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. 

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. 

Degrees of Freedom

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. 

The Dance

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 

Elemental

 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 inscribed 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.