Cultivating Self-Love

A practice to cultivate self-love and a recipe offered centering compassion, spaciousness, equanimity, kindness, forgiveness and humor. Working with the life just as it is and the self just as it is, bringing kindness and compassion.

Transcript

Welcome to this practice centering self-love. Please find yourself sitting in a posture that feels conducive to practice, Open, Relaxed, Yet energized. Perhaps you're sitting in a favorite chair. You may be sitting cross-legged on the floor. You may be lying down or even standing. Feel into what the body wants in this moment and what will be most supportive of your practice. Opening to self-love and cultivating self-love is really the ground of practice. Often we have the impulse we want to love others, We want to help others, But if it's not coming from a solid foundation of self-love, Then it becomes quite complicated and there can become entanglements where we're really trying to fulfill something of our own needs through others or through our work. So finding yourself and cultivating that ground of self-love is wise and also brings a level of cleanness to our interactions with others because we are centered in self-love. We're coming without the need to validate ourselves through others. So let's start by perhaps placing a hand on heart and just seeing if you can send self-love down through the body, Softening the belly, Opening the heart, Feeling the flow of prana, Life energy through the body and connecting with a true sense of gratitude for this moment, This breath, This day, This life, Exactly as it is. Softening the desires we might have for something to be different, Softening the conditionality that we often engage in. I'm happy if this thing is happening. I like myself if I see myself in this specific way. The radical offering of self-love is about expansiveness, Spaciousness and non-conditionality, Really welcoming everything that is exactly as it is without needing it to be different. Seeing the ways that we are successful, Seeing the ways that we are doing well and also opening to and seeing the ways we struggle, Softening our heart to our own challenges, Looking at long-standing patterns that we may be engaging with that haven't quite budged or transformed yet and opening up into that spaciousness. As Ajahn Sumedho says, Right now it's like this. It's like this. So taking a moment to just make peace with how it is right now, The lived experience of your own life, The richness, The complexity, The beauty, The confusion. As we call in self-love, There's actually other building blocks that are essential to cultivate and to awaken self-love, Much like if we make a recipe, There are certain key ingredients. There are key ingredients to self-love. One is compassion, Self-compassion. So just take a moment to let that word compassion land in the body, Mind, Spirit. Let it open and soften you. Self-compassion again for the ways that it may be challenging, Self-compassion for imperfection and all the ways it may show up for struggles. Ah, Yes, This is part of the human experience. We are imperfect. We struggle. We want to get it right. And yet we don't always. We can connect with that shared humanity of other humans as well, Also imperfect, Doing their best. Another key ingredient is spaciousness, Just creating more space around everything. Sometimes the stories can be quite claustrophobic. We can become so narrowly focused on one aspect of ourself, One aspect of our life that is perhaps not going the way we would like. And it can feel quite constricting, Quite limiting, Quite disheartening. So what happens if we open the windows, Open the doors, Even step outside under that big blue spacious sky, The stratosphere, And take that very big view? The world is so vast. The universe is so vast. And welcoming in some of that vastness is a balm for the spirit. It is a balm for what ails. And often opening to spaciousness brings in equanimity, More balance, The ability to hold everything that's arising, What's easy and what's hard, What's succeeding, What's failing, What we're certain about, What we're confused about, Holding it all with some sense of balance and equanimity. So another key ingredient, Spaciousness and also equanimity. And I've also mentioned kindness a few times. I think it's worth teasing out that sense of kindness. What does it mean to be kind to ourself? We can often be so harsh, That voice inside the head, Judging, Doubting, Worrying, Just injecting so much negativity into the life, Into the body. So again, Take a moment and just breathe in kindness and exhale anything that's not kind, Letting go of anything that's interfering with the sense of kindness. And you can use that same practice of inhaling any of these ingredients, Inhaling spaciousness, Letting go of that claustrophobia and constriction, Inhaling equanimity, Letting go of the grasping and the clinging and the perseverating. So as we come to the end of this sit, I invite you to perhaps do some further journaling around your own recipe for self-love. Again, I'm offering certain key ingredients here, Self-compassion, Spaciousness, Equanimity, Kindness, Forgiveness, Humor. There may be something in your recipe that you want to add in as well. And it's time well spent kind of journaling on each of those aspects. What are you already bringing and what needs to be increased, Perhaps what can be welcomed more fully as you grow your self-love. May you be happy, May you be healthy, May you be safe and protected. May you live with ease and well-being.

Reviews

Bingo! This is exactly for what I looked for, searched, hoped to find - the beginning of a new journey...🙏