Think for a moment about something you've deeply struggled with accepting about yourself or your life.
Perhaps it never worked out for you to have children and the grief of that runs deep.
Perhaps you've been carrying extra body weight for decades and you know it's all wrapped up in your feelings of not good enough,
Yet no matter how much therapy you do you still can't shake off that belief and the pounds stay glued to your body.
Perhaps there are episodes in your sexual history that you plan to take to the grave with you that no one will ever know.
Whatever it is,
I want to invite you,
If you can,
To stop what you're doing,
Place one or both hands on your heart,
And just ask yourself,
Can I love myself even with this?
Just sit and allow that question to reverberate through your body.
Perhaps you can love yourself or you already do,
And if you can't,
Then ask yourself,
Well,
Can I love myself even with that?
Because here's the truth,
Whatever challenges you face in your life,
Big or small,
All of them are healable through the power of unconditional self-love,
Inseparable from the love of the divine.
Today I want to talk about a topic that still makes me feel kind of squirmy and that is self-love.
What it is,
How we cultivate it,
And why it matters now more than ever.
If you've been following me for a while,
You know that I'm a practitioner of a somatic healing technique called EFT tapping.
One of the things we do in that practice is say over and over,
I deeply love and accept myself exactly as I in this moment.
Now before I learned about EFT tapping,
I had been a student of Tibetan Buddhism more than 30 years at that time,
And had also spent decades in 12-step recovery,
And in those practices I had been taught to be kind to myself or extend compassion to myself,
But love myself and say that aloud in someone's presence?
Oh boy.
I realized that my previous training up to that point was actually quite cerebral and abstract,
Referencing kindness and compassion while tidally spiritually sidestepping the ardor of love.
So what is self-love anyway?
Self-love means giving myself complete unconditional space to be exactly where I am in the moment,
To feel everything I need to feel.
There's a sense of presence,
You know,
Feeling what's inside of me,
And then also a sense of spaciousness,
Like the feeling of the moment is just one weather system in the greater sky of my being.
When I let the busy calm down and I just drop in,
What is there as the medicine is the space itself.
That cradle of love divorced from any story of who's right,
Who's wrong,
What should be,
What shouldn't be,
Just that simple flame of awareness is in itself love.
And that practice tends to bring me back to homeostasis.
It brings me back to myself in a good way,
And it doesn't mean that I necessarily feel happy and high,
But rather it guides me to a home within myself that I can return to.
There's a sense of wholesomeness,
Of goodness,
Of resting contentedly in that cradle of space,
And a sense of that being an energy within myself that I can return to and trust.
There are a couple of quotes about love that I want to share with you.
One of them is from master mythologist Joseph Campbell,
Who said,
Love is the burning point of life,
And since all life is sorrowful,
So is love.
The stronger the love,
The more that pain,
But love bears all things.
Love itself is pain,
You might say,
The pain of being truly alive.
The other quote is from a woman named Corrie ten Boom,
Who is one of my sheroes or she-heroes or heroines.
Corrie was part of a Christian family in Amsterdam that hid Jews from the Nazis,
And her entire family was captured and sent to a concentration camp.
And while the rest of her family was killed,
Corrie was released through a fluke clerical error,
And went on to become an incredibly powerful spiritual teacher and healer.
This quote of hers floors me every time.
She once said,
There is no pit you can find yourself in that is so deep,
Where the love of God does not go deeper still.
What both of these quotes say to me is that the traumas of our lives,
The experiences that we regard as unbearable,
Unspeakable,
And infinitely shameful,
Are in fact the keys that open the gates to an equally unfathomable divine grace,
The cup that always overflows and never runs dry.
When I think about real self-love,
I hearken back to my friend Ellen Young,
Who I knew for three too short years before she died in 2016.
At every stage of her cancer journey,
Ellen would place her hands on her heart and ask herself,
Can I love myself even with this?
In our final conversation about two weeks before she died,
Ellen asked me,
Please don't let anyone say that I battled cancer.
I didn't battle it.
I loved it.
I loved my cancer.
It was a truly precious part of me.
So what I learned from Ellen's experience is that self-love doesn't guarantee a happily ever after storybook ending to every struggle.
You know,
It didn't give Ellen the miracle remission she was hoping for.
But what it does give us is a foundation within our being to meet life's inevitable sorrows with equanimity and generosity.
Why does self-love matter?
Why practice self-love when it can feel so trivial in a world lurching through one turbulent upheaval after another?
Corrie ten Boom's words remind me,
Self-love and divine love are not two kinds of love,
But rather the same vital current flowing through different channels.
And when we drop into the deepest layers of self-acceptance,
Not just the I'm having a great hair day acceptance,
But the rock meets bone,
Even with this kind of acceptance,
We unlock love as a door to infinite wisdom and understanding.
This is why self-love matters.
It's the foundation of coming into right relationship with the divine,
Which is the foundation of character and character is the foundation of community and a community that is healthy and rooted in care is the foundation of a humane world.
We're living through a time when every institution,
Every system we thought was unshakable is now in free fall.
And when that fall inevitably occurs,
What will rise from the ashes of ruin?
Despite all the talk of the inevitable brave new world that lies ahead,
We as flesh and blood,
Heart and soul humans still have the power to choose.
We must choose love while we still can.
And that love begins within.
So what will stand in the ruins?
It's our choice.
Let it be the love that never left you.
The love that goes deeper still.
