How Do I Love ME?

Attain the Overview in Order to Love

 

For ever so long on the spiritual path, we have been told to “love ourselves” for we are only able to love others to the degree that we love ourselves.  But, in the quest to know what love is and how to accomplish it, what does it mean to love oneself?

The facile answer is to take care of our bodies – have a massage, treat yourselves to a day at the spa, eat healthy, do yoga, exercise, etc.  Others recommend meditation to calm the mind and constructive hobbies to engage the mind in positive activity.  If there are emotional challenges, some recommend support groups or counseling.

But all of these are external solutions to an internal issue.  You are not your body or your mind or your emotions.  You are a soul who generates a body, mind, and emotions in order to experience/learn what you came into the physical realms to accomplish.

Soul's Beauty Expressed

Locating and living from your own point of origin (the soul) is critical to forward progress on the spiritual path and to fully living an enjoyable life on Planet Earth.  From the pure perspective of soul, there is no such thing as “loving oneself” for there is nothing but love and no one to love for everything is the communal soul.  But the minute you made the decision to have a physical incarnation, you bifurcated into a higher and lower self and this allowed you to perceive separate individuals, separate emotions (love/hate and everything in between), separate times and lives.  So, when considering what it means to “love yourself,” place yourself as close as you can to your point of origin (soul).  See your life from the overview available to soul – this is not your only life, this is not your only place, and everything that occurs here is perfectly orchestrated for your higher learning and understanding.

When you choose (and we emphasize “choose”) to look at your life from that perspective, you have given yourself access to higher levels of love for yourself.  You no longer source your value or worth from those around you.  You no longer perceive love as being based on your own or others’ approval of you.  You accept yourself (and everyone else) unconditionally and realize that everything you have done and everything that has happened to you has been for the purpose of your forward progress.  Now, you are starting to love yourself.

Rather than dreading the lessons of your life, you are eager to progress and so you seek out the tangles within your energy field.  They may manifest themselves as unresolved anger/grief/fear from your early years or from outdated but persistent thought patterns.  With industry, passion, and dedication you eradicate these energetic tangles by allowing your emotions to run through you freely until you have felt them enough.  You will know when this has happened.  It’s a bit like rinsing tangles out of your hair.  It’s not untangled until it is, no matter how much your ego wants it.

A word of caution in this regard . . . the energy of the spiritual warrior who wants to eradicate all energetic tangles and eliminate all lower vibrational energies within oneself can easily slide into prideful, ego-driven fantasies within oneself.  “I don’t need to do my spiritual clearing work every day because I’m so evolved it’s unnecessary.  I’ve done everything my teachers have told me so I must be very advanced on the path.”  A wise man said, “Make no judgments, make no comparisons, delete the persistent need to understand.”  This type of spirituality is based on comparisons with others and is merely a detour on the path.  Pride comes from a need to emotionally protect oneself.  If you find you have wandered down this detour path, simply look to discover the emotions you wish not to feel, the thing you dread being exposed to others, the memory you are trying to forget.  Clear it, feel it, expose it.  It’s a bit like taking the bandage off a healing wound.  The new skin is tender and fragile, but it is pure and real.  Self-declared spiritual evolution is not to be trusted.  Those in bodies simply do not possess the necessary vantage point from which to make such assessments.

So, how can you “love yourself”?  Go to the highest point within yourself and see yourself and your life from that perspective – as close to the unified soul as you can get.  See your life as you would a stage play and get curious about what the writer has created for the next act.

Then go to the spa, eat some chocolate, get a massage, and have a nice meditation.  All those things are lovely to do for the part of you that is your physical body/mind.  They just don’t accomplish loving yourself if you do nothing else.

How will you know when you’ve really started to love yourself?  It’s easy to tell.  Watch for these two symptoms . . .

1.      You feel completely loved by the universe, the angels, the energies, God/Goddess/All That Is, the Great Cosmic Giggle (or whatever name you choose for that unnamable thing that is larger than us all).  This love melts every defense you ever had and leaves you whole, sweet, and soft.  You experience frequent episodes of awe at what’s happening to you interspersed with waves of gratitude for everything and everyone.

2.     You find yourself falling in love with everyone around you – even those you have found difficult in the past.  You see their lives as stage plays they wrote in order to learn lessons, resolve issues, and evolve.  You accept that they are on their path, just as you are on yours so negative judgments or opinions about others are now simply unnecessary.

When you experience these things, you experience the higher realms of Spirit and it just gets better and better.  It all “awaits you in the garden.”

Namaste.