02/17/2023
START WHERE YOU ARE
I have never believed that you must completely love yourself first before you can love another. I know many people who are hard on themselves, yet love their friends and family deeply and are loved in returnâthough they might have difficulty in receiving that love. But itâs hard to sustain love for others over the long haul until we have a sense of inner abundance and sufficiency.
When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth. Feeling incomplete inside ourselves, we search for others to complete us. But the equation doesnât work that way: we canât gain from others what weâre unable to give ourselves.
Itâs important to recognize that self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point. When we start to pay attention, we see that weâre challenged daily to act lovingly on our own behalf. Simple gestures of respectâcare of the body, rest for the mind, and beauty for the soul in the form of music and art or natureâare all ways of showing ourselves love. Really, all of our actionsâfrom how we respond when we canât fit into our favorite pair of jeans to the choice of foods we eatâcan signify self-love or self-sabotage. So can the way we react when a stranger cuts us off in line, a friend does something hurtful, or we get an unwelcome medical diagnosis.
As Maya Angelou said in her book Letter to My Daughter, âYou may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.â I started meditation practice, as many do, with the need to turn around that tendency to feel reduced by life.
