I have noticed recently a challenge in people around me – the challenge is showing up with love.
Humans have been taught to externalize our expectation for love, and hold it up against these expectations, measuring if we are loved by someone elses’ actions or the Universe/God/etc. When I see this, I usually start to look at how this person is loving in general. What I have noticed is that most people measuring love from the outside in, don’t have a strong sense of self-love and it shows up in their actions.
I notice often, people that struggle to nourish themselves with food, by either eating not enough or too much, haven’t learnt the art of self love. People who don’t take care of basic things like remembering to make choices that serve their sense of self – like moving toward or away from someone or something, remembering to stick to a commitment made internally that requires showing up externally or remembering an attitude chosen and sticking to it. We allow ourselves to be derailed by other people or things/events and in the process, abandon ourselves.
We see this obviously with women, in raising children or families, and we see it in men who are running companies and are stuck outwardly, finding the inner love most difficult. This is portrayed often by defensive ego patterns. Defensive ego patterns can look like self-affirmation to other people, self – aggrandizement, provoking others in one way or another, ultimately pointing to a complete breakdown in relational harmony.
This external breakdown in relational harmony is a sign of inner self love wittled away through belief systems, conditioning, programming, habit, and we attempt with all our power, to get the love we need from the people around us. This starts a blame game, as others can’t fulfill our needs, expectations unmet, and a downward spiral that until self-love – a LACK of self-abandonment – happens, will keep going down in varying degrees of extremes.
We look to self-care nowadays as taking a long hot bath or a walk in the forrest, but this not the self love I am talking about.
The self love I am talking about is not abandoning ourselves due to our bad feelings about ourselves. Sometimes we catch a bad feeling from someone elses’ attitude, sometimes, we take on someone elses’ opinion of us and it becomes self abandonment, sometimes we allow a situation to define our self worth and therefore our self love and then the last thing we feel like doing is nourishing ourselves. You can nourish yourself in any way possible to create self-love – you will feel it.
At a particularly difficult time in Manhattan, my self love routine was to look at myself in the mirror every morning and give myself a little speech of encouragement, even when I didn’t believe it or feel it. It took a short while, but eventually this upward spiral started to lift me up.
Sometimes, my own act of self-love is to make the bed, achieving one small thing today, sometimes it is to declutter the junk corner in the house where procrastination takes form and things that I don’t know what to do with get sidelined to the ‘later’ pile. Sometimes it looks like making myself a cup of tea, and sometimes a cup of tea – when it is the 8th for the day, is the opposit of self love, and sometimes it is just serving dinner with a sprig of parsley.
What could small acts of self love look like for you?
Often, what we habitually show up with, thinking these are our acts of self-love, are in the moment habits to self-soothe – coping mechanisms with a consequence – like vegging out with one more series of the season you are watching or missing your shower today, so the call to action for self-love is also to do a stock-take of how you are showing up every day in life and which coping mechanisms are no longer serving you truly, and which habits that may have started as love, have turned to hurt. The long term big picture helps create a hurt or heal awareness because honoring yourself today with a glass of wine, every day and several hours a day, is no longer love or honoring yourself today by skipping your yoga practice, after several weeks is no longer an act of self love.
Conscious connected awareness from day to day can be developed and needs to be practiced so that each day, you manage, for the variables of the day, from a place of learning and curiosity and accountability (ugh! what a swear word! 🙂 ) Accountability to yourself is probably one of the greatest acts of self-love there is.
I wish you luck in love and healing of the loneliness that comes from self-abandonment.
Namaste