Who is the One Who Loves

By Elisa Novick

When I first learned about utilizing affirmations for programming the consciousness, I came up with an ingenious idea. I bought a watch with an hourly alarm (I believe it was one of the first ones) and every time it beeped, I’d say to myself “I love you, Lisa.” (Lisa was my given name.)

I was at a gathering one night and my watch alarm beeped and as the women looked over at me, I explained what I was doing. About 15 years later, a woman approached me and told me that she had attended that gathering and ever since, every time she heard a watch alarm beep, she would say to herself, “I love you, Lisa!” Wow! How absolutely wonderful — a source of prayer for me that I hadn’t known about! Yet I wondered why she didn’t substitute her own name.

I was just learning in those early days about the power of negative and positive self-talk. I experimented and found out that there was a place inside of me that responded to, “I love you, Lisa,” that was different from the one that responded to “I love myself,” which was also different from the place that responded to, “I love me.” I tried many variations, such as, “I love myself unconditionally,” and “I am loved,” “I am the Beloved,” and “I am God’s beloved daughter,” etc. Each vibrate in different parts of the body and energy field and feeling centers and the frequencies these words carry are healthier and happier than the ones created by the stream of negative judgments that most of us carry around with us.

Here is a great story that displays what we usually do: I once participated in a seminar in which we were instructed to raise our hand every time we found ourselves judging anything, and then were sent off to lunch and told it was to be a silent meal. It was funny, and I suppose sad as well, that in the silent dining hall with little going on but eating, hands were popping up continuously throughout the room!

Yet in all of this exploration, there was still the sense that one part of me was trying to change another part of me and neither was the real me, and the division was creating its own issues. I’ve learned so much since then, thankfully.

These last weeks, teaching Laboratory of Life workshops at the Omega Institute, I was struck by my observation that in each beginning go-round, when given an option to share a theme that they were working on, so many of these beautiful people shared some variation of, “I’m working on loving myself.” I found myself unable to get what that meant. I couldn’t locate, despite all that early work, a place I could identify as self-love or a specific frequency for self-love, to assist these people in their quest. As we went through the workshop, I witnessed something more clearly than I ever had.

By the point in the workshop when people were coming forth as their true selves, the issue of self-love had disappeared completely and the room was filled with loving, radiant, joyful people.

Loving is a quality of the soul. When you are your soul or your true self — I’m using these terms somewhat interchangeably here — loving is. It doesn’t have to be programmed, nothing has to be healed, you don’t have to wrestle with your inner or outer demons or your personal history or whether you are “getting your needs met.”

There is no separation between the one inside that loves and the one that needs love or needs to know it is safe out there to express love. You don’t have to prove your worthiness. You don’t have to take your cue from those around you. You don’t have to give love to be love, yet in that Presence, love exists and radiates from us and can be felt by those around us as a feeling of being loved. And we don’t have to learn how to love ourselves or love others, or get them to love us in that exact special way we need to hear/see/feel it. We just have to be our Selves, fully all of who we are, and the rest follows automatically.

I’m not saying that once you’ve experienced the true self once, you won’t forget again. There are processes and stages to traverse to come into the fullness of being your true self and to learn how to hold there for more and more of the time. The soul, once recognized, begins vibrating us and that highest, truest vibration pushes up and out all that is not Itself. So we may have to revisit our Selves many times in many ways. (See my article, The Healer’s Journey: From Healing to Thriving.) That is a process I’ve dedicated my life and work to.

What clarified for me in this precious time with these people so eager to learn and grow, was that ultimately and in this moment, there is no self to love, because the innate quality of the Self is loving.

To listen to and read past conversations with Elisa Novick on Planet Waves, plus her articles, please use this link. You’re invited to visit her website and Facebook page.

Elisa Novick, MSS does profound work as a healer, teacher, counselor, coach, minister, and facilitator of workshops and trainings in personal, professional, and spiritual development. She can assist you to clear personal, karmic and genetic patterns that have limited you and teach you exquisite attunement skills so you can become the magnificent master of life and Light that all of us are destined to be. Elisa has been assisting people in their growth since 1982 through her counseling practice and in facilitating over 1,000 workshops in holistic health, human development, family constellation, systemic constellation, organizational dynamics, planetary healing and spiritual awareness. You may email her directly at elisanovick [at] thrivingplanet [dot] org.