Let's keep talking about my favorite topic… Love! ❤️

As a former licensed psychotherapist, I specialized in relationships, both people looking for love and couples wanting to deepen their intimacy + connection.

Over the years, I’ve discovered 4 Main Stages of Love based on where we are in our consciousness.

The 4 Stages of Love:

✨ 1. I Need Love
✨ 2. I Choose Love
✨ 3. I am Love
✨ 4. Love

To be clear, no stage is better or worse; they’re all a necessary part of our evolution. Think of them like stages of development… you can’t be in kindergarten and jump to graduate school. Each stage holds lessons + wisdom within them.

The ego gets a bad reputation, but we want healthy integrated egos, and in my eyes, these stages are all equally as important.

So, wherever you are is perfect. No need to judge yourself or what stage you are currently in. They are not necessarily sequential, and you can jump in and out of them.

1️⃣ First stage is Need. “I need you”.

Not too long ago (evolutionarily speaking) couples were together for survival purposes. It was necessary. We have all been conditioned through Disney and other modern media about fairy tales that teach us the “you complete me” kind of love.

The happily ever after syndrome is where you GET something from someone.

This puts a lot of pressure on the relationship, and in truth, they could never truly fill you because you don’t lack in any way.

An inner perceptual problem could never be fixed by an outer solution.

This stage focuses externally and it comes with a lot of frustration, manipulation and control.

We all know this one well, so I won’t go into it more.

2️⃣ Then there is the I Choose Love stage.

Most people in western society are just now waking up to this; maybe because the divorce rate is so high that we’ve started putting attention here.

Psychologists have realized that we unconsciously attract a partner who will bring up our childhood wounds so that we can heal them. Clearly, you wouldn’t do this intentionally.

Unconsciously, we believe what is familiar is safe, it’s not accurate, but it’s how we’re wired.

At this stage, when you’re with someone, you’re a match for each other’s wounds, like a puzzle piece, you have a perfect way of fitting together.

Oftentimes, this is when someone prays for ‘the one’ and then they show up and we say, ‘can you send
someone else?’

Those wounds are coming up because they are looking to be met with love.

Unfortunately, what we want from our partners will be the hardest thing for them to give us, but if they are willing and conscious enough, you can use the relationship to each grow and heal together.

If you’re single, or if you don’t have a partner who is willing, you can still heal those parts of yourself on your own or with the support of a therapist, coach or conscious friend.

Once you heal those wounds at the root, within you, you either no longer attract partners that will provide you the opportunity to heal them, or if you have a partner, those same behaviors that used to trigger you won’t anymore because you’ve healed them.

Essentially in the CHOOSE LOVE stage, you use the relationship, and what gets triggered, as a vehicle for your healing and evolution. The triggers become your breadcrumbs to freedom… expanding into greater love.

All parts of us are looking to me met with love. Any part of yourself that you judge or hide is really a doorway to
self-acceptance.

If you don’t embrace all parts of yourself, you’ll project them onto others, and life reflects it back to you until you do. It’s that simple.

Everyone you meet (not just lovers) gives you the opportunity to love yourself more fully. 💜

They are mirrors showing you how to love yourself.

As you integrate those parts, you fall in love with the entire world.

Loving yourself is synonymous with loving everyone else on the planet.

(And that doesn't mean you have to hang out together or like everyone).

3️⃣ Once the majority of healing takes place, relationships primarily become about celebration and sharing in love. This is the third stage of love, the I am Love.

At this stage, you know that love has been within you all along. Someone may have evoked this sense of love within you, but they never gave it to YOU, therefore they could never take it away.

People come and go, but you realize love is always here, it is who you are. You’re no longer projecting it just onto one form (one person) and then getting scared that it can be taken away.

It’s freeing to know love in this deep way.

In the I AM LOVE stage, you see you are the source of love. 😍

It’s no longer about a self-improvement project and you discover the truth of who you are has always been whole, and that you never lacked anything.

4️⃣ The last stage is simply called Love.

It’s not an “I love you”… there is no ‘I’, there is no ‘You’ – simply just love…. no separation.

In my brief experiences or openings of this bigger love, it’s the most intimate experience of Life… of Oneness. It redefines what love is.

It’s seen as the very fabric of life Itself… the chair, your lover, the trash, all made of the same material…love.

The closest analogy, to paint a picture that I can share, is to imagine everything was gold, and made from that gold were rings, plates, vases, etc. You would say that it’s the same, but appears in different forms.

Love is the foundation.

At this stage, it is no longer WHO you are, it is WHAT you are. ✨

Rather than I am in the world, there is a perspective shift to see that the world is in me.

No matter where you are in your life, no matter what you have gone through, it’s possible to wake up to this love right now. Something in you already knows.

It’s all here to wake us up to this bigger love affair… A love that is no longer reserved only for one person, but experienced in, as and through, all of life.

Life wouldn’t want us to stay diluted in egoic love and miss out on this bigger Love.

My favorite quote is from St. Francis of Assisi and he speaks to this poetically when he says, “What you are looking for, is what’s looking”.

May you discover that everyone is your soulmate, here to wake you up
to the source of love. 💗

To realize that, you are ‘The One’ you’ve been looking for….