Arylo Ch 03 Seal and Heal Love Cracks

We have come to this planet to love ourselves in spite of whatever obstacles others or we ourselves have put in our paths. – Louise L. Hay

Adventure #3: Seal & Heal Your Love Cracks Take back your love power and never give away your power to feel loved again

Did you know that you were born in love with yourself? Yep, born feeling loved, connected to love, and ready to give and receive love unconditionally. Upon arrival, your heart and soul were full of 100% pure love. Unfortunately the world you were born into, while advanced in many ways, didn’t and still doesn’t operate on the principles of love (at least not yet.) Fear is the name of the game, and fear is the #1 smasher and smusher of anything resembling love.

When your pure beam of love dropped into your bouncing baby body, fear, in all its forms – hate, meanness, comparison, doubt, anxiety, judgment, worry, rejection, shame – wanted in as quickly as possible. If you were fortunate, you landed softly into a family who held a tight container of love, not so affected or blinded by their own fears that they projected and handed them down to you immediately. A tribe that did their best to create a place for you to feel safe, cared for, worthy, and special, at least for a time. But very few of us, no matter how great our parents, escaped adolescence without being affected by fear and its “love stealers.”

At some point in your life, probably between the ages of 2 and 11, something happened to make you feel separated from the pure, unwavering and unconditional love to which you were born connected. As a result, you suffered your first “Love Crack.” This event might have been a specific moment, maybe one you can remember right now – likely painful, difficult and

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 1 internally jarring. Or your love crack might have resulted from a series of events, that when combined, poked and prodded at that pure love, until one day, you felt separated from love, and crack!

This crack created a fissure inside your pure heart, opening up the way for the love stealers to move in and take up residence. Love stealers are fear’s messengers, like renegade roommates who come charging in, uninvited, to stomp on your free spirit and wreak havoc on your pure heart. Their job is to fill you up with feelings and beliefs that make you forget and doubt your connection to unconditional love. Truthfully, they are more like love kidnappers than love stealers. They lack the power to actually remove love or take it away, but wow are they masters at making you feel like love is gone. Their power comes from making you feel unloved, alone, unsafe or scared, as that’s when you are most vulnerable to a love crack.

Since these love stealers don’t have bodies of their own, they mostly rely on the words and actions of adults and children whose hearts they’ve already infiltrated through the love cracks. Driven blindly by the pain and fear living inside of them, most people have no clue they’re delivering heart-polluting, spirit-smashing love cracks to others. Maybe for you, a bully cracked your innocent and pure heart. Perhaps a harsh, abusive, or neglectful adult or sibling delivered a love crack causing you to build walls of protection around your heart, or just the opposite, let go of your boundaries all together. Maybe you began noticing how society treats people differently, which twisted your mind to believe you needed to be someone other than who you were. Or maybe, your love crack resulted from a comment that came from a person you loved or trusted. Although they didn’t intend to hurt you, their words pierced your core, cracked your trust, and you began to believe being vulnerable or expressing yourself freely and fully was

Regardless of the event, your first love crack – the Cardinal Crack – marks the moment you stopped trusting love, started feeling and having faith in fear, and began protecting your heart and dimming your spirit. Which made it all the more easier for more love cracks to appear as you grew older. With your heart now exposed to something other than pure love – fear – the love stealers just kept working on stealing your trust in love in all its forms – loving yourself, loving others, receiving love, believing the world can be a loving place, etc. And they keep stealing more and more until the day you decide to seal and heal your love cracks.

Gone un-healed, your love cracks continue to get activated whenever you face situations that cause you to feel unloved, unsafe and insecure. Like a cavity that goes un-sealed, fear- creating love stealers are like germs that keep hitting the roots of your self-love tree, causing you pain and causing you to forget your inherent self-worth. Your job, and the adventure we will take in this chapter is to find your love cracks, and to seal the openings so that you can heal the roots.

For many of us, our love cracks were so difficult and damaging that we hid them far, far away from sight. Instead, terrified to look at them, or admit they exist to anyone, we develop all kinds of self-destructive behaviors to keep them hidden, especially from ourselves. We stuff our gaping emotional and spiritual holes with addictions to other people, alcohol, food, sugar, clothing, shopping, etc. We anesthetize ourselves from the pain of the cracks with activities like overworking, being over-busy, over-focusing on other people’s lives, and over-watching bad tv.

