(PS - this is also available as a podcast episode - also found wherever you get your podcasts - and if you listen in, thanks! Hopefully the audio quality is getting better ;)
February is always such a special month for me – not only is it my birthday month (yes, I think of it as a whole month), my husband’s birthday is in February, and we even got married on my birthday! Yes it is special because of Valentine’s Day too, but even more special to me, is the date of February 11th, because that’s the date of my nana and papa’s wedding anniversary. February might be the shortest month of the year, but it never fails to feel magical to me. My grandparents were married 60 years before my nana passed away in 2021, just a few months shy of my son’s birth, sadly.
Why I am speaking of this now? My nana was someone who struggled with self-love, I think, her entire life. She was the youngest of three and there was a lot of struggle in her family – they were poor, there was post-war shell shock (as PTSD used to be known) and alcoholism, and she had to carry a lot of weight of never feeling ‘enough’ in her life. But she was magic to me. When I think of self-love now, I think of her, not just because of how much she loved me, but also how much I think she tried to get me to see myself through her eyes. It’s the little things that she used to say to me, which at the time I hated or didn’t understand, things that I understand now, as a mother. Things like, how much she loved my chubby little knuckles before kissing them. I hated my body always and so this didn’t make sense to me; little did I know that one day I would have a child, a child for whom I want something different - and that's for him to not see himself through a dark lens (like I did). Like my own magical nana did.
And isn’t that such a tragedy? That here we are on this planet, sharing this space and time with one another, and yet instead of enjoying it, we mostly spend our time criticizing ourselves and each other? Picking apart the perceived flaws, trashing ourselves at every opportunity (sometimes not even consciously), and comparing ourselves. Constantly. I talk about the ego a lot, and comparison is one of the tools of ego because what it does is undermine and invalidate ourselves and our efforts. Yes, I know that some use comparison as a tool to try to enhance themselves or use it as motivation, but what I’m speaking about it is the use of comparison where it diminishes you, not expands.
I’ve said before that love is connection. But not only connection, it is that which made you and that of which you are made. It is your natural state, just as transformation is your natural state. You are a microcosm of the universe, which is also of love and connection, which is also constantly in a state of transformation. Your three aspects – body, mind, and spirit – are all meant to constantly be transforming. All life is change. All life is connected. All life is love. But, we also hold space for paradox remember, and so one of the constant challenges of this universe is the battle between transformation and stagnation. How this manifests in human beings is through our suffering, our trauma, which arrests our natural process of transformation in one or more aspects of that body-mind-spirit, and keeps us stuck in repeating cycles or worse – adding new traumas and suffering to our experience because we’ve been unable to release ourselves from the prison we find ourselves in.
So what does this have to do with self-love? Well, self-love is a master key for transformation. Just as transformation is our natural state, so is love, including, love of self. But what self am I talking about here? I’m talking about your True Self. Your most authentic self. The authentic expression of your Highest Self while incarnated here on this beautiful blue planet. The aspect of self that is neither your Ego or the Witness. To know this Self is to LOVE this self, because when you KNOW this self, you KNOW God. You KNOW Source. You Know love itself. Remember, it’s what made you and also the stuff of which you are made, and so self-love and self-knowledge are two sides of the same coin. TO see your Self is to see your Creator, because you are an aspect of that eternal light from whence we all come.
Despite love and transformation and Self-Love being a part of your natural state however, the paradox here is that the human condition means that more often than not, we experience ourselves through a lens of self-loathing, and that’s because we are mostly confused about who we are. I daresay that most human beings think that they are the person they see in the mirror – or rather, the dark mirror – the ego. The patchwork quilt of identity that is fashioned over time from our negative experiences of this world. That quilt holds every trauma and limiting belief to have ever formed in our minds and bodies, but not our spirit. You see, self-loathing may be part of the human condition, but it is only a part of this physical, 3D human condition, for it is not the condition of our spirit, our higher self. Meaning, there is paradox within paradox, and the beauty of spiralling through the experiences of life mean that we must start pure and move into those states of negativity and ego and self-loathing so that we may learn and grow from them, and ultimately come to the realization that the only meaning any of it has is due to the meaning WE ascribe to it, and therefore the instant you want to assign new meaning, you can, you have that freedom, that free will, to stand up and say, I AM DONE with ways which diminish me. I see that they have and have had a function in my evolution, but just as evolution needed dinosaurs, there came a time where they were no longer necessary. I’m not just speaking about the asteroid, I’m talking about the divine plan for humanity, which could not have occurred while dinosaurs roamed the earth. There is a divine plan for you, for me, for all of us. And while we are in the prison of self-loathing and reliving our suffering, we are not evolving. Not transforming.
