Some people approach holding flattering mirrors
That warp just a little and scatter
The light that you carry
In ways you can barely detect.
The closer you get, the less they reflect
Your true image, but stretch
A false version of you in a thousand directions
And slowly confuse your self-perception.
The only way to regain your bearings
Is to close your eyes and to reach out your hands.
When that rooster crows
You will remember what you know—
That every loud profession
Is an accidental confession
That the quiet, enduring substance
Of loyalty is absent.
At the break of dawn
The world will see what you have done—
If you can see it too,
Then you still have the power to choose.
Love does not live in the words you use
But in what you choose to do.
When a decision is made,
A new world appears—
Almost as if
The lens through which
You view the world
Is all there is.
If you search online for how to love yourself, you will see a lot about setting healthy boundaries for others in your life. In my experience, self-love comes before the setting of boundaries, and not after. I don't think boundaries are the stuff self-love is composed of, but a natural consequence of it.
When you are in state of viewing yourself compassionately, you come to understand your own complexity, imperfection, and inconsistency with warmth and patience even as you work to improve. You understand that you will never be perfect, because no one is, and that you, like everyone else, are nevertheless lovable. When others then treat you with consistent patterns of disregard, lack of respect, or even hostility, you come to understand that they are acting out of their own wounds. They lack self-love. And because I too once lacked self-love, I understand it and feel true compassion for them.
But when someone treats me poorly now, I know that their treatment of me will affect my ability to love myself if I accept it, and I refuse to accept anyone into my inner life who will compromise the warm self-regard that I have worked so hard to achieve. The door closes pretty firmly. That does not mean I do not have love for those people, and it also does not mean I would not accept them back into my life, in due time, if they show with their behavior and their words that they have changed. But until then, I love myself too much to go down with them.
Self-love is a journey that everyone has to face on their own. It is only through doing so that genuine union with others becomes a possibility.
The frequent advice to "love yourself" or the maxim that "You can't love someone else until you love yourself" sound like wise advice, but ring hollow to those who have a hard time doing so. Negative self-talk can be so deeply embedded in the psyche, often from childhood, and frequently reinforced by the way that we view the world, that it becomes almost impossible to imagine what any other way of being would look like. So how do you actually learn to love yourself? Where do you start? And what does that even mean?
I'm sure that there are many approaches one could take, but I will share a bit of what seems to be working for me. At first, when I decided to actually try to love myself, I started by trying to stop saying mean things to myself in my head. That did not work; in fact, I think it made me do it even more often because I was focused on it. So my next thought was that I can't just remove something without replacing it with something else. So any time I started saying mean things to myself in my head, I would substitute the opposite. For example, if I caught myself saying, "I hate you" to myself in my head, I tried replacing it with, "I love you," often a beat later. That didn't really help either. It was too surface level.
Then I recalled another rhyming problem that I have dealt with. I am someone who historically has ignored my own emotions. They were so repressed that I stopped being able to feel them in my body-- to the point where I was disconnected from hunger and thirst cues until they became demanding. I started addressing this problem by becoming a detective of my own emotions. I would notice, midday, that I had a lingering, strong feeling. It could be anger, sadness, joy-- anything. And I would randomly notice the feeling and have no idea where it came from. Then I would have to think back, and there was always a really obvious trigger in the not-too-distant past. It could have been a client interaction, frustration over a task, an interaction with someone. But I realized I would move on from an emotionally arousing experience without giving myself the time to process the associated emotions. If I did pay them any heed, it was to force them into submission to rationality and then quickly move on. But I wasn't really moving on-- my body was still processing the emotions, but it was hiding them from the view of my mind. My mind and body had become separate processing units for information that did not effecively communicate with each other. It took conscious mental will to bring myself back into union to allow myself to experience the world as a whole person. I had to start sitting with my emotions and letting myself feel them and think through them at the same time. That takes time. And I started having a lot of big realizations about myself that I was blocked from having when I was not in union with myself.
