LIVING WITH JOY - Chapter 5
V. The Art of Self Love
There are many ways you can love yourself, and everything that happens to you is an opportunity to have a loving experience. Seen in the right perspective, anything can provide you with an occasion to love yourself. When things seem to be going against you, they are only happening to show you blocks to your usable power. I am sure if I asked you to make a list of things to do that would be loving to yourself you would be able to think of many. There may be a part of you that reminds you that you're not carrying those things out, and a battle begins. This inner war can be draining and making yourself wrong is not a right use of energy.
Loving yourself means
accepting yourself
as you are right now.
There are no exceptions to the contract; it is an agreement with yourself to appreciate, validate, accept and support who you are at this moment. It means living in present time. Many of you look back into the past with regret, thinking of how you could have handled a situation in a higher way, imagining if only you had done this or that, things would have worked out better. Some of you look into the future to make who you are right now inadequate. The past can assist you if you remember the times in which you succeeded, creating positive memories, and the future can be your friend if you see that in picturing it you are creating a vision of the next step. Do not make yourself wrong because you have not yet achieved it. It is important to love who you are now without reservation.
Loving the self is beyond attachment and detachment. You exist in physical bodies, and each one of you has a focus which you call the "I." You have been given the "I" so you can separate from a greater whole and experience a particular part of beingness. Everything you have experienced up till now is what you were born to learn about. Whether you label it good or bad, it is what composes your being, your uniqueness and pur pose. If you could see yourself from my perspective, you would view yourself as a crystal with many facets. Each of you is completely different, a unique combination of energy. Each of you is beautiful, special, and one-of-a-kind, as is each crystal. You reflect light in a unique way, thus your aura varies from those around you. If you could appreciate your uniqueness, see that the path you have chosen is different from anyone else's, it would be easier to detach from others' views and follow your own guidance.
One of the ways to love the self more is to stop comparing yourself to others. Although you are part of a whole, you are also an individual self, with your own path. The group and family belief systems you have taken on as your own can be obstacles to your self-love. "Everybody says it is good to meditate," you may be hearing, and so you feel bad if you don't do so. The challenge of loving the self is to step aside from every thing you are told, and ask, "Does this fit me? Does this bring me joy? Do I feel good when I do it?" It is ultimately your own experience that counts.
There is a temptation to make another person or something like a book an authority, and to put outside of yourself the ability to decide what is good for you. There is much benefit in being with teachers, but only so that you may learn to bring in information and growth for yourself. I exist to open doors for you; I do not wish to take your power, but to give it to you. When you are with teachers, any person you have made an authority in your life, even if it is just a friend, question and listen carefully to what he or she is saying. You may be accepting his or her statements as truth, and it is important to ask if what they are saying is true just for them, or is it something that is good for you also?
Loving the self means
stepping outside of guilt.
There is tremendous guilt in this society. Many connections between people come from the solar plexus, the power center, from which people try to persuade, convince, control and manipulate each other. Loving the self means stepping outside of this kind of relationship. To do so you will need to let go of guilt.
If you do not play the same ball game as those around you, you may find them feeling threatened. They want you to think and act in certain ways to fit their pictures, so they try to gain power over you through guilt. Often parents know no other way to be in control; they use guilt, anger and the withdrawal of love to dominate their children. When you feel strong and in charge of your life you can come from the heart. When you feel lacking in control you may feel you must manipulate or engage in power struggles to get what you want. You may think you have to make excuses for your behavior or tell white lies to protect other people's feelings.
When you act this way you are not loving to yourself; instead you give your subconscious a message that who you are is not enough or acceptable to other people. If you wish to be free, it is important not to manipulate other people either, but to give them their freedom. At first you may feel as if you have lost a measure of control if you turn over to other people the right to do as they please with their lives. But you will create between you a whole new level of honesty and love that could not occur without your courage and willingness to re lease control.
