What’s bliss whispering? Where is it tugging you today?
Happy belated Valentine’s Day! For me, it is my favourite holiday, because what better thing could we possible celebrate? Let’s celebrate love and appreciation in all its forms – friendships, partnership, family, colleagues, and so on – in all its expressions, in all our relationships, and with all its different languages.
Have you read “The five love languages”? It’s a thin book by Dr. Gary Chapman and quite a few years ago it opened my eyes to how a couple of people in my life were expressing their love for me in a way that I just didn’t recognise as much. The basic premise of the book is that there are five ways in which we express love and appreciation to other people: physical touch, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and gifts. Each of us are capable of giving and receiving all of those, but we usually value one or two more than the others.
Understanding my preferred ways (physical touch and quality time) and the ones of loved ones close to me helped me become better at expressing my appreciation and valuing the ways in which I receive it.
I remember a beautiful conversation with a close friend last year about her relationship leading to a big relieved laughter with the bottom line of “Oh, he is basically screaming I LOVE YOU but just in his love languagues”.
So, discovering the love languages of the people you care about, but seem to be missing explicit communication of their appreciation, may reveal how they are sincerely expressing it on a consistent basis, but maybe in a love language that you are just not that tuned into.
If you are not quite sure which love languages you and others value most, Chapman has free quizzes on his website to help you find out: https://www.5lovelanguages.com/quizzes/
I invite you to express yourself in each of these languages at least once this week.
Let me know how it goes❣️
We can only live in the present moment, and time passes so quickly, so the best we can do is to be wide awake and present in everything we do.
If you’d like support in that: I’m hosting my first live meditation on Insight Timer later this week for 20 minutes. Friday morning 7:10am Central European Time / Thursday night 10:10pm Pacific Time.
And most of all, keep your heart wide open to all experiences coming your way. Here’s the video for this week where I unpack this in a little more depth.
How can you keep your heart more open this week?
Have a wonderful week!