So I decided to apply that understanding to the negative self-talk problem. I wasn't sure what that would look like but I had a fuzzy notion that I was standing at the beggining of the right trail. I just knew I needed to involve my body and my mind in the process of unpacking what was happening, and I needed to listen to both. So instead of viewing those spontaneously negative self-statements as a problem to be eradicated with brute mental force, I started viewing them as an invitation toward broad curiousity. When such a statement would arise in my mind, I would start backtracking through the mental process that gave rise to it. What event triggered the self-criticism and what memories did it bring up? I realized that there was always both an external trigger and a memory that gave rise to the negative statements, often from many years ago.
I focused on the memories of old behavior and statements I had made that I was ashamed of. I began imagining my younger self during those moments that I was still punishing myself for, in great detail. I remembered what I looked like, how young I was, what I was dealing with at the time, what my intentions had been, how much I did not know yet. And I developed compassion for that younger self. I used my imagination to sit with that prior version of me and comfort her. I treated her the way that I had always wished someone would have treated me. I have done this so many times now that I have met a thousand prior versions of me and loved them all.
The hardest task of all is to love yourself in the present moment. But I find that the more I love my prior selves, the less difficult it is to love myself now. My self-talk is much kinder than it used to be, and I can imagine the compassion with which my own future self will regard me now.
Under the canopy, eyes closed
The breeze cradling the forest in its arms,
The dance of light and shadow
Ushering in the quiet communion—
I awoke and understood
That this is how a soul is known—
As a dance of light and shadow,
Eyes closed.
The secret heart of forgiveness is to stand in a proper relationship with time. We are not part of time’s fabric, tethered to past or future. We are, at every moment, in the eternal now. The transgressions we must forgive belong to a time we no longer have access to. They do not belong to us, but to another age, another way of being.
To understand this about others’ transgressions, we must understand it first about our own. When we break with them and leave them where they lay, we become more fully present in the now, and future possibilities begin to branch in infinite directions. You must afford yourself the opportunity to break with your own past in order to extend the grace of this possibility to others.
I've tried to write my story
But it takes a turn toward silence
Every time the limb I'm standing on
Begins to creak under my weight.
Perhaps its just illusion that
Transforms my speech into a song,
But when the tune undoes me,
And the branch snaps suddenly,
Instinct spreads my arms which may
Have always had these feathers, and
Perhaps the tale I long to tell
Unfolds another way.
Meditation cultivates our ability to become self-observant, to recognize our own internal patterns of mind, emotion, and decision-making from a place of detachment. The more you do it, the more you come to realize that the observer is actually who you are, and that your habits of thought and emotion are merely that— old habits. They may define you to others, but not to yourself. They are not core to your identity; your identity sits sovereign in the chair of the observer.
And the more you think about that reality, the more you start to wonder whether that true self ever changes at all, or is some sort of enduring, fundamental feature of the universe. I recall having this same level of consciousness when I was very small; the world of experience at my disposal for observation was just extremely limited.
Realizing that the observer is the self is wonderfully liberating; it means that there is infinite possibility for self-reinvention. We can truly change our lives from the inside out. And if we can master ourselves, imagine what else is possible.
The caves of the wilderness open their doors
To those who walk with an open heart—
Quiet doorways behind swaying pines
Whose hinges creek in the wind,
A slit in the sandstone, buried in shadows
That opens into a small, dark world,
Like a pocket sewn into a seam of time.
If there is anywhere about this earth
The smallest of rents in the veil,
I think it must be in the deep, dark woods,
Or deep in the human soul.
Clothed in white against the window,
Backlit by the salt glare emptiness
Of winter’s brazen stare, you sit
Composed, a grin flashes and fades,
Whole worlds rise and fall behind your eyes,
You say nothing.
The love that breathed here
Once feels evanescent now, concealed
Behind statistical probabilities
Like an atom in the quantum field,
Taking shape only when observed.
The inner workings of the world
Invite us to a different view.
I have seen the mask slip
On the face of the world
In the void underneath
All the timelines converge
Back to the dance
All the steps are reversed
And only the hard, unrelenting smiles
Keep us in time til the rhythm returns
With one foot on the stage and one in the void
The music we’re born with dances with time
I. Water
In the beginning, when darkness hovered
Over the surface of the deep,
There was no moon to pull the waters
Toward their home among the stars,
No fish to hold us in its belly
Until we understand
That our souls were inscibed with messages
We must speak into being.