Just as self-love is a catalyst for transformation – like the ART of forgiveness – self-loathing and fear arrest that natural process in body and mind. Sure, a person who has suffered and not yet released themselves from it still will change, that’s a given, because like I said, change and transformation is absolutely WHO YOU ARE. YOU ARE change and transformation, but where those changes take place are what determine the quality of that transformation and whether that transformation is diminishing or expanding. The natural process of transformation is always toward expansion, where the unnatural process of transformation is always toward diminishment. It becomes difficult to express meaning sometimes because we lack a language for this stuff. I said natural versus unnatural, but only so that I could make my meaning clear. But the reality is, change and transformation is always natural, though not always subjectively positive for the person undergoing the change. However, what is objectively true is that one spirals up, and one spirals down, though the end result (and there is never an end) could be that spiraling down is necessary to foster the growth needed to spiral up. For example, in my case, I spiraled down for years. Sure I changed, my body got older, my mind retreated further into the limiting beliefs it had created, but those changes were not serving my highest good at that time (though again, holding space for paradox means that at the same time that they didn’t serve my highest good, they also DID serve my highest good because I am here now, grateful for those experiences). This is what I mean by lacking adequate language to talk about concepts where an event or circumstance can simultaneously be both objectively bad AND good, if we don’t restrict ourselves to just how we’re experiencing the event NOW. Isn’t that an interesting paradox as well, for the NOW is infinite, which means contained within the present moment is the future – and the past – which means that if you experience something objectively bad NOW, you have the power to look into your future and see a different outcome and base your response to the NOW based on what you want to see in the FUTURE. This is how you get to play with time, you magical, powerful being, you.
So when I say that you are not transforming so long as you are stuck identifying with what happened in the past and how that past is still present in the body, what I mean is that you are not transforming in the way that you have now decided to show up in this reality. Meaning, you have exerted a free will choice to say – “I intend to take a different path.” This is really the heart of not just free will, but Self-Love, where you choose YOUR TRUE SELF over everything else, you choose the real you, and give yourself permission to practice the ART of forgiveness with yourself and the world, and step into a new reality. Just like that. That is – again – how powerful you are. The distance between where you are now and where you want to be is just a thought away.
One of my very best friends asked me once, “how does self-love even work?” At the time I didn’t really have an answer for her. I had to go within and ask that question to the Eternal Self, which is the best way to seek answers (especially ones that we already know). I call this ‘channeling,’ but at its most basic, it’s really just learning to listen to your intuition. This is the portal to Higher Self wisdom and really, it’s like opening a dam – once the floodgates are open…be prepared for all sorts of weird and wonderful tidbits to come through (especially, for some reason, around two or three in the morning). But I digress. How does self-love even work? Self-love at its most basic, and as I’ve discussed, is hand-in-hand with Self-Knowledge. Awareness of Self and how you show up in the world versus how you WANT to show up in the world. The reality is that many individuals don’t know themselves. I certainly didn’t. Getting to know yourself is the greatest, most empowering, most enjoyable/fun/satisfying/exciting/surreal process that a human being can go through. It won’t just open your mind, it will open your heart. It will empty you out and fill you back up. Break you down and build you back up. It will take you from spiraling down to spiraling up. It takes you, breaks you, shakes you, and replaces the FAKE you with the REAL you, so that you can go out into the world and be that change you want to see. Because when we embody transformation, all we are really saying is that we are unafraid to be our most authentic selves, and once we are our most authentic selves, guess what we get to do? We get to commit the second greatest act of Self-Love, which is paradoxically all about helping others discover themselves. This is the principle of Awakened Leadership, and it is rooted in Unity. Remember, if we are all aspects of each other, fingers of light sharing the same light, then by helping others you help yourself. By loving others you love yourself. It always come back to where we are now: that You Get What You Give.
My nana wasn’t really looking at me from her own eyes, you see. She was seeing me through God’s eyes, just as I was seeing her through God’s eyes (I just didn't know it). Just as I see my son through the eyes of Amma, Source, God. How could you ever see through God’s eyes and not break down in the presence of such love? Because make no mistake, God is love, true love.
Happy Valentines Day.
