31 Loving Yourself

Have you ever felt insecure and unloved? Often we are separated from our true loving nature.
We may be haunted by feelings of abandonment reflected in our relationships. We don't know how to more fully experience our Loving center of Being. You can though. This podcast explores the how. Very practical, powerful, and simple.

These podcasts are a compilation of what I have found to be the most helpful over the last 50 years on my path of awakening. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart.

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. Please reach out to a psychotherapist if one is ever needed.

Transcript

Hello, This is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. Have you ever felt really very unloved, Insecure, Maybe alone? I think a lot of people have felt that way. And I sure do understand that. I remember back when I was in theological school, And I was having a existential crisis as well as emotional crisis, And I sure didn't feel loved. And I couldn't find anything solid in the universe to give me that love that I was looking for. It seemed to me that people's love was unstable for various reasons. They might come and go out of your life. Maybe they die, Maybe they move on. And even in good relationships, The love could fade. I was in seminary theological school, So you would think I would rely on God's love, But as I said, I was in an existential crisis, And I wasn't even sure, Is there even a God? How do I know that? I pondered, Am I loved? I just thought, Let me start there. Could I find proof, Something that was compelling where I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, 100% certainty, Was I loved. And I spent weeks in the library with a notepad just thinking, Am I loved? I pondered it. I read so many books. I studied, I researched, I talked to people. And this went on for a long time, Day in, Day out, For weeks, Months, I don't know. It could be over a year, Just with that thought at the forefront of my heart and my mind. And then one day, I remember I was sitting on a bench outside, And suddenly it occurred to me, You're so depressed, You want love so bad, You feel so anxious, Why are you so concerned? Unless you love yourself. As concerned as you are, As depressed as you are over this issue, And anxious, That's how much you care for yourself. Otherwise, Why would you be depressed over it? Why would you have such emotional angst unless you really cared for yourself that deeply? Well, I couldn't believe it. I had stumbled upon this thing that was right before my eyes, Right under my nose the whole time. I loved myself. I always thought that I hated myself. That's why I was so depressed and anxious and treated myself so harshly and whipped myself trying to find love. But in fact, It was the opposite. I was doing those things because I loved myself. It was so startling that I tried for a long time to overturn this thought, This revelation. Well, What if somebody said that you were stupid and you believe that and you were growing up in your life feeling that you were not intelligent? Is that loving yourself? Well, Yeah, Because the reason I would do that would be because they meant a lot to me. Maybe it was a parent or somebody in my life, A figure that I respected, And I wanted their love. So I didn't want to disagree with them. I wanted to believe what they believed, And if they thought I wasn't intelligent, Then they knew best and I would go with them, And I would also think that I wasn't intelligent. Or whatever example you might come up with. Being their love was important to me, So I did. Why? Because I loved myself and I would do anything because I wanted to, Even if it meant growing up thinking I wasn't intelligent or any other example you might come up with. I would treat myself badly because I loved myself and out of that love, I decided it was worth it because I would get something greater. The love of my parent by agreeing with them or the love of my significant figure in my life by doing the crazy things that were required for them to continue to love me. I did all this because I loved myself. Every way I twisted it and turned it, It turned out that I was doing what I was doing because I loved myself. If my culture believed in crazy things and I accepted those crazy things, Why would I do that except I love myself and I wanted to fit in. So I believed what my culture told me to believe. So once I realized that indeed I did love myself, Even if the expression of that love was quite maladaptive, In other words it didn't feel good that I felt so depressed and anxious because I cared so much about myself. Depression and anxiety weren't getting me anywhere. They weren't helping but I was doing it because I cared. So I realized my maladaptive behaviors were an expression of that love so I started to sit down with myself and I would tell myself, Feel good that you feel bad because it proves that you love yourself. If you didn't care, Why would you feel so bad over these issues? Bringing me to the second point, I realized that I had to absorb, I had to open up. Now that I discovered that I was love, I had to open up and receive that love. So I used to sit down and feel good that I felt bad and I would just hug myself and I thought, Well, I'm going to just start to include adaptive behaviors along with the maladaptive ones and just soak up the love that I've discovered that I have for myself and let it be okay that I'm also have some maladaptive habits, Depression, Anxiety, Whatever it was, Until I can figure out how to let those go and I bet starting to absorb the love will help unravel the depression and the anxiety anyway and it did. I bring this up because I think so many of us crave love and we don't know that it's here all the time. You do love yourself, I can guarantee that on the same basis that I found that way back in seminary as I just described. Love is all around us. We are love and the whole universe reflects love back to us all the time through every bit of creation. The only reason we don't feel it and see it is because we've separated ourselves for whatever reason from our innate nature and as we come back to ourselves we call that awakening and that's what this podcast is. The things that separate us are tension, Stress and our thought forms and as we let those go it's very relaxing and we melt back into our innate nature which is love, Happiness and well-being. Thus the title of our podcast Relaxing into Happiness. To relax back in happiness though which is our true nature I just want to remind everybody that that requires not just knowing it but soaking it up, Receiving and