There was only the darkness and the deep--
The eternal, churning heart of all things.
II. Fire
Air speaks:
You are my sacred counterpart
Though you can fill no sails,
And I am not the alchemist
You are who can turn flesh to ash
And yet no greater miracle exists
Than when you and I wed.
Forget the wedding party,
We will turn the whole world red.
III. Air
Fire speaks:
I am borrowed from heaven,
Heart of the gods, lent to men.
I require constant attention
And there's always someone to supply it.
[Air did not reply to this,
And carried on her way].
IV. Earth
Think of the predicament
We've placed the planet in.
Flesh of her flesh, bones made of
The same stuff as stones,
Our breath a never-ending exchange
Where we welcome her into our chests,
Yet deny her any purchase
Until we must.
She is us, and vice versa, yet
As wayward children
We have tied her hands behind her back
While she looks on in horror at our actions.
With every breath she calls us back
To union with all things.
Our bold refusal leaves her with no choice
But to collect the dust we're made of
In her palm, and scatter to the winds
The dream that we will understand
The predicament we're in.
When you live inside a web
The whole world trembles on a thread,
Which can be somewhat terrifying,
Until you turn around and realize
That you're the one who's spinning it.
Then you know you are the web,
And the world ceases to exist.
Come walk with me down to the bench
At the bend in the sidewalk
Where the river and the canal meet and talk--
One from the depths and one from the shallows--
One moving fast and one moving slowly--
So each flows into each,
So the wordless council meets.
You think you'll never be forgiven
For the things you didn't do,
And that's not true. The reason you can't be forgiven
Is that the blame never belonged to you.
So let it go to nameless tributaries
Reclaimed by the earth
And let these words be the quiet room
Where you remember your soul's worth.
Lost in the woods, I sat down by a tree,
And I asked it which way I should go.
"Inward and upward," whispered its leaves,
And the roots said, "Follow your shadow."
Meanwhile the bark, where I rested my
Shoulders remarked, "I have always grown
Outward in every direction--
Or at least in the ones you can see."
So I asked what it is that I do not see,
And he said, "You're not separate from me."
There is currently a group of Buddhist monks walking 2,300 miles from Texas to Washington, D.C. to spread a sorely needed message of peace and lovingkindness across the United States. While they do stop to greet people and give addresses at waypoints, most of their message is conveyed through action rather than words. When they do speak, their words align with their message, and they have spoken about the mindfulness with which they take each step. They are a walking meditation and they wear their mindfulness like beautiful garments.
Their concept of walking meditation and the mindfulness of each step deeply resonates with me. I've been running for decades, and for much of that time, I was dissociated, lost in my thoughts and totally disconnected from my body. I thought that my disocciation was a super power; it allowed me to endure miles with bloody blisters, chafing, sore muscles, and basically ignore the pain. But I remember in 2016, when my local running club did a mile race challenge, I realized how present I needed to be in my body in order to run that shorter distance well. (The shortest run I had done prior to that was a 5K). When I ran the mile, I learned that every single step counted; there was no space to zone out and slow down. It forced me into the moment.
More recently, I've called on my memories of mile race strategy to help myself to become more fully present in the moment while I'm running, and I've realized that running outdoors, particularly when alone, can be a beautiful extended meditation. Every time one of your feet makes contact with the ground, you are grounded in your body. Each footfall is my body's response in the ongoing converesation my spirit is having with the earth.
As I've worked on this, I've realized that what I'm really striving for is authenticity. I want my inner and outer worlds to be one and the same. I used to dream so large and think of that world as separate from this one, but I've realized my own agency to bring those dreams into reality. That's why I'm here. That's why we are all here. We were born in this world in order to live in it, not to suffer our existence while dreaming of another life. Authenticity is becoming, fully, who you have always been, even if you have do it while shaking.
I remember how, in the moment,
It felt like my head had flipped back
Like the top of a Pez dispenser
And a column of fire rose from my throat to the sky
And I whisked my baby into my arms
Because a voice in the distance was screaming, "Danger,"
And I listened without asking why.
That was the moment I saved her and myself.
That voice I heard was mine.
