What is a love warrior and why the hell would you want to release him? The love warrior is an aspect of our subconscious that takes action and fights for love to happen. In his light aspect, the love warrior holds amazing power, because he is driven by love, stops at nothing to make it work and knows how to get and keep our desired partner. However, when that love warrior is not balanced by an ability to surrender and allow love to flow into our experience with ease, he can fall to ‘the dark side’. This is precisely what happened to me and here I’d like to share what has worked for me in terms of releasing him and restoring that healthy balance.
First of all, it’s important to see if this is relevant to you at all. Do you have a strong love warrior and are you actually overdoing it and compromising your happiness by letting him dominate? One way of quickly telling is checking with yourself whether you have the components for him to manifest. Do you uphold the values of love and proactivity? The stronger those values are, the higher likelihood that you have a strong love warrior that might be falling into his shadow aspect.
Another way of telling whether your love warrior might be overdoing it is checking if you use the disempowered strategies that he employs to get love:
- Self-sacrifice: Do you do things in the name of love while ignoring your own needs? Do you feel like you need to “fight” for love, to take action for it to manifest between you and your partner?
- Survival mode: When love is not coming your way in the quantity/quality that you need, do you toughen up and wait for winter to pass? Do you see and do that over and over, have you gotten used to receiving less love than you want and need?
- Service: Do you focus on understanding the other person who is not giving you what you need and adapting to them? When there is a problem, do you go like “right, I got this, it’s my fault so I will do the inner work to change” and let them off the hook, so they don’t have to do their part?
If like me, you find yourself answering ‘yes’ to some or all of those questions, it might be worth bringing some balance in the way you handle your energy in your love life. Here are four techniques that you can use to do that which have completely transformed the way I feel and look at love in the last weeks.
1. Declare the love war to be over
This is an exercise of active imagination that allows you to distance from the love warrior aspect of your psyche and take back your power from him. In the long term, you might still want him to serve you, but in the short term you need to direct your energy elsewhere to restore your balance. Or in other words, he needs to take a break. What you do is close your eyes and invite him to meet you. See how he looks like – is it a he or she actually? Where is he, how is he dressed, what is his weaponry, what is he doing etc. Then go and greet him and as you do, offer your gratitude for his service and all the amazing love accomplishments that he has brought to your life. Then tell him that the war is over, that he doesn’t need to fight for love anymore. Help him take off his armour, give him a big solid hug and get to the next exercise.
2. Give your love warrior another task
After some rest, your love warrior will need something to do. Masculine active energy won’t disappear from your system just because you decided you won’t fight for love anymore. The warrior is still alive and he needs to feel that he is being of service. A way to do that is to send him on another front. For example, you can meet and ask him to direct his heart-centered attention, action and determination to a creative project.
3. Decide love is going to be easy for you
Once you release the love warrior, you need to explore the other end of the spectrum. What is it like when love comes easily to me? What is it like when I just surrender to feeling loved and do NOTHING about it? You can commit to an indefinite period of time to explore that (I’d go for at least 1 month if you want to timebox it), to see the shapes it can take in your thoughts, feelings and actions. Once you know how it feels you can see where you’d like to hang out in that spectrum of the active and the passive, the feminine and the masculine, the warrior and the lover. This time, however, it will be a conscious choice based on knowing your options!
4. Send some love to the lover within you
Since the love warrior is very much focused outwardly, on giving love to others, there’s a high likelihood you’ve deprived yourself of love. The good news is that you have a lot of love already within you, an amazing and powerful resource you can now use to restore your ability to receive love. One of the biggest mysteries in the universe is how the hell do we love ourselves? 😀 We don’t even know what the self is, but we are supposed to love it… It’s very generic. To make it more specific, you can reconnect with another aspect of your psyche – your inner lover. You can close your eyes and invite him/her to a meeting, just like you did with the love warrior. Usually he/she will be a human of the opposite gender, a character that you create (it’s better that they are not an actual person you met), someone you find very attractive and can fall in love with. Once you meet and do whatever you feel you want to do together (that warming up of your relationship can take some more visits, but it does usually go sexual too eventually), you can set an intention of sending love her/his way. What that means is that next time you find yourself thinking of your partner, someone else you’re into or simply feeling like you are lacking love & connection, you can loop your energy and attention inwards and go meet your inner lover. See yourself giving them that love that you’ve been wanting to give to someone else. That way you train yourself in receiving love, so that when it’s coming your way from someone else, you can actually let it in. That’s where things begin to change for you, because when you can love yourself, you can also finally receive that love from others.
Last but not least, releasing the love warrior is not the end of the game. It’s just a way to restore yourself to a healthy balance by exploring some other ways of loving. It is most valuable when you’ve been overdoing that specific way of loving – if you find yourself in the other end of the spectrum, too much in your lover/feminine and too little in your warrior/masculine when it comes to love, it might be worth doing everything above in reverse.
Love ya,
Zori
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