As If

When a decision is made,

A new world appears— 

Almost as if 

The lens through which 

You view the world

Is all there is. 

Boundaries

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. 

How To Love Yourself

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.  

Eyes Closed

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

 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. 

Another Way

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.

The Conscious Observer

 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.