It’s like constant love-crack triage, we just have no idea our heart and soul is bleeding, craving love.

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 3 This suits the love stealers just fine. Unexposed, they remain in power. However, when you dare to expose the fear, stare it down, and activate the courage that lives in the part of your heart that remains untainted and pure, the love stealers lose their power, the love cracks begin to seal, and you start healing the love cracks for good.

inherently possess to feel loved at any moment and to find you way back to love no matter what. When you reclaim this power, a great change occurs within you. When difficult moments arise in your life, when you feel afraid, alone or unloved, instead of choosing fear, creating or deepening a love crack, and causing yourself undue suffering, you begin to find your way through the difficulty and pain using the power of love. This choice, to trust love, leads you to outcomes that bring more love into your life, not less. And over time, as the love cracks heal, you return to your first nature, to make choices that are worthy of you being called your own best friend.

Love Cracks Exposed!

Let’s draw a line in the sand right here right now, take those love stealers on and reclaim your love power, shall we? I’m daring us all – me too – to take love cracks out for show and tell.

Love cracks exposed! Oh yeah! I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. Heck, I’ll tell you what, you don’t even have to show me your love cracks, just promise me that you will show yourself. Is it a deal? Great, let’s go!

The love cracks I am about to share with you are true stories about my life that I’ve not shared publicly until now. I am sharing them with you because I know hearing someone else’s story has the power to open up long ago, locked up places inside of yourself. While the details may differ, the fears are the same. As you read about my love cracks and their impact on my life,

Moment, connect with yourself as your own B.F.F. and ask a few questions to find the wisdom and self-discovery wants to bubble up for you.

Love Crack #1 – The Cardinal Crack

My first love crack happened two weeks after my arrival on the planet (even back then I was over achieving!) I was born three weeks premature, 4lbs 6 oz, which in the 1970s meant I went immediately into the incubator. I spent two weeks in that capsule under a bright and warm light. It was nice. Then the day came for me to leave the womb of the warm bubble for the bosom of my mother, but it didn’t quite go the way I expected. When the nurses took me out of the incubator and handed this open bundle of pure love to my mother, instead of receiving a rush of love from her, I felt a closed-off heart. Ouch. Crack.

You see, when I showed up on the scene, my mother was in deep grief, having lost her father nine months before my arrival. Do the math, and you’ll quickly figure out that she grieved the loss of her father with me in her uterus. By the time I emerged, she wasn’t done grieving.

Like many people who experience but don't process the death of a loved one, a big piece of her heart was closed off completely. That was the piece, as a baby reaching out for love, I immediately felt for, but could not touch.

To be clear, it wasn’t that my mother didn’t love me or wasn’t happy to see me. Of course she loved and wanted me. She just wasn’t open to receive the love I had to give, or needed from her to feel safe coming into this crazy world. So while I am sure her intention was not to cause a love crack, my little spirit and heart felt rejected, and Ouch. Crack.

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 5 With the crack formed, in swooped the “fear of rejection.” It took root deep inside me, in a place I couldn’t detect. For years, this fear directed my choices in life and relationships, however I was clueless to its presence or impact. I had no idea that as a very little being, big walls, like thick metal doors, began construction around my heart to make sure that I never felt that kind of rejection ever again. Imagine how thick those walls were by the time I was 30, after receiving many more blows to this same love crack, giving more power to the love stealers.

Perhaps you too have built walls around your heart? Walls that feel like they keep you safe, in a place where no one can reject you or hurt you, but whose safety comes at the cost of you feeling separate, lonely or unloved and unsupported. It’s easy to miss the signs, it’s not like anyone can see the walls on the outside. Besides, even if they could, you’d just look like all the other fear-driven people with whom you work, attend school and hang out. The bogus belief in our society is if a person has tons of friends and loves their family, then all is well. When in truth, you can be the most popular person, the most loyal daughter, and still have big walls around your heart that keep love at a distance, keeping you feeling alone and disconnected from love, making choices so not aligned with being your own best friend.

