Make Room for More Love

This exercise is a variation of the ‘Superman’ heart opener, but is intended to help you pull out the weeds of experiences that are stunting your ability to love more freely, more fiercely. Maybe you need to get rid of some of your fears of intimacy or perhaps an old lover is still taking up space in your heart or maybe you just have wounds in your heart that are still holding on like pernicious foliage.

Breathe in the love that’s floating in the air from others (alive and in spirit form). Take your fisted hands to your heart center. Identify the troubling things that are causing your heart to be heavy or blocked. Just notice what it is for you. As you breathe out, imagine these things are moving into your fists, as if you can literally hold onto them. Then stretch out your arms, open your palms, and let the energy around you absorb whatever you were holding onto as you complete your exhale. Before you breathe in again, send out some gratitude to the Source for recycling your troubled energy. Repeat as many times as you like.

Superman Heart Opener

This simple exercise simple is just one gesture. Take your hands to your heart as if you’re about to open up a shirt (think Superman as he’s quickly ripping off his clothes), then physically open your heart chakra and let the love pour out. Imagine it beaming from your chest and energizing people who need it, whether you know them or not. I often do this gesture before I enter a party or a business meeting or a room full of people. You can literally do this gesture or just imagine that you’re doing it, which also works. Energy responds to intentionality, so the mere act of being conscious about opening your heart lets more love out.

Let Love Lead

You’ve probably heard the phrase many times, ‘Lead with your heart.” This next exercise plays into that cliche in a new way and works well when you’re meeting new people for the first time.

• Breath in and imagine the color green or pink vibrating in your heart space, before you breath out, do this one action (either literally/symbolically or in your mind’s eye), imagine you are opening up an outside layer so your heart can shine through even brighter.

• This is your Superman moment. Rip off that outer layer like you’re Clark Kent ripping off his shirt. Let your heart shine with even more love as you breath out.

• You’ll be amazed at the reaction people have to you when then experience an outpouring of love. This exercise is really fun because it’s all about setting an intention to make someone feel loved and acting out your superhero fantasies. Everyone wins!

Love Loves Abundance

Love is not a stingy emotion. It’s is a generous, abundant emotion and expands, grows, and will fall all over you, if you let it.

To illuminate this point and to dive into this mindfulness snack, imagine that all the leaves on all the trees are really just moments of love that are available to you. Go out for a walk in a very wooded area, if you can. Look closely at one leaf, then another. Then look up and feel awash in the seemingly infinite number of leaves on the trees or clouds in the sky. If you’re walking on the beach, every grain of sand can be perceived as all the opportunities for people on this planet to share love. Love loves abundance and can grow exponentially, if we imagine it. The more you look, the more you’ll see love all around you.

Learn a New Love Language

The landscape of this planet is filled with so many people speaking so many different languages. If you’ve ever watched a foreign film and felt that you could almost understand the words without the subtitles, or you may wonder if you were suddenly stranded in that country, if could you communicate. Other languages seem completely out of the realm of comprehension, words that resemble primal grunts or the sounds you’d hear when you stub your toe. To quote one of my favorite movies (The Princess Bride), “Inconceivable.”

Similarities can be drawn when it comes to the languages of love. You may have heard the theories that there are different ‘love languages’ that people have when they communicate. Back in 1992, Author and therapist, Gary Chapman identified the FIVE love languages:

• Words of affirmation

• Quality time

• Receiving gifts

• Acts of service

• Physical touch

Years later, he added a sixth language to the mix, Distance. This is the one that may have sounded like incomprehensible or counterintuitive to our notions of love, but I completely understand the need for space and inner stillness.

This exercise is simple. Think of someone you love (or yourself) and try on a new love language in your interactions with them. Test-drive this new love language with a gesture or a date or a massage or by leaving them the fuck alone. You can also ask someone to test-drive a new love language with you. There’s no wrong answer, just the intention to express love.

Love Expands

This Mindfulness Snack is geared toward making you feel a huge, ridiculous amount of love. Sometimes we feel just a little bit loved, but this exercise is designed to make you feel remarkably loved in an exorbitant and exuberant way. Who couldn’t use a little more love in their life?

• It’s simple. Imagine something huge, a mountain, the sky, the ocean. Then imagine that this is the amount of love that’s available to you in this lifetime. Remarkable, I know! Keep going.

• Think of something else that’s even bigger and inspiring. Breath in and believe that this enormity of love is also available to you.

• But don’t stop there! Now breathe out and imagine that you’re capable of bringing that much love into the world. The love from your heart is as big as the ocean or the mountains or the sky.

• Imagine that love can take you anywhere. Sometimes I think about Oprah when I do this exercise because I’ll be she didn’t imagine that she’d become Oprah. She probably just had a belief that her love was capable of reaching far and wide. And she was right.