As a child, I watched the ‘I Love Lucy’ TV show. Lucille Ball exuded the ‘self-love’ vibe regardless of cumbersome daily issues. My tender-aged, observer-self sensed that vibe. I loved Lucy. Lucille Ball’s Self-Love quote sets the scene:”Love yourself and everything else falls into place.”
I’ve edged in and out of loving myself. There has never been a ‘One Formula Fits All’ way to do it, I’d imagined. Maybe I’d imagined wrong. You’d imagine that loving ourselves would come naturally. It does. As babies our innate wisdom led us on numerous adventures. Through pure presence, we experimented with smiling, crawling and lifting ourselves up. No inner voices berated us, no sense of limitation held us back. A sense of freedom, excitement, innate happiness and curiosity drove us on.
Between our first baby moves and adulthood advances, thoughts creep in and circumstances conspire to leave us doubting, fearing and lacking in self-love. Does modern society, and it’s largely beating capitalist drum of rush and panic to seek answers in the material world, instead of within, lead to our lack of self-love?
I don’t remember learning self-love. I’d imagined self-love coming over me like lashing Dublin rain on an empty, street-lit night, the skies drenching me. I’d never put words or logic on how much I was yearning for self-love. Until I was quite grown up. Until it became evident that without self-love, I’d be forever stumbling about, living and loving in a haphazard way. Nothing both grounds and moves the life experience more than self-love. Why does something so obvious feel so out of reach to us?
The importance of working hard, being successful, making money and putting others first are society’s questionable hallmarks of doing well. However, living well happens on a sturdy scaffolding of self-love. Otherwise our attempts