One Love
You can love others, but not fully as you can when you also love yourself. I'm always working to find ways to love and have great awareness of that love of me.
The issue I have and often we have is that we only have awareness of loving the “good things” about ourselves. That is easy and beneficial, but what is more beneficial is when we can love and have awareness and acceptance of our Shadow as we often call it. Those things we choose often erroneously because those zones we often are afraid of and fear letting them to the surface. Once we do we can understand them and love them.
But there is more to this work on self love as we need to have awareness of the programming that we either knowingly or unknowingly enters via many ways. Which are put there and these are part of it, but can be easily changed once we bring awareness to them. The fear of looking fully at our shadow comes from fear itself. Fear we are not loved.
Often the fear is connect to how we are told that we are somehow defective, broken, wrong, bad, perverted, lost, selfish, evil, psychotic, sociopath, narcissistic, greedy, fat, ugly, old, young, poor, powerless, unloved, shitty, an ass hole, paedophile, bastard, killer, murder, planet killer, racist, misogynist, or Misandrist, politician, CEO, etc... or any other label you think to can add here, and you are that someone! What didn't expect that did you :) , well most of the time your inner dialogue has one or more of these labels either conscious or unconsciously floating in your subconscious mind.
Further more, our Entertainment and Main Stream Media (MSM) often is putting these seeds and thoughts in your mind as well, and we begin to judge others and worse, judge ourselves based on someone else's morals!
It could be our friends, family, co-workers, and employers or clients, but by far worse the greatest contributor to this unproductive dialogue is you!! Yes, you sitting in front of the computer.
In order for me to truly and fully love myself completely. I need to have awareness of this inner subtext running. Some times it might be a “old recording” coming out in you, and it might even not be you who is saying those things to yourself. It might be coming from someone else in your subconscious mind, your Mom telling you that you were not good enough or your Dad saying you will never be anything of importance. There you go, if you don't have awareness then you may continue on not loving yourself fully as you can.
Often we call them “old tapes” running and they will be there and we will hear them pop up if we are mindful and aware. When we hear them and are aware of them we can then turn the volume down on them. We can relax and add in and replace the old subconscious tapes running and change our personal reality as if we change the thoughts we have, the feelings/emotions, and our behaviour will change with it.
The first step is awareness, the second is get in touch with those feelings and emotions, and understand the feeling is in your and not the outside world. That in changing the feelings you can change your behaviour and when you change those, you change your personal reality, and then your personality changes.
Let the old un-benificial behaviours go, and be aware and enjoy your new personal reality. Learn to truly love yourself and and accepting your shadow, and the loving of others becomes much easier for all.
Keep on stepping, steppers.
Your path awaits you
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
In Lak ‘esh,
Michael