An Introduction to Love vs Personality
The modern world of psychiatry widely acknowledges the importance of self-love for healing the disordered persona, especially in the aftermath of a global mental health crisis. This concept is supported by abundant research in psychology, coaching, religion, spirituality, and medicine. It seems that understanding the true essence of love might have eluded us until now. As Shakespeare noted, “Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.” Neglecting oneself often leads to depression, burnout, and anxiety. Experts like Brene Brown emphasize the need to love oneself first in order to truly change one’s life. However, many may wonder about the true meaning of self-love, how to practice it, and the consequences of neglecting it.
Emma Seppala best selling author and famous Yale lecturer importantly says “Shown the immense power of self-compassion and compassion not only for our personal well-being but for our work life,” wrote…..Self-criticism is basically self-sabotage whereas self-compassion–treating yourself with the understanding, mindfulness, and kindness with which you would treat a friend-leads to far greater resilience, productivity, and well-being.”
In order for us to actually find love, a part of us must die. A part of us needs to die because it’s not love; usually instead, it’s something based in fear, says Mark L Lockwood who designed his 10 step healing course with the very first step being centred around a recovering a sense of self love. That is what St. Francis meant when he spoke of the healing power of love saying that “it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.” It is when the personality gets in the way, when our attention and our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions eventually become our circumstances and through this we start operating from a place of fear, and we don’t even know we’re doing it.
This is the destructive power of the personality running riot, running on subconscious. A lot of the work we do is teaching people how to wake up; how to be present again, to rewire the brain and also how to simply focus and be mindful.
Fear is a the disease and Love is a wonder drug – Mark L Lockwood
There’s a massive difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it. That is the secret for many people’s success. Love really is the energy of the soul. Love heals the personality and compassion and gratitude along with it. We’ve often over-complicated this thing, and this is where the sacred texts and the wisdom traditions come in. We need to return to love, that’s how we’re going to get through the Mental Health crisis and every other epidemic, pandemic that ever comes by.
“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.” —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
We’ve all heard of the power of love, but I think we underestimate it, especially when it comes to healing ourselves. An authentically powered person rarely lives centred in love. It’s IQ, EQ (emotional quotient) which is your emotional intelligence, that makes you live a completely different life to a person whose heart is hardened. When your heart’s hardened, a part of you needs to die; which is deadly serious business!
Compassion and kindness have really become pivotal to people understanding that to heal a personality, which is a mask, it’s something inauthentic that you need to bring your authenticity to the party. The truth will set you free, and that’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever learned. The truth will set you free. That’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen people apply. It’s almost as if when they know that, they start to just surrender, put their hands up, and things begin to change, literally straight away, like a Satori or an instant Awakening. Generally, it’s a process, yes, but people do change their lives in an instance.
Listen out for your Wake-up call
You know, often we get a wake-up call and it’s being mindful, attentive, focused enough to hear that wake-up call. And we respond to that call with an open heart and with love. If we respond to it from the personality, which is all our thoughts, perceptions, feelings that we’ve ever built up, every experience that we’ve ever had to protect ourselves from – it’s a place where we operate from; and we don’t even know it. And we call these your ten ego insurgents. They really need to make way for love, which is connection, gratitude, courage, wisdom, and so on.
We’ve found these ten pathways back to your authentic self, a self that is really, really rooted in the healing power of love. This is really, really good news. It’s science, it’s psychology, human science, but it’s also spirituality. You know, the desert fathers and the mystics and monks have been telling us this for centuries, and what we get to see now is how all of that wisdom is starting to play out.
When you have a disordered personality, you’re going to have a disordered life, disordered relationships, disordered career, finances, and so on. Eventually, um, disorder is going to seep into everything, so we return to a full dimension of wellness when we become authentic once again. Some of us have never found our authenticity, and we can really use that as a wake-up call. If we’re suffering, we need to take it as a wake-up call and start to actually change.
You don’t read, listen to podcasts, you can do all you like if you’re not really there authentically; it’s not going to change a damn thing. We found that there is nothing that cannot be healed by love, especially the personality, especially the masks that we’ve put on to protect ourselves. So for us, hell is empty, you know? I keep saying that to people and it’s good news.
A return to love
How do we get to love? We get there through compassion, we get there through kindness, we get there through patience; we get there through the 3-second rule of pausing before we respond. That’s how we get there, one random act at a time. Anything that is not loving us must die. This is the journey of life, and it just shows us that something is going on, something good. The journey is to remove everything that is not based in love, and when we start to remove these things, we really start to live deeply, profoundly. We don’t just heal, which is something we do again and again and again, we transform. In other words, we go above the form, the silhouette, the mask that we once wore, and that is spiritual awakening.
There is a spiritual solution, which means there’s a solution inside of us that understands reality is based on all things God, self, and other, and it’s all going on around us. If you can’t see it you suffer. If you do, you set yourself free. It’s all good news; we’ve just got to listen. We teach people the healing power of love through the Paradigm process how to manage their energy, how to manage their emotions, thoughts, feelings, and actions. They are always going somewhere; they’re creating you, and in so doing, that creates an external environment, but you’re not the environment, thank goodness. So you can recreate, and I think this is a necessary part of life, a first half and a second half, and in the first half, we create out of fear, and we create a mess.
“Your task is not to seek for Love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” —Rumi,
We need to show up fully, and this is showing up wholeheartedly for ourselves and in our life now. When we show up and move towards love out of fear, move from powerlessness back to a real authentic sense of the power of love, we are naturally kinder, we are naturally more forgiving. Now you can see how the cycle starts to perpetuate itself, um, so love really is an energy that is moving, living, and breathing through you and all you’ve got to do is choose it again and again and again.
Love is something that you practice; it’s really not an idea in our heads, it’s a real living, powerful thing. I think we’ve got to pick it up and put it on like a coat, and that’s the paradigm shift; that’s the shift from an ego-defensive self to a sacred, self-authentic self, going “I don’t have to do this anymore; I don’t have to be impulsive; I don’t have to over-defend myself”, and if you think something of me that I don’t like, that is not my business.
So when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at actually change, including the person or the personality looking back at you in the mirror. When we go from fear to love, from powerless and lost to found and powerful, we really start to live the unlimited life that we were destined to strive for. The healing power of love finds us first, we just have to accept it when it comes.
The Research on Healing and the power of Love connection
If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself.” —Barbara De Angelis
So in case you’re not sold on love and the healing power of love yet and you’re not smitten with the idea that healing your personality is best started with Letting go of Control and recovering a sense of self love, as it is suggested on the first of the 10 Pathways back to Sacred Self in the Paradigm Process, then check these fact out. Research shows that self-love and self-compassion can have a significant impact on mental health, including:
- Reduced anxiety, depression, and stress: Self-compassion is negatively correlated with anxiety and depression, and can help reduce stress.
- Increased positive emotions: Self-compassion can help people experience more positive emotions, such as optimism, excitement, and passion.
- Improved mental health: Self-compassion can lead to better overall mental health, especially when combined with compassion for others.
- Increased self-esteem and happiness: Self-compassion can increase happiness and self-esteem.
- Improved emotional intelligence: Self-compassion can elevate emotional intelligence and wisdom.
- Increased feelings of social connectedness: Self-compassion can increase feelings of social connectedness.
- Reduced rumination: Self-compassionate people are less likely to ruminate on how bad things are.
- Increased perspective taking: Self-compassionate people are more likely to take a perspective other than their own.
