The power of Love and Belonging

Exploring the power of love and belonging

Love and belonging are essential to the human experience. As I conducted my interviews, I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it. That one thing is the belief in their worthiness. It’s as simple and complicated as this: If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness—the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don’t fit with who we think we’re supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing, and proving. Our sense of worthiness—that critically important piece that gives us access to love and belonging—lives inside of our story.

The greatest challenge for most of us is believing that we are worthy now, right this minute.
Worthiness doesn’t have prerequisites. So many of us have knowingly created/unknowingly allowed/been handed down a long list of worthiness prerequisite:
I’ll be worthy when I lose twenty pounds.
I’ll be worthy if I get/stay sober.
I’ll be worthy if everyone thinks I’m a good parent.
I’ll be worthy when I can make a living selling my art.
I’ll be worthy if I can hold my marriage together.
I’ll be worthy when I make partner.
I’ll be worthy when my parents finally approve.
I’ll be worthy if he calls back and asks me out.
I’ll be worthy when I can do it all and look like I’m not even trying.

Here’s what is truly at the heart of Wholeheartedness: Worthy now. Not if. Not when. We are
worthy of love and belonging now. Right this minute. As it is.
In addition to letting go of the ifs and whens, another critical piece of owning our story and claiming our worthiness is cultivating a better understanding of love and belonging. Oddly enough, we desperately need both but rarely talk about what they really are and how they work.

Defining Love and Belonging
For years I avoided using the word love in my research because I didn’t know how to define it, and I wasn’t sure that “C’mon, you know, love” as a definition would fly. I also couldn’t rely on quotes or song lyrics, however much they might inspire me and speak truth to me. It’s not my training as a teacher,motivator or researcher.

As much as we need and want love, we don’t spend much time talking about what it means. Think about it. You might say “I love you” every day, but when’s the last time you had a serious conversation with someone about the meaning of love? In this way, love is the mirror image of shame. We desperately don’t want to experience shame, and we’re not willing to talk about it.

Yet the only way to resolve shame is to talk about it. Maybe we’re afraid of topics like love and shame. Most of us like safety, certainty, and clarity. Shame and love are grounded in vulnerability and tenderness.

Belonging is another topic that is essential to the human experience but rarely discussed.
Most of us use the terms fitting in and belonging interchangeably, and like many of you, I’m really good at fitting in. We know exactly how to hustle for approval and acceptance. We know what to wear, what to talk about, how to make people happy, what not to mention—we know how to chameleon our way through the day.
One of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and belonging are not the same thing, and, in fact, fitting in gets in the way of belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted.
Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.
Before I share my definitions with you, I want to point out three issues that I’m willing to call truths.
Love and belonging will always be uncertain. Even though connection and relationship are the most critical components of life, we simply cannot accurately measure them. Relational concepts don’t translate into bubbled answer sheets. Relationship and connection happen in an indefinable  space between people, a space that will never be fully known or understood by us. Everyone who risks explaining love and belonging is hopefully doing the best they can to answer an unanswerable question.
Love belongs with belonging.
 One of the most surprising things that unfolded in my research is the pairing of certain terms. I can’t separate the concepts of love and belonging because when people spoke of one, they always talked about the other. The same holds true for the concepts of joy and gratitude, which When emotions or experiences are so tightly woven together in people’s stories that they don’t speak of one without the other, it’s not an accidental entanglement; it’s an intentional knot.