The first action love stealers take when they move in is to send a note to your little girl, written in little girl language, like a 5-year old can understand. Your little girl, believing this note, commits it to memory – she never wants you to have to feel this love crack again. But of course, as you go along your life, you face situations in which you are rejected – maybe it’s the birthday party you didn’t get invited to or the contest you entered but didn’t win – and your mind forms a firm belief around this love-stealer lie. As an adult, a big girl, you take this lie as truth, often subconsciously, and use it as the baseline for your choices and reactions – from the big life decisions down to how you react in a given moment in your relationship, with yourself and with

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 6 others. And because this belief comes from the love stealers whose job it is to steal away love, when you act based on it, you literally feel less loved, not more. Feeling like love isn’t there, like it’s left you again, over time you begin to trust the fear-based lie over love and no matter what you do, you don’t receive the love you want . For example, with the fear of rejection, I received this message:

Little Girl Note:

“Don’t rush in to meet people with your wide-open heart!! That’s dangerous. They could reject you! Better to just stay separate, that way we don’t get hurt again.”

Big Girl Belief:

“If you reach out for what you need, expect not to get it.”

What happens then is that these messages and beliefs become reflection machines, and not in a good way. You begin to mirror the fear you unknowingly feel on this inside, all over your life in what you create on the outside. In my case, the fear of rejection kept me from the love and connection I craved in both my personal choices and in my approach to my professional life. In my love life, I chose a boyfriend who used love like a yo-yo. One minute he was giving love, the other snapping it back. The more I rushed in to get the love, the more he rejected me.

Nothing like sticking myself right where it hurt inside my love crack. Talk about an act of self- abuse! But because I didn't know how to source love from within myself – I didn’t yet love myself – I had to rely on him to receive love. I had unknowingly given him my Love Power, and

I was powerless to feel loved without him. In my work, this fear showed up as me overworking,

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 7 often doing the work of 10 people to the detriment of my own happiness and health. At the time, my false pride led me to fashion myself as a high achiever. Once the love crack sealed, I saw the truth, I was an achievement junkie, work-a-holic who’d rather exhaust herself and work harder than be rejected if I asked for support (not to mention the overwork was a convenient distraction from the feelings of rejection in my love life.)

ME MOMENT: Take a moment to close your eyes and see which of your love cracks is ready to be revealed to you.

• What was your cardinal crack? The first time you can remember being met with someone

else’s pain or fear, words or actions that made your pure, innocent heart crack or coil back?

What's been the impact?

• If you can’t remember a cardinal crack, not everyone does and that’s okay. Check in with

yourself about fear of rejection. Does rejection strike a chord as one of your love cracks? If

yes, how does it stop you from taking actions for yourself that a best friend would? What

does protecting yourself from rejection cost you?

Love Crack #2 – The Love Stealer Gang

The next love crack came at the hands of a gang of love stealers, two mean girls who decided to make me their juicy 5th-grade project, or should I say target. Today, I know they were directing their own self-hate at me (in high school, one of the girls would try to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge.) But at the innocent age of 10, I was just a smart girl trying to overachieve and so frequently found myself chosen as the teacher’s pet – in other words, prime mean girl meat. Threatening letters dropped into my book bag. Public promises to beat me up on

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 8 my walk home (which thankfully never materialized due to a lucky friendship with a very large and strong 6th grader.) But then came the day of “the bathroom incident” – the two towering mean girls, the one scrawny me, alone in the girl’s bathroom during class time. The mean girls were in power, and I was cornered. Finally they had caught me. I knew it, they knew it and unfortunately, I felt it. I thought I was a goner. And then, just as they were ready to pounce, out of nowhere came an angel – in the form of a student who needed to pee – and I escaped physically unscathed. Emotionally, however was a different story. I had been really scared. In that bathroom, two on one, I had felt trapped. Ouch. Crack. Hello fear of being vulnerable. Move over fear of rejection, neighbors are moving in!

Perhaps you too have been in a situation where you’ve felt physically or emotionally powerless, the target of someone else’s pain or unkind actions, especially by another girl or group of kids, the more public the worse. Maybe you’ve been bullied, ganged up on, or made fun of for the exact things that make you especially you. If so, what messages did you receive? Mine were:

Little Girl Note:

“Not everyone loves you. Some people hate you, just because you are being you.”

“If you’re going to be smart, other girls won’t like you.”

Big Girl Belief:

“Being vulnerable is weak. Never allow yourself to be seen as weak. Be stronger than everyone else.”

“Do not trust women you don’t know.”

