Self Love part 2

I broached the subject of self-love a couple of months ago in a newsletter here from the perspective of how to encourage the development of self-love in children. Seeing parenting behaviors you may have experienced was to give you an alternative perspective on encouraging more self-love. Today, I wish to tackle the same subject from a different angle. Last time, I wrote about the trouble with even using the word love because it means many different things to many people. This time, I want to start with my current definition of love – The desire to be present and positively responsive with someone. Participation is an essential ingredient in love. Having a lovely feeling about someone is nice, but that is wishing for connection, not the actual act of loving them. Loving requires you to be present and receptive to the truth of what they feel and think. Love requires respect. Love also requires you to respond to their truth with your truth in a way that honors both perspectives. Negative judgments are not loving. Differences and disagreements are fine as long as there is respect.

This opens up one of the first tenets of self-love. You must be present with yourself. That means you must feel what you feel and appreciate your unique perspective on each thing without self-judgment. You may be aware that others around you will not accept your viewpoint, which is okay. The challenge will be how to express your truth in a manner that does not alienate or trigger fear in those around you. Sometimes, you can’t prevent their responses as you have no control over how people will react. You must decide for yourself whether expressing your truth out loud serves you. Either way, you must allow the inner space for you to feel your truth. Even the times you know that how you feel is not right, it still has to be embraced in the moment until you grow beyond its limitations. We never grow from a state of self-judgment. Judgment is like super glue. It sticks stuff to us. When we are ready to move towards a place of standing and feeling that serves us better, we must be free to let the old feelings go.

Being positively responsive to yourself means acting in a way that supports your feelings. For instance, you might have been invited to a music performance and find that the music does not agree with you. Supporting yourself may mean excusing yourself and leaving. You alone are responsible for maintaining the integrity of your being. It is nobody’s job to make space for you to be you. It is your job to make that space for yourself within yourself. That is another frequent challenge in life. Learning how to create the space to be yourself without stepping on others. As much as it makes an excellent slogan to put on a poster, the reality is you do not have the right to demand that others respect your expressions of self. Respect is earned by giving respect and creating good relationships with good boundaries. This introduces another key concept in self-love – belonging.

We like to have the image of self-love as independent of participating with others. “I should love myself no matter what other people say!” It makes a good storyline for a movie or book, but it differs from how life works. As I said earlier, love requires participation. When you are alone, you might develop feelings of competence, success, ease, or any number of positive feelings, but love needs a higher purpose. It is more grandiose. Love flows from participation with connection. Love involves a sense of belonging. The belonging may be to a family or tribe, or it might be belonging to some principles. This is a feeling of belonging to something higher and bigger than yourself. It involves a feeling that your participation matters. This gives you a purpose and focus beyond mere survival.

When you love another person, that person gives you a purpose beyond just yourself. Your love is built from that more significant purpose and connection to something greater than yourself. Well, self-love functions the same way. To love yourself, you need to see yourself within the context of a greater purpose. Your relationship to that purpose is what generates that feeling of love. The more you can align with that purpose and act on that alignment, the more you love yourself. That purpose gives you permission to express yourself and be yourself. And the more free and able you are to express yourself, the better you feel about yourself. Belonging to that context of greater purpose gives you the freedom and support to shine. That is when you know you are loving yourself, you shine!

It sounds simple when I put it that way. If only it was that simple. The biggest thing that shuts down love for self or others is judgment. Judgments resonate way down deep in a very absolute way. What this tells me is that we developed a reaction to these judgments at a very early age when everything was still seen as black or white. This highlights where the work of love begins. Judgments are not black or white; they are simply feedback about what works today and what does not. We have to drag our emotional reactions from our past into the present. It often feels like lifting a heavy bucket from a deep well. It is work. But in the light of the present time, we can assess why something about us was judged negatively. Once we understand why, we can create a new expression of self that might fit the needs of those we are expressing to while still shining out who we are.