You can learn to detach from the reactions of others and from your own emotions if they take you out of a calm, clear center. Loving yourself means asserting yourself with compassion. When you are willing to show others who you are, you open the door for them to expose their real selves also. Judgment stands as an obstacle to self-love. Every time you judge, you separate. When you form opinions about another person, looking at him and saying, for instance, "this person looks like a lazy person, or a failure, or has terrible clothes," you create a message to your subconscious that the world is a place where you had better act in certain ways if you want to be accepted. By rejecting other people through your judgements, you have set up a message in your own subconscious that you are only going to accept yourself under certain conditions. This leads to an inner dialogue of self-criticism. It can also bring back many negative images to you from the outer world, for once you send out these pictures you have created a pathway for them to come back."
Look at the messages you put out to other people. Do you accept them lovingly, without criticizing or putting them down? Do you smile at them? Are you friendly, do you allow them to feel good about themselves, or do you sit without acknowledging them? If you accept them, even just telepathically (that is in your own mind), you assist them in finding their higher selves. You will find other people accepting you more lovingly also.
Your beliefs about reality
create your experience of it.
It can happen in subtle ways. If you think people do not accept you as you are, that you must try hard to please them, then you will draw those kinds of people into your life. You may find that you end up seeing friends at the times they are tired and non-giving. Whatever you believe to be true about friends or any people in your life, you will create that experience of them. If you say, "this man is warm and affectionate towards me," you will create that in the relationship.
To move into a higher sense of self-love, start identifying what you consider to be facts about the way the world works. If you think that the world is cold and uncaring, or that you must try hard for everything you achieve, then that conviction stands between you and self-love. A belief is what you consider a truth about reality. You may say, "it is a fact that if I smile at people they smile back," but this can be a reality for you and not for other people. Indeed, because of this belief you may choose subconsciously to smile only at people who will smile back. If you believe that people never smile back at you, then you will automatically pick people to smile at who never return it.
If you want to experience a world that is caring and supports your images of self-love, begin looking at what you are saying about the world to yourself. You can change your encounters with people and the world by altering what you expect. It has been said "the world may not be just, but it is exact" and this means that what you get is precisely what you expect and believe you will get. If you are in a profession you "know" is hard to make money in, and you say "not many people make money in my field," you will create that as a fact for yourself. You are holding a certain view of reality, and that will be your experience, not only of your career, but of others you meet in that field also. All you need do is alter what you expect to happen and you will experience a different world.
Another quality of self-love is forgiveness. Some of you hang onto old issues, feeling the anger over and over. It is irritation at yourself, perhaps, or at another who let you down. The higher self knows forgiveness. If there is anything you are hanging onto, an anger, a hurt, a negative feeling about another, then you are keeping it in your aura. The person you are mad at is affected, but not as much as you will be. Anything you are carrying in you towards another sits in your aura and acts as a magnet for more of the same. There is most definitely a reason for forgiveness, for it cleanses and heals your aura.
Self-love also involves humility, which is self-expression from the heart and not from the ego. Humility says, "I am open. I am willing to listen. I may not have all the answers." Humility is one of the qualities that will allow you to receive more, for humility implies openness. It does not imply a lack of self-confidence, but a great amount of faith and trust in yourself.
Only those who feel good
about who they are
can express humility.
Those who act the most arrogant or coldly confident are those who lack the very characteristics they are trying to project. People who love themselves come across as very loving, generous and kind; they express their self-confidence through humility, forgiveness and inclusiveness. If you know people who seem to be very wise and yet put others down, reject friends, make people feel bad about themselves—no matter how high their words or what they teach, you can rest assured they do not love themselves.
Loving the self involves faith and trust and belief in who you are, and a willingness to take action upon it. It is not enough to feel that faith and trust; you need to experience it in your outer world. You are a physical being, and joy comes from seeing around you those things that express your inner beauty—a garden, flowers, trees, your house, the ocean. All of these are the rewards of acting upon and trusting yourself, of following your path and vision with action. The ultimate challenge of self-love is to act upon it, to speak up to people and to create in the world your heaven on earth.
It is not enough just to give and radiate love; loving the self comes from receiving love also. If you are giving love to everyone, but they cannot receive it, then it has no place to go. You do everyone great service by being willing to receive their love.
One of the greatest gifts
you can give others is opening
to their love for you.