This type of love crack totally messes with our relationship to power and to the connections we have with other women. Afraid to be vulnerable, when it comes to your personal power, either you become the woman who gives her power away in an effort to keep love or you become a woman who hates weakness inside herself and in others, and so becomes uber strong to protect herself. I got the memo to be stronger than everyone else, so in the moments when I’d feel any kind of vulnerability, I learned to get bigger, meaner or leave. I became impatient with others who I saw as weak and impatient with myself when I wasn’t performing to my high standards. I had little to no compassion for my own weakness. One of my best friends, who had a similar experience with a group of girls, got the other note. She removed her boundaries, let other people step all over her, and dimmed her light in an effort to make friends. She learned to tell herself, if something isn’t working it was because people didn’t like her or because she was doing something wrong. She became more loyal to others than she did to herself.

With friendships, this love crack keeps us from the deep, soulful circle of sisters every woman needs to discover the woman she is inside. Some women with this crack surround themselves with a big circle of girlfriends thinking they have deep connections, but quantity doesn't equal quality. Also, while they may be good to their friends, they are not so good to the women outside the circle – who the cattiness, competition and mistrust gets directed at. Other women, like me, stop liking and befriending women all together and become one of the guys. I was unwilling to stop being smart (I did have a high self-esteem after all), so I just decided to hang onto my one or two close girlfriends for dear life and hang out with mostly men. I didn’t really like nor trust most women until after I made the promise to love me.

• What love crack have you received at the hands or words of another girl or woman? What

love-stealing note did you receive? And what has been the impact? How has this caused you

to love yourself less?

• Does the fear of being vulnerable resonate with one of your love cracks? If so, what’s been

the impact on your relationship with your personal power? Did you build walls or let your

boundaries go all together? If not this fear, what fear came in when you felt a loss of power

or control over your experience and surroundings?

Love Crack #3 & #4: Alone, Abandoned & All On My Own

At the age of 11 and 15, like massive earthquakes, two super-sized cracks came through the hands and actions of my father. I can’t even remember the details of what created the first, but I do remember vividly how lonely I felt afterwards, so alone in fact, that for the only time in my life, I thought about killing myself. I had come home from being somewhere, doing something, as pre-teens do and in the process of walking through the living room to get to my bedroom, my mother and father stopped me for questioning. As they sat together on the couch, I answered my mother in a tone that my father apparently didn’t appreciate. And, before I knew what had happened, I went from standing on two feet in front of my parents to laying sideways, completely horizontal. Disoriented, I realized that I was being dragged up the blue-carpeted shag stairs by my hair and by my father.

Tossed into my room, the door slammed and I was left alone. And I felt totally alone, as if I was on a desert island all by myself. The man who was supposed to protect me, had just

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 11 assaulted me, in front of the mother who was supposed to protect me too. There was no one to reach out to for help. No one whose lap I could crawl into for safety and security.

As I started to come out of the daze I had been jolted into by my father’s rage, I started to feel in my heart and spirit the effects of what had just happened. Ouch. Crack. A deep, guttural sense of complete loneliness and isolation set in (fear), quickly followed by the thought, “Maybe

I should just swallow a bottle of pills.”

Thank God I raised my head and saw peering back at me 101 pairs of eyes, the loving eyes of my loyal stuffed animals! A tribe of furry creatures, who at this point felt more like my family than the two alien adults sitting in the living room. My father came up to my room later to apologize, but the crack had already busted open and for the first time ever I felt afraid to be alone. I knew that my dad wasn’t an ogre, he was just a man in pain, who on that day, after a few drinks, unleashed his pain on me. And so a new set of love stealers moved in.

Little Girl Note:

“You are all alone. There is no one here to take care of you.”

Big Girl Belief:

“You have to take care of yourself.”

Four years later, my father died suddenly in a car accident. And the fear of being abandoned took up residence next door to the fear of being alone.

Little Girl Note:

Big Girl Belief:

“Hang on to what you love for dear life, never let it go.”

Together these two fears would cause me to put my big dreams on hold for 15 years and stay in a 15-year relationship that had there been no love crack would have been a 6-month summer teenage romance at most. Although I fashioned myself a strong, independent girl then woman, so many of my choices became unconsciously driven by my need to do anything I could to not feel lonely. I was so afraid of being alone. I surrounded myself with lots of friends, the more the better. I never did anything alone. I kept myself busy so I didn’t have time to feel the loneliness, or see how my fears were running me directly opposite of the dreams my heart and soul had for me.

