The song Message In a Bottle by The Police played on my phone while walking the other day. I sang along to it and took in the words:

A year has passed since I wrote my note
I should have known this right from the start
Only hope can keep me together
Love can mend your life or love can break your heart

It got me thinking about how profound Sting’s (Gordon Sumner) lyrics are. Even though it’s about a castaway, the words “Only hope can keep me together. Love can mend your life, or love can break your heart” applies to us all.

Hope seems like a binding thread that keeps us together as individuals and as a group. I mean, think about it. You want to get a new job. You hope it happens. You hope your daughter is happy. You hope to get good results on your test.  Hope is a magical word that allows us to believe anything is possible, and we wish it to be so.

The lyrics, “Love can mend your life or love can break your heart,” is pretty thoughtful. Regardless of our lives, circumstances, problems, or whatever, we can allow love to mend our lives, or we can choose to let it break our hearts. I mainly refer to love for ourselves because we cannot control or predict how someone else feels. We take leaps of faith with other people, where we trust they won’t hurt us, so why not have faith in ourselves? Anything worthwhile is a leap of faith.

But regarding love for ourselves, we certainly have the power to allow love to mend our lives.  We just need to build up the positivity “muscle” (it’s not really a muscle – haha) in our heads, learn to listen to ourselves, and take good care to make ourselves happy.  We are the only ones who can achieve that for ourselves.

Things or other people will not (can not) cause us to feel genuine love or happiness. That has to come from within us. It sounds drippy and cliche, but it’s the truth. We can fool ourselves with goodies and goblins and believe that’s what brings on the happy; only a feeling of love for ourselves can achieve that.

Let’s look at this deeper:

When you love yourself, you choose the right things to do that bring you joy.

However, when you don’t love yourself, you allow outside influences to lead you into uncharted waters that you didn’t want to go on.

See the difference?

Examples:

When you love yourself, you’re pleasant to be around, think positive thoughts, do what brings you joy, and you feel whole and complete.

If you don’t love yourself, you’ll disregard the boundaries of your time, allow disrespect to happen, and don’t speak up when something is unacceptable. I know this because I was there for a long time. It doesn’t feel good not to love yourself.

How do we get there? To get love to mend our lives as Sting sings?

Baby steps. Choose positive thoughts to plug into your mind each day. It can be as simple as looking at yourself in the mirror and thinking (or saying), “Hi, I love you.” ( Mirror Work, by Louise Hay, is a beautiful book on this subject.)  Did you ever notice how exercising in front of a huge mirror energizes you more than in a room without mirrors? Your posture is better; you focus more on the moves and want to look good in it. Use any mirror to energize you and help you love yourself more.

The more you think positively about yourself, the more love you feel for yourself. And boy, does life change! You might lose some relationships or stop doing an activity. That’s a good thing! You’re filtering out what you want and showing yourself some love. Remember what Sting sang, “Love can mend your life, or love can break your heart.”

Thank you for reading this. I hope (see, there’s the word) whoever is reading this gets something out of it to help feel better. Love heals. Love transcends. Feel it for yourself.

To you,

Francesca