is just you, pushed outward.

But nowadays, I see people claiming to be working on themselves while spending every waking moment distracted. They are playing music or YouTube videos in the background so they don't have to hear their own thoughts. They are hanging out with friends, playing video games, or talking on the phone whenever they are alone. They never stop to just be with their own thoughts. They don't even know what it means to be bored—to just sit down in a room, stare at the ceiling, and feel that boredom.

You have to listen to your mind rattle off random thoughts. You have to feel those deep-down emotions bubble up to the surface and make you cry, get angry, or want to punch something. Sit with those emotions. Hear those thoughts. Don't dwell on them endlessly, but sit with them. When they come up, listen to what they have to say. And after you've heard them, if they get a little too crazy, you reel them back in and say, "Okay, that's enough. I don't want to feel that way. I don't want to think those things. But I see that you're inside me, I accept it, and I will work on it."

The False Idea of "Working on Yourself"

That is what working on yourself means. It's not this constant, superficial excuse of, "Oh, I'm working on myself," used to avoid building meaningful relationships. It's not cutting off the friend who always encourages you to do better just because you don't want the pressure. It's not saying, "I'm working on myself, so instead of sleeping with five different people, now I only sleep with two."

What are we really doing? What are we promoting? What is the world becoming? We have to change this, and the best thing we can do is start with ourselves.

Raising the Collective Frequency

Each person has to take the time to go through that journey of self-discovery. We have to navigate the hurt and sit with the emotions. We must better ourselves and raise our frequency and vibration. We are a collective. We are all connected and unified. We are all fragments of God, pushed outwardly, experiencing every possible outcome of the universe through each and every one of us.

If each of us takes the time to truly work on ourselves, raise our vibrations, and elevate our frequencies, we get closer to that one unified whole. By raising our individual vibration, we raise the vibration of every other fragment around us. The entire collective gets an upgrade. That is what we need to be working on. Like my aunt used to tell me: "Each one, teach one."