Love Thy Self: The Stories We Tell
Loving yourself is a divine thing to do.
It can seem very complicated, especially when we are stuck inside our minds with secrets or stories we don’t understand, or that aren’t even ours. I was stuck there for a long time carrying so many secrets and so much shame. I circled round and round not feeling like I was going anywhere. Healing started when I started to understand that these were just stories and they weren’t even mine. It made me feel lost to let go of them, but it was a turning point.
It pushed me enough to quit circling ‘round so I could begin spiraling out of it which gave me some new found self respect.
Loving yourself starts in the shadows.
It’s easy to get stuck. Robert Johnson, author of Owning Your Own Shadow, says that refusing to own our shadows can get us into real trouble, not just as individuals, but cultures, as well. He says we can “store up or accumulate” things in the shadows that can show up as war, racial intolerance, chaos, and so on, in society, if we fail to address it. That chaos can end up inside us, too. But it is not the darkness that is the problem. The problem is in the avoidance. Although I moved slowly I began discovering great things like it wasn’t all my fault and I could set shame down and just leave it by the side of the road. There was a lot of value in learning to face those things with kindness because it led to self-compassion which is essential. It led to a place of peace within myself, and it led me to see a divine place inside where love lives, the part where we all matter.
In doing so I showed myself the greatest love and care I ever had or ever could.
Learning to love yourself can be messy.
Self-love can be messy because it’s so easy to avoid and overlook ourselves. This puts us at risk because we forget what we know. We forget to listen to ourselves. We often feel selfish just considering what our souls are longing to say. Self-love is about making vows to ourselves and making space for others to do the same while respecting the boundaries. It takes self-compassion along with empathy while never losing touch with who we really are. It is more than stating an opinion or booking a massage, and it involves more than someone saying sorry or following someone else’s steps to heal, grieve, or know. Loving ourselves is about staying in touch with what we know deep down.
The good news is that it’s never too late to face what is hard to face, and it is worth the effort to move past it to get to what is divine.
Move to loving your higher Self.
We can’t talk about self-love without talking about having more than one “self”. Instead of having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, maybe they’re both angels. Perhaps one is our small self, or ego, and the other is our higher Self (more likely sitting quietly at our core). The one is nervous and working overtime to make us look perfect, the other one knowing we can relax and let go. If we listen to our small self it will always tell us to fight for more, be easily offended, focus on “me” over “we”, and won’t be helpful when things get tough. If we listen instead to our divine Self (which is a lot quieter) it will always lead us back to a place of compassion, for ourselves and for others. So as we are trying to live lives of passion and meaning we may be side-stepping a bigger question of what it is we are listening to. We can go careening into the world without listening to what sits at our core. Or we can align our passion with compassion and give our higher Self a place at the table, give it a voice in our lives, ask for its direction and blessing. In doing so we will have less need to fight or take things personally, and it will always point toward what is best for us all.
Even better, it will be right there when things get hard or we get confused about what Self-love truly looks like.
The sooner we recognize and honor that presence, the sooner we can find greater love within and build a loving world to inhabit together.
Let that sink in. Let that be enough.