This is the key to having our light received. We have to shine within the context of the needs of those around us. This is not something we were capable of understanding when we were young. Connections that create belonging are built out of mutual needs and participation in meeting those needs. To belong, we must share the responsibility for getting those needs met. Self-love operates in the same way. Internally, we have many different and often conflicting needs. Self-love is built by figuring out how to balance and meet those needs appropriately. For instance, you may need to bury your frustrations in massive amounts of cheesecake, but you also need to not be as sick as a dog. You might creatively decide that jumping on your bike for a ten-mile ride will be almost as distracting as all that cheesecake without ending up sick to your stomach. This is a self-loving choice.

This is the essence of self-love – you make better choices for yourself. This same tactic is what you can use to love others. You might want to do one thing with someone else, but you find they want something else entirely. Love means finding alternative forms of expression for your feeling desire to participate with another that meets both your needs. Your head wants what it wants because it is very limited. When you drop down into what feeling it is that your heart wants, you discover that there are a thousand forms of action that can bring you the feelings you desire. The heart is much easier to please than the head. Love lives in your heart anyway, so let go of your head’s need to have everything its way. Our head is our biggest obstacle to both love and self-love.

To recap, self-love is the fundamental ingredient to happiness and fulfillment, and it operates under the same rules as love for others. You need respect for the many parts of yourself. You need the safety of non-judgment, which is self-acceptance. You need to get out of your head and embrace what you feel and desire in your heart. Let go of the head-generated stories about what exact conditions will save you and make you feel okay. You are looking for self-love, and that does not come from the head or its stories. You already contain all the elements necessary to create a positive, loving human being. Some work may involve digging out old false beliefs built from black-and-white thinking, but it is worth it. Find something that you belong to, something that gives you a greater purpose and focus for your life. As you express that greater purpose, you will develop self-love. You are worthy of that feeling of positive self-love.

There is more. Self-love has an even broader purpose. Most people, deep down inside, live in a chronic state of fear that they are unlovable and unwanted in some way. This is a natural consequence of growing up. As infants, our brains cannot conceive that the world is not an extension of ourselves, with us at the center. Everything is all about us. Consequently, when our brain develops enough to realize that the world is not about us, we develop various levels of fear that we will not be taken care of, possibly even abandoned. We see that the folks around us have their own concerns that don’t involve us and that our needs and wants may not matter to anybody. When we grasp this, we conclude that their lack of instant response to our needs is because there is something wrong with us – we must be unlovable and unwanted in some way.

This is where self-love steps in. It tells us that their lack of alignment with what we want and our way has nothing to do with who we are inside. They are simply different from us and naturally put their own needs first. We mature to take responsibility for meeting our own needs and creating win-win relationships with others to manifest those larger desires. We learn to take in the love, the desire for positive participation, from wherever it is offered. Conversely, when we are in fear we grab onto whatever relationship we have and try to control it to make it safe and permanent. Unfortunately, this fear-based control usually destroys those relationships with time. People resent being controlled. With self-love, we can open ourselves to letting the universe love us. That means we are open to creating relationships of all sorts everywhere. The opportunities are abundant. That is what is meant by letting the universe love us – we let life in and learn how to dance with it. We can’t demand life dance with us; we only offer our hand and see who steps up. When you love yourself, you can let in the love life offers you. You will find that when you shine that love is all around you.

Here is a fun way to enjoy this in music – Doris Day

David

We still have C15 at the office. This is the twice as potent as the popular Fatty 15 supplement. What is it for? Well:

Immune function

Heart & lungs

Metabolic health

Joints and red blood cells

Longevity

Cell membranes stronger/less fragile

Pick yours up now! Learn more about it in this video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKt3S25Q-as

Ellen

Ellen has been playing with a new facial product she made up to get rid of those little spider veins in her cheeks. It seems to be working well. She mixed castor oil with DMSO and applies it directly to her cheeks with a cotton swab.