When I first met my now husband Noah, who I affectionately refer to as “Walking Love” for his great ability to give love fully and freely, my love quotient - my capacity for receiving love - was the size of a pea. Which meant that although I had finally manifested a man into my life that could offer the love that I had yearned for in other relationships, I was unable to let all the love in. At times, he and his love were so much to take in, that my stunted capacity to receive love would become completely overloaded.

In these moments, even though my heart knew I had hit the jackpot of love, I did what any scared-to-death-of-real-vulnerability girl would do in this situation of love overload… find reasons NOT to like this man! Too bald, too many holes in his socks, not ambitious enough (by my over-achiever standards), whatever excuses my self-sabotaging subconscious could find to eject this love out of my life, and it found plenty to obsess about.

While I couldn’t see it at the time, I was pushing out and blocking the very love my heart and soul craved. Why? Because I was scared to death.

He was becoming dangerously close to penetrating the deep layers of protection I had spent years building up around my heart to keep away any chance of being hurt.

We all build walls of protection because we’ve all been hurt. Our beautiful, loving, open hearts have, at one time or another been tromped on, broken or betrayed and so our normal, and probably necessary action at the time, was to build walls, force fields, layers of protection around our hearts… resulting in the miniature, shrunken love quotients most of us walk around with.

But there comes a time in each of our lives, when, if we truly want to experience love to the capacity we all yearn for deep inside, that we have to be willing to melt away the force fields, take down the walls, and slowly step forward to reveal ourselves, our hearts, vulnerabilities, and innocence to others…

• opening up ourselves to RECEIVE more love,
• which in turn allows us to FEEL more loved,
• which then allows us to GIVE more love,
• resulting in our ability to FREELY and FULLY give and receive love unconditionally.

You too have the ability to increase your capacity to receive love, to expand your love quotient, and like building any muscle, I recommend starting with smaller practices and risks and building up over time, so that when the big kahuna of love walks in, you are ready to receive!

Build Your Capacity To Receive Love

1. Practice receiving small bursts of love, like compliments or random acts of kindness. We’ve all done the dance when someone gives us a compliment to push the energy somewhere else. At our best we say ‘Thank you’ without fully receiving the love, and at our worst we discount the compliment, ‘Oh, this old thing? Had it for years.’ Or we've said, “No thank you” to a stranger who offered to do some small favor for us – like lifting our luggage, letting us go ahead in line, carrying a bag, etc. These are all instances of blocking love. Reject love in small ways, and you block it in big ways. My friend Marci Shimoff, NY Times best-selling author of Love for No Reason, says it takes 20 seconds to fully receive a compliment. To increase your love quotient, when someone gives you a compliment, say “Thank you” and add on to it with what you love about what they’ve complimented you on. And next time someone offers to help you, say, "YES! Thank you." And receive the love.
2. Create close, healthy connections with multiple people of your same gender & get real. Women with women. Men with men. This is about opening up your heart to forming close, intimate and deep bonds – not just based on a shared history or because of shared work or child situations, but based on really revealing and seeing each other for who you truly are. Intimacy = Into Me See. I meet so many women, and I was one too, who don’t have the level of deep and vast love in their lives they crave because they don’t have deep, intimate connections with other women. They may have lots of friends, but those friendships are not the deeply vulnerable kind. They may even have one or two BFFs that they let mostly in, but they wouldn't be caught dead in a group of other women sharing openly and vulnerably. Taking part in loving, supportive, non-competitive circles with other women will give your love quotient a HUGE quantum leap, because your heart will learn to trust again in ways it can only do with other women.
3. Stop Holding Your Heart Hostage. Identify your form of protection & let it go. What is your form of heart protection? Have you hidden your heart away in some obscure location for safe keeping, built walls like Fort Knox to keep out intruders, or even let her shrivel up to seemingly fake death. When you can identify your mode of protection, you can start working on letting them go. Take a journaling or visualization adventure to find what is holding your heart hostage. Ask yourself questions like,

“What is keeping my heart protected?”

“What have been the incidents in my life that have caused me to protect my heart?”

“What is my heart afraid of?”

I’ve worked with clients who have rescued their hearts from refrigerators in the forest, uncovered them through layers of death shrouds, unlocked layers of steel walls - all kinds of wild adventures. Once you find what’s keeping your heart protected, thank the protection for its service and imagine taking your heart back by putting it in a safe place inside of you.

About Christine Arylo

Popular author of Choosing ME before WE, Every Woman’s Guide to Life and Love Christine has been called the Queen of Self Love. Her insights, fresh perspectives and daring take on love, in all its forms, have been featured on TV and radio stations across the country, in the top spas and retreat centers in the world, and in colleges and corporations throughout America. She is the founder of Madly in Love with ME, an international movement of self-love, which includes a free self-love kit downloadable at www.ChooseSelfLove.com. She is also the co-founder of Inner Mean Girl Reform School, a virtual school where women go to transform their self-sabotaging voices into self-empowering ones.