ME MOMENT

• What love crack came your way at the hands or words of a man in your life, whether he

meant harm or not? What has been the impact? How has this stopped you from pursuing your

life freely and fully?

• What love crack surfaced after an event that caused you to feel alone or abandoned? What

belief has been running you since? And how has that belief impacted your life choices?

• Take a look around at your relationships and notice if and how the fear of abandonment or

fear of being alone shows up in your interactions, reactions, and choices. If those love cracks

were sealed, what would be different?

The last story I am about to share with you illustrates of what happens when you choose love over fear and take your Love Power back.

Love Crack #5 – The Last Straw. Taking My Love Power Back.

When my ex-person pulled the ripcord on our engagement, every love crack inside me quaked like an 8.0 on the Richter scale. The aftermath was so devastating that the love stealers given the chance, I am quite sure, would have taken complete control of my life, and locked up my heart and soul for good. And for two-weeks, they did. They had quite the party at my expense, feasting on and feeding every fear that had ever taken up residence inside me.

But then something shifted. A very wise woman helped me see that I had the power to make a different choice. She said to me, “Honey, you can keep chasing this man for the next 40 years, and he will keep breaking (cracking) your heart. Or, you can leave and your life will open up into possibilities you cannot even imagine.” What she said, rang so true, that it soared past every love stealer, straight into the depths of my pure heart, and without the blink of an eye, I took a 180-degree about face. I stopped running into the arms of fear – and my former person – and instead ran straight into the arms of love – myself. I declared I would never give my Love

Power to any one person again, and instead I’d learn to find love first from inside myself. To do this, I would stand up to the fear, and in the name of love for me, find, seal and heal every single one of my love cracks.

I remember feeling such a deep sense of conviction when I reclaimed my Love Power by making these promises. Never again would I give someone else the power over whether I felt loved or not. I mean really, feeling loved is such a deep, life-critical desire for all of us – why

That would be crazy. But most of us do it anyway. It’s like handing over the thermostat of your heart to someone who on a whim can either turn up the love or turn down the love, leaving you feeling warm and cared for, or alone and out in the cold. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out this is a bad idea!

And let me be clear, reclaiming your Love Power is not about constructing more walls of protection, which many of us choose to do after a love crack eruption. Instead, you do just the opposite; you dismantle the walls. Yep, in this moment of feeling super vulnerable, you choose to trust love over fear, and run straight towards your love cracks, ready to face whatever you find, and heal it. You make the promise to look honestly at every love crack you’ve collected, and accept the mission to return your heart to its state of pure love.

I won’t lie to you, healing love cracks is not easy or always pleasant. You’ve got to get up close and personal with the huge holes you’ve been stuffing with your relationships, food and alcohol, external achievements, social activities and busyness for years. But if you can love yourself through that – whoa! That’s B.F.F. love. As your best friend, you love yourself holes and all. You love yourself because of, not is spite of, these holes, because what you need more than anything else to heal is love, yours.

I also wish I could tell you there will come a day when every love crack will be completely healed, but I haven’t met a person who that is true for yet, including myself. But what

I do know is that as you heal your love cracks and replace the love stealers with your trust in love, you will gain a tremendous power and an ever-increasing sense of self-love. Instead of being run by fear in your choices and feelings, you’ll become acutely aware of your love cracks, able to sense when they begin to tremble, avoiding the need for total eruption, or for engaging in

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 15 self-destructive, crack-stuffing behaviors. In the moments when fears or feelings of being unsafe, unloved, unseen, un-anything arise, you’ll have the power to send a different memo to yourself – a love memo.

When you feel rejected, instead of playing the loop, “They don’t want you,” you’ll send a love memo to yourself that plays something like, “You are loved and wanted, because I love you and want you. Their reaction has nothing to do with whether you are loved or not.” Just like a best friend you’ll be able to calm yourself down, and make yourself feel safe and loved. Over time, like a Jedi of Love, you’ll learn to trust that the force of love will always be with you.

You’ll begin to see the truth that you have always been loved and you will always be loved. And once you can feel that love deeply inside your own heart and soul, you won’t have to give away your Love Power to a person, a substance, an activity or a thing ever again.

Taking Back Your Love Power

Now it’s your turn! I showed you my love cracks, now you get to show-n-transform yours, and take back your Love Power from the love stealers.

