By Bart Sharp

How do you find love?  A question asked through out the ages.  The response question; “How much do you love your self?  How deep does your love for you exist?  Is there a deep inner serenity inside your heart?

We are a magnet for what we emanate from our being.  What is inside of us will attract the same.  If we desire a prince charming we have to have the same sincerity in us.

A common test to find how much you love your self is when you are quiet, alone with no outside stimulus such as a televison, “Are you happy and content?”  “What dialogue is going on inside of your head?”  If the self-talk is negative it is a reflection that these  parts of your suppressed past are active within you.  We still hold the traumas and our body is in emotional discomfort.  It is one of the greatest obstacles for self-love, the pain of our pasts.

Much of the path to love is coming to terms with our hurts, abuses and let-downs.  We may feel ashamed of these and even believe they were our fault.  Regardless of how we feel about them we still do not have to hold onto them.  As a friend told me, “God forgives you even before you create a mistake, so will you allow you to forgive yourself?”  My world opened up after I could accept that.  It is that simple.  Our job is uncovering the past as fully as we can and somehow it will change.

When we transform we leap to new plateaus and what is found is a much stronger love for ourselves.  What is reflected and attracted is love from others in ways we have never known.  Love changes as we change.

By Bart Sharp

I like to entertain the thought that being in love at the age of 50 or above is a more powerful kind of love than young love.  A lot can be said about the merits of young love in it world of freshness, naivety, physical beauty and hormones as the world has traditionally focused on that era of romance.  Purity is a wisdom that comes from the lessons of introspection, completion and experience.  Of course this article may show the younger audience what they have to look forward to.

If someone can love at age 50 requires them to resolve their guilt because they have made almost every mistake in the book by then.  If they are still willing to love openly again like the innocence of your love a huge forgiveness of self and of others must occur.   Otherwise the weight of those unresolved and unforgiven parts of us will kill any ability to reveal ourselves deeply that is required in mature love.

Love is too heavy of an experience for cynicism, it can severely wound a heart.  Time will always tell us that our freedom requires us to learn the lessons that regret presents to us.  Maturity guides us.  The only blame that cures is looking at our own faults to uncover where we went off the path, then we can find our way back to the richness of loving us. Then another.

To be refreshed in our own hormones and the joyful vitality of loving someone over 50 it is required to let go of our resentments.  The anger that have has complied deep inside and layered our libido to create a stalemate inside must go.  Loving over 50 requires us to unfold our pains and expose them to the light to be free of our past and our life force of sexual energy flows freely from the genitals up to our heart.

What we learn from aging is vulnerability, a softer side that opens to the world. Knowing we will be protected by our wisdom we go more naked into the world.  In that defenselessness we are more of an invitation to receive love of all kinds and see it in its multiplicities of expression.  We can cherish life in all of its moments.

We have seen so many kinds of fear by age 50 we know it is not real, so why buy into it?  Anything depleting is created in a lie.  Love always fills and replenishes.  With maturity we know how to nurture love so that it stays alive.  Each stage of life can be honored in love, loving relationships and heart filled romance.