In any male-female relationship, or between two men or two women, the relationship will succeed to the degree to which each can receive the other's love. Even if you are giving 100 percent, if the other person is receiving only 50 percent, then what you give to him is reduced by half. If what he gives back is only 50 percent, and if you can only receive 50 percent of that, then what you get back is 25 percent, and so on. The result is that you experience less and less love from each other. To experience greater love in your life, be willing to receive gifts from others, offerings of love, friendship and support.
If you want to bring your higher self into your life on a daily basis and increase your self-love, take one characteristic of the soul and whenever you have a moment, think about it. Some of these are: peace, appreciation, humility, harmony, joy, gratefulness, health, abundance, freedom, serenity, strength, integrity, respect, dignity, compassion, forgiveness, will, light, creativity, grace, wisdom, and love. By taking these qualities and reflecting or meditating on them, you will magnetize them to your aura, increase them and draw the recognition of them to you from other people. Whatever you think of, so you are. If every day you pick one of the qualities of the higher self, ponder on and identify with it, you will create it as an experience of yourself.
Self-love involves respecting the self and living in higher purpose. When you put value on yourself, your time, love and vision, so will others. Before you see your friends, ask what is the highest purpose you can create together. Have you ever stayed at someone's house really wanting to leave, but hesitating, not wanting to hurt his feelings? If so, you were valuing him more than yourself. You were giving him the telepathic message that he does not have to respect your time or you, and it should be no surprise if he took you for granted after a while. Whenever you value and respect yourself, speaking with truth about who you are and taking appropriate actions, you not only evolve yourself, but you assist others by your example. The inability to say "no" to people reflects a world view that says other people's feelings are more important than yours, their rights are more significant and should be considered first. When you do this you create energy blockages within yourself, backing up resentment, anger and hurt which then sit in your aura and attract more of the same.
Self-love comes from the heart, in being gentle and giving unconditional love. Some people think self-love means acting powerful and using the will in an aggressive way that denies the rights of others. You have seen people who get their way and who do not care about their effect on others. You call them ruthless. Often, in a similar way, you can be aggressive with yourself, one part of you dominating and controlling the other parts.
Sometimes, the will acts as if it were an enemy, trying to force, direct or make you do certain things. It can feel like a parent, standing over you. To make matters worse, you may think that the things it is trying to force you to do are for your highest good. For instance, you may berate yourself constantly for not being more organized, or not starting something you are putting off. You may make huge lists of things to do and then feel bad if they are not done. This is making the will right and your other self wrong, the self that is resisting the direction of the will. In this case, you are using your will against your self. It may be that your higher self has created the resistance to keep you from doing certain things and is directing you to other doorways.
If it is used in conjunction with the heart to help you in following a path you love, your will can assist you to increase your self-love. The will can be a director of focus. When it is linked with what you love to do there is ho end to what is possible or to the boundaries you can transcend. Have you noticed that when you loved to do something, say your favorite hobby, you could work for hours on end and could easily say no to distractions? The will is a force like a river that you can flow with or try to swim against. You can use it either to beckon and invite you towards your higher path or to constantly punish yourself for apparent transgressions. Which system motivates you? Is your will helping you increase your self-love by focusing you on your path of higher purpose and creating the intent and motivation for action?
Last but not least,
don't take yourself so seriously.
Laugh and play. It's not the end of the world if something doesn't go right. The quality of humor is perhaps one of the greatest doorways to self-love. The ability to laugh, to smile at others, and to put your problems into perspective is an evolved skill. Those who come from a high level of self-love are often humorous, have a great wit, and love to bring out the childlike playfulness in others. They are willing to be spontaneous, often find reasons to smile, are able to make others feel at ease and to be happy themselves.
This next week, as you look at the people in your life, ask yourself (and do it without judgment) do these people love themselves? If you are experiencing difficulties with them, look at the area of problems and ask, do they love themselves in this area? Send them com passion to use in whatever way creates their highest good, and enjoy the love you have just sent out as it comes back to you to use for your highest good.
THE ART OF SELF-LOVE
PLAYSHEET
I How would you know if you were acting or thinking in a way that is loving to yourself?
I How would tomorrow look if everything you did was an act of self-love?
I What would your actions look like if you were loving to yourself in the following areas: your physical body, your intimate relationship, your job or career?
I What would you do tomorrow if you were loving to yourself in your relationship, job and physical body? List three specific actions you would take for each of these three areas.