Preparation – Your Mindset & Materials

Prepare to bring out your inner three-year old. We’re taking a trip back in time to hunt down your love cracks, using the tools three-year olds love best:

♥ a few sheets of paper or your journal, preferably blank pages

like to write with and that makes you happy.)

♥ a space where you can be with yourself (could be quiet and serene, or as an extrovert I

did this adventure in a local coffee shop – anywhere you can hang out with yourself.)

If you are reading this list and getting excited to play, draw and create. Great! You’re in the right mindset, the brilliant and judgment-free mind of your three-year old who is always up for anything that includes crayon-like substances. If the thought of drawing makes you less than exuberant, like say you are considering not grabbing these tools and instead you’re reaching for a crappy ballpoint pen at the bottom of your purse, or thinking you’ll skip the drawing all together and just read your way through this transformation, please stop that self-sabotaging thinking. Do not short yourself out of this experience.

There is good reason for the color and blank paper. You need them to get these love cracks and love stealers out into the open, where you can see them. Bringing them to life visually with symbols, words and color activates an entirely different place in your brain, which gives you access to deeper places you can’t access with your mind.

Whether or not you consider yourself an artist – so many of us were told at an early age we weren’t good at drawing so we stopped or became self-conscious – you are on a self-love journey and one of the self-love branches is self-expression! Throughout this book, I dare you to let your inner three-year old out to play and nurture the branch of self-expression on your self- love tree. Back then you had no problem picking up a crayon and coloring outside the lines. Dare to color however you want, knowing that whatever you create will be beautiful because it is an

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 17 expression of you. It’s time to let your fabulous, unique self fly… words, color, pictures, symbols, whatever form your self-expression takes on the pages you are about to create.

Step One: Start with Heart

Let’s start with a simple symbol – your heart – in the middle of a blank page. Draw this heart in the image of the beautiful pure heart you were born with. Color it in with bright pink, deep red, golden yellow or emerald green – all the colors of self-love and love. Draw wings on it, smiley faces, heck bedazzle your heart if that suits you. Then write these words, “I am loved” on the page, in or around the heart. Put your hand on your heart and say the words “I am loved” out loud, 3x, locking in the truth before we go out hunting for love stealers!

Here’s my heart…

[illustration of my heart]

Step Two: Your Love Cracks In Lights!

Time to go to the movies – the perfect place for an intimate interlude with yourself, only instead of going to the theatre to watch the film, this movie will be showing inside your mind.

The plot? The movie of your life. The star? Your love cracks. Your role? The observer. Your job is to travel back in time and find the love cracks you’ve experienced over the course of your life.

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 18 What follows is a short visualization. Read it or grab a recorded version at www.theSelfLoveBook.com. Keep a piece of paper handy to write down any details that surface.

ME MOMENT

To begin, get comfy here in your cushy movie seat. Close your eyes, hand on your heart, and take three deep breaths. With each breath, imagine everything around you going dark except for a bright light right in the middle of your forehead, the spot between your two eyebrows. This spot is called the ‘third eye,’ when you open and use it you can gain access into insights that you could not see otherwise. Think of this spot as a portal into your wisest self, beyond your mental thoughts, the place that gives you access to that bigger universal force of love on this journey with you. This is the movie screen of your heart and soul and this movie is about to begin.

Imagine that this screen is a reflection of your life, and the current image is one of you today standing or sitting in your happy place, the location where you feel like your best self – vibrant, open and free. Allow yourself to really see this person, your best self. Notice her strength, beauty, and unwavering love for you. She is your Jedi of Love, on a quest to find the love cracks that formed throughout your life and show them to you. She is daring, adventurous and ready for the challenge. Your job is simply to watch the movie play, note what she reveals to you and bring the information back here to our adventure together so we can do some sealing and healing.

Notice your wise, Jedi Love self now, extending her hand for you to grab. Take her hand and allow her to lead you on a journey back through your life in five-year intervals. Starting with your life today, travel back through time. Five years back. Ten Years. Fifteen Years. And so on.