relaxing into what's there all the time and that's our true nature. You have to soak it up like a dry sponge and feel it. Find it and feel it. That's feeling yourself and you'll always be separated from yourself if you can't feel yourself right? So feel it. Find it and feel it. You are love. Feel it. Soak it up and then feel it. So important. As much as you can and then a little bit more the next day and the next day until that's the way it is all the time. Everything is love. It's made of love and we have to work hard to block it out. As I became more clear and as I meditated, As I stopped and just let go of the things that were clouding my vision and I became more clear I could feel and see the nature of consciousness, The nature of creation, The nature of molecules as strange as that sounds and I could see that they were all made of love. Here's what I experience about life. On the far end of the spectrum and we've talked about this a lot in these podcasts but on the far end of the spectrum is beyond creation. I can feel that. I can see that. I get there intuitively but it's very real. I've opened up that intuitive eye where I can receive and understand these things and it's beyond reality. Everything is there but it doesn't exist because only those things in creation exist but as strange as this sounds as nothing flows into something as it begins to become something there's lots of light and then that light as it slows down turns into sound which turns into bliss which turns into joy and happiness. So everything is radiating happiness and joy and everything is made of that and because everything is ultimately the same thing but in different shapes it's attracted to one another, To each other and it's got the same vibration and that magnetism that pulls everything together, That sameness, That same vibration, That resonance, That is love. Love pulls everything together. When you're in a relationship and you love you feel pulled together, You feel on a similar resonance, You care about each other, You have empathy for one another. Well it's that way with all of the consciousness and the creation and the molecules and the atoms, Everything in life is made of that. So we are made of love, We are surrounded by love, It's love everywhere. We have to work not to see it, We have to work to block it out, We have to stay stuck in our heads and stuck in our mindsets not to see it and that's why we meditate so that we can stop doing that and as we relax our clarity comes back and we see we are love, We're surrounded by love, Everything's love and as we come from a loving place love flows through our life and we give and receive love. More things, More synchronicity happens in our lives because we're surrounded and a part of love as is the whole universe, It's all one and we'll talk more about that in another podcast on the subject of trust because you can imagine when everything is yourself and everything flows to your highest good because it loves you just as you love it because you're all the same thing that a great amount of trust, Complete trust happens and in great trust you can move mountains because everything, The universe conspires to help you because it is you. It only makes sense. So yes, On a fundamental level we are loved but I couldn't see on a fundamental level so that's why the first example I gave you that I came across in seminary was so powerful for me. Well, Along those lines let's look at another powerful way that is helpful before we get to clear vision where we just know and see that everything is love. When we don't know and see that everything is love we can do something that sounds so incredibly simple but it's very effective and that's to keep a gratitude journal. Just write down at the end of every day what happened to you, What loving thing happened, A dog comes up to you and wags its tail, A squirrel walks up to you, Nature, Somebody gives you a gift, Things that you would like turn out, People smile at you. You know we're so separated that we weed these things out, We block them, We forget them but if you write them down at the end of every day after a while they accumulate and they're down in writing so they become indisputable and that indisputable fact starts to overwhelm the protestations of our blocked mind, Our mind that says no I'm not loved, No I'm not loved, Nobody loves me, Things like that because the universe does love you and after a while it just becomes ridiculous to say otherwise. This is a good thing to do until you can see clearly because it's a step forward and we move forward as we've talked about in other podcasts, We move forward the most powerfully through our baby steps, Just a half step forward at a time and this is a good half step. What's another good step to connect to the love that you are? Well nature, Sit in nature because nature is pure love, It will shower you with love. Why do people love nature so much? Well because pure beingness shines through nature and nature doesn't think so it's all being but it's not clouded by thought forms, It's not contained by the boundaries and divisions of thought forms. We as humans have the ability to do that so we block ourselves out but nature doesn't and when you're sitting in high resonance, The beauty and the love and the light of nature, That part of you which is all of you that is beauty, Love and light resonates more clearly and strongly, Brilliantly because the nature around it supports and when one thing's resonating, The other thing of similar frequency will resonate with it and get stronger so your beauty will blow through the containment of your thought forms and you start to feel better and better and better even if your thought forms haven't evolved. Your inner nature will just burst through all of the delusions and illusions that you've created in your mental stories and emotional stories. It's not you, It's all people, We all do that. We all, Because we're separated from ourselves, We feel existential pain, Emotional pain, Physical pain and we create stories about it and beliefs about it and actions to take about it which then further cloud everything up and we just get further and further out on a limb and disconnected from ourselves until we find a way to come back and so being in nature will blow through all of that at least for a while and you can come back to yourself. In fact, Joseph Campbell once said that man's purpose in life was to match his heartbeat with the heartbeat of nature. I love that. Okay, You are loved. Soak it up. Hey, You can feel good that you feel bad. Give yourself a hug and soak it up. Okay, I look forward to talking to you next time. Take care. Bye.

