There are points in my life where I am on the “self-love” ball, and times when I fall off… HARD.
I’ve been going through the latter time lately. And here’s the thing with that: normally, it takes me falling off into oblivion before it becomes painful enough that I have no other choice than to get back on the ball- and only because that is INFINITELY less painful.
Today, however, I am trying to curb that pattern. Today I am only moderately uncomfortable. Which is about step less than I was last night when I realized what’s going on. When I had the ah-ha moment, I stopped all things and went to bed. I went to bed at 9pm. I slept until 9 am. And then I tried with all of my heart not to do things like cleaning unless it would make me feel better. (Which, it really didn’t. But it had to get done. Which is how I got here in the first place: “Well, it has to get done and I’m the one who has to do it, so I’ll take time for myself later…..”) No, I haven’t been 100% on my self-love game today, but it’s definitely an improvement from yesterday. I meditated, for one, which is something I’ve been woefully lacking in. For two, I posted a blog I wrote awhile back, and began on this one. Oh! And I wrote a goal list for my own personal goals, one of which was “write a blog a week”!
I don’t have a specific purpose for this blog, but accountability. Perhaps also to say: self-
love is messy. It’s not always perfect. Sometimes, in fact, what is most self-loving is for me to notice that I am NOT being self-loving and accepting it for what it is without judgement.
That can be hard to do. I suppose judgement has it’s place. It teaches me what I do and don’t like from my own particular viewpoint. I don’t, however, know that it has ever taught me the TRUTH about anything. I suppose it could be argued that it has taught me the truth about my own ego ideas. My own projections, my own biases, my own conditioning, my own perspectives… but I don’t know that judgement has ever taught me a lot about any universal truth. My ego wants to argue here that it does- that my judgement protects me, aids me in decision making, and helps me be a “good person” (which for me, means aligning my values and my actions). But I also guess that judgement, as I have known and perceived the word anyways, hasn’t really shown me any truth as IT IS. It hasn’t shown me the truth through anything except through the eyes of my own, very limited, experiences and perceptions.
Going further down this rabbit-hole, I realize I need to reinstate one of my old favorite practices: asking the things I am observing, what they are, as opposed to what I perceive them to be.
That will be my self-love practice this week. It will be my practice to remember that the way things seem to be are only because I perceive them to be that way. And that in any moment, I can ask the universe (ie the observed things) to show me the truth of itself, without me getting in the way.
The first thing I ask is my reflection: “what are you?”
It’s interesting to begin writing with no purpose and seeing where it leads. Thank you for joining me on this particular journey.
Yours in Oneness🧡Freedom