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 19 Using her fantastical light saber, she shines the light on each of these five-year junctures, allowing you to see and take note of any love cracks. Her light is like a spotlight that moves back and forth, and has the power to shine through the cracks so that you can see them. As the love cracks appear, jot down or taking mental note of what you notice. Search for incidents that caused you pain or shame. Look for events that caused you to feel as if you needed to protect yourself in some way – whether that was to take control, disappear, perform differently, put your needs aside, put up boundaries, or let go of boundaries. See the times when you dimmed down your light, where you got small, let go of a dream, a passion or where your excitement got damped down. Notice incidents that caused you to cut off connection between yourself and another person, or events in which you experienced what felt like a loss of love, a break of trust, or a breach of your personal boundaries. Find the times when you felt most alone. Write down your age, your grade in school or whatever you can remember that clues you in to what time frame this happened during.

Notice your reactions and feelings. Notice what happened to your heart and spirit – did they shut down, disappear, go dark, create walls of protection? For each love crack you discover, notice:

• When you perceived that loss of love, trust, or safety, what was the mental note you stored in

your mind so you wouldn’t have to experience that pain again?

• How did you change to make sure that wouldn’t ever happen again? What piece of yourself

did you let go of or hide away?

• What was the fear that made its way into your heart because of this love crack?

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 20 Keep going back in time, until you reach the point when you can remember loving yourself without condition. A time when your innocence and pure heart was still perfectly intact, free from love cracks. Notice your age and notice what was true about you, this little being of love and magic. This may be an age before you could talk or walk, or it could be much later. You may not be able to find the place at all yet where you can remember feeling that pure, unconditional love, which is okay too. Trust that whatever you find is exactly what you need.

Once you’ve seen your bigger love cracks – stand here with your wise Jedi of Love self and see what your expedition has uncovered. You may have found one love crack, or many more. Ask your wise Jedi of Love self now, “Which love cracks shall I bring back for sealing and healing?” For the purposes of traveling light but mightily, choose up to four love cracks.

Don’t worry about leaving love cracks behind. Choose the ones that still bring up a twinge or hurt feelings in your cells and heart, and you will bring back the biggest cracks. When you seal and heal the biggies, the rest come along too.

After she answers, see her writing the love cracks down on a piece of paper and handing the memo to you. Expedition complete! Thank her for all she has done for you (a hug is always nice) and make sure to bring your love crack list with you.

As the movie screen fades to black, take a breath and stretch out your body from the long sit it had in this movie seat. Open your eyes and grab the hand of your three-year old – you all have coloring to do!

Step Three: Expose the Love Cracks

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 21 Are you ready to get naked with your love cracks now? No, you don’t have to physically get naked, it’s just fun talk for time to use the power of the pen and words to take your Love

Power back. Take these two steps to bring your love cracks into the light

[insert illustration of love cracked heart]

Claim and Name your Love Cracks: Remembering the memo your Jedi of Love wise-self gave you, write the love cracks you are ready to seal and heal on a piece of paper, including a few sentences about each. Then, just like I shared, give each love crack a name – can be a word, phrase or sentence. Whatever expresses the impact this crack had on you. The words don’t have to be perfect, they just need to resonate with you, so that when you repeat them out loud, you feel exactly what you’re talking about.

Show Your Love Cracks: In your journal or on your blank pages, draw a simpler version of your heart on a new page – again coloring it in with a solid color or pink or green to reflect it’s pure state of love. Then one by one, draw the crack into your heart and write the name near the crack so that you can see what happened to you heart as these cracks appeared. You can also add the walls of protection that formed because of the cracks as I did above.

Step Four: Expose the Love Stealers

With your love cracks out in the open, now we can ferret out the love stealers, the fears that made their way into your heart as a result of that love crack. Just like I shared, it’s your turn to name the fear for each of your love cracks and create a “Love Crack Expose`” to expose the beliefs and impact of these love stealers. Since most of us haven’t been trained to share our fears

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 22 openly (we were taught to stuff them far away and out of sight), naming the exact fear might be challenging. I’ve included a list of some of the common fears that get injected into pure hearts of love. Identify the fear that resulted from each love crack, choosing the words that resonate most for you, and then write up your Love Crack Expose` for each.

LOVE CRACK EXPOSE`

Love Crack: Name of the Love Crack

Love Stealer: The fear, name it. “The fear of…”

Little Girl Note: The thought that ran through your mind to protect you from getting hurt again.

What did you tell yourself in that moment, almost like a post-it note that got stuck to your mind, heart and spirit? Write this in words a 5-year old can understand.

Big Girl Belief: The false truth created that you began to live by and make decisions by.

Impact: The cost to your:

1. Self-love - How did you give up on yourself or settle?

2. Ability to give and receive love - How did you shut down from intimate connections?

3. Relationship to the higher universal force of love - How was your connection to spirit

affected?

[call out box]

How To Ferret Out the Fear & Find the Love Stealers

The love stealers don't want you to be able to name the fear, so they make it hard for you to pinpoint. Which is exactly why I am giving you some tools to help you bring language and

copyright 2012 Christine Arylo www.christinearylo.com 510.482.5858 23 awareness to the fears that may be lurking in your love cracks. What follows is a list of ‘root fears, most feelings and fears can be boiled down to these. For example, the fear of being called stupid or looking imperfect is really the fear of rejection or failure at its root. The fear of being called a fraud is really the fear of not being enough at its root. The fear of losing your job or any kind of financial insecurity is the fear of not having enough or the fear of being alone.

The fear of…

Abandonment * Being Alone * Disappointment of Self or Another * Failure * Loneliness *

Not Being Enough * Not Having Enough * Not Fulfilling One’s Life Purpose * Rejection *

Vulnerability

Do you best to get to the root of whatever fear’s been injected into your heart, and don’t worry if you can’t narrow it down. As you keep shining the light, the fears will surface. And for extra super powered support, here are two fear-busting resources:

The 40-day Fear Cleanse www.thefearcleanse.com A 40-day self-love practice led by me and my spiritual running buddy Gabrielle Bernstein. The cleanse helps you become aware of your brand of fear and teaches practical and spiritual techniques for transforming the fear into freedom using the power of love.

Fearless Living A book by my friend, Emmy Award Winner Rhonda Britten, founder of

Fearless Living Institute.

Step Five: Seal the Deal. Take Your Love Power Back

This entire book is an adventure in restoring your Love Power, to connecting you to the love that is always within you with such strength and resolve that you never forget again how to find your way back to love. Today you take one giant step for reclaiming that power by transforming the lies fear told you about love into the divine truth about love.

Your brain doesn’t distinguish between real truth and made up lies, it believes whatever you say is real. Then, like a good soldier, your mind goes out on your behalf to find evidence of such truth – fear based or love based, it doesn’t care. It just follows your orders. This is why affirmations have proven to be so powerful, because you literally are what you think. Your duty as your best friend is to take a stand to kick fear OUT and replace the space with love.

First… The Transformation

Take these three steps to transform the fear-based lies to the truth of love:

1. Expose the love stealer. Using the same heart that’s displaying your love cracks, draw

one hole on the end of each crack. This signifies where the love stealers have been eating

away at your pure love. Write the name of the love stealer near the hole.

2. Expose the lies. Under each love stealer, write the Big Girl Belief and/or the Little Girl

Note. Start each phrase with the words “Of course,…” Stop after writing the phrase to let

yourself sit with what these lies have been doing to you and your life. It may feel

uncomfortable, that's okay, we won’t leave you here. And it’s good to let yourself touch

the feelings so you can release them.

love-truth that smashes that fear-based lie into pieces, using the phrase ‘OF COURSE!...’

To find the truth, close your eyes, put your hand on your heart to make that love

connection and ask your heart, “What is the truth?” Write that down in a love color, like

red or pink.

[illustration of heart with love stealer, lie, truth]

Then… The Reclamation

Reclaim your Love Power by reclaiming your heart whole! Go back to the original pure love heart that you drew, or draw a new one. Add all of the “OF COURSE! love truths” in a love color, beaming for all to see, especially yourself!

Then close your eyes, put your hand on your heart and say aloud, each of the love truths, feeling your mind relax into love, and the channels to love reopen as you bound down your journey to truly becoming your own best friend.

This one act is like an instant shot of super glue – seals those love cracks shut. And even though extracting the love stealers and healing your bruised heart will take time, what’s most important is that you are heading the right way, on the road back to love, to the place of pure love you were born at all those years ago. On this path, as you love yourself more, your channels to love will open, more love will begin shine through, and little by little the love stealers will lose their grip and power, and your full love power will return. Your journey of self-love will be to continue to heal and fill these cracks with love.

[illustration of heart with love truths]

End this ritual with a self-love promise to anchor in your commitment to keeping your

Love Power and choosing love over fear, again and again. Hand over heart, 3x:

I promise to heal my love cracks using the power of the love I have for myself.

On to the next part of the journey… filling up your love cracks up with love, yours.