Reviews

Thank you William. As always I'm grateful for your talks

Perfect timing today 🙏🙏🙏🙏this makes so much sense and it is so simple for we who overthink. Thank you

Wow, wow, wow! Once again, this was word-for-word exactly what I needed to hear today 🙏🫂❤️🌟I hope you won’t mind that I share a bit more of my experience here in the hopes that anyone reading this might be helped by my perspective, especially since some people mentioned in these comments that this one was tough for them to understand:
My grandfather was the authoritarian of the household. Not even my grandmother was “allowed to put her head as high as his”. Everyone, literally everyone in the family, even the ones who lived out of state, were utterly controlled by him and his shifting moods and needs [one minute he was declaring himself the Master of the Universe, the next minute he was a powerless victim and “none of us were doing enough to make him feel better’].
My sister and I grew up in their house, and he and my grandmother openly favored her over me [my grandfather even admitted to this favoritism to my face, though it was after he had walked himself through everything he had given her, and realized he hadn’t given me the same attention. I think he was ashamed, and I am working on forgiveness of him].
Favoritism aside, my sister and I were both required to give up all autonomy in his household. I didn’t even realize how insidious that agreement was until after I turned 40 years old.
Having been born into a family where my mom divorced my dad only a few months after I was born, I just wanted a dad.
One of my earliest memories is being on a school bus and this kid told me “I don’t have a real family because I don’t have a dad”. That DEVASTATED ME.
I just wanted a dad, and I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to realize I was willing to give away my power and sovereignty in order to experience love from a Father Figure™.
My grandfather raged whenever a decision was made without his input, even if that decision had nothing to do with him.
My grandfather only acknowledged his definitions of words like “respect “ [read: he had no problem violating your boundaries and being utterly disrespectful to you, but you better not do anything to upset him]. Even though this man was a literal tyrant, I wanted his love. I wanted that Father Figure Energy and Connection™, even if it meant making agreements with him that were having a drastically harmful impact on my growth as a person. I was too young to understand that part.
Fast forward 3 or 4 decades later, and I am undoing a lifetime of giving away my power and “looking outside of myself for answers”. The idea that I have to “look outside of myself for answers” was put there because I made an agreement:
“I will give away my self-sovereignty to you, my grandfather, and in return, you will love me as a father is meant to love his child.”
[SPOILER ALERT: he was not good at loving anyone or anything except his dog]
That’s what William Cooper is talking about in this. It’s a glorious paradox✨After listening to this talk, I now see that I actually do believe that I deserve love, and that I do love myself more than I allow myself to believe, (because I wanted connection so badly and I loved my grandfather so much I was willing to give up everything) and that means I never really stopped loving myself. I am “sitting with the bad feelings” because the bad feelings are proof positive that I believe that I deserve Unconditional Love.
If you gave away your power, it’s like you gave away your favorite sandwich to a kid in the cafeteria who forgot their lunch that day…you cared more about the connection and helping someone else than your own satisfaction. We just ended up taking it to such extremes that we forgot that being living embodiments of Unconditional Love is how we got here in the first place. And we never stopped being Unconditional Love ❤️Wowzers, that’s way more than I intended to write, I just like helping others and sometimes sharing personal experiences helps with integration ❤️‍🩹❤️🤟Thank you William Cooper THIS HELPED ME SO MUCH 👑♦️❤️‍🩹✨

I'm having a hard time with this one. I have listened 3 times twice fell asleep but probably good for subconscious. I will keep a gratitude journal-- think it'll help cut through thought forms. Walking in nature this morning and it seemed to say flow with the cycles: prepare to hunker down & rest, soar without questioning the unknown, ease into being...match nature's heartbeat 💞

i really enjoyed this talk on love. I think I understood what you were saying. But sometimes we do things that don’t seem like love, but they actually are because we do them because we love ourselves… Is that right? I’m going to watch for that in my daily life now and look at it as another form of self love 🌙🧡🎃🤎🍁🌞💛🌙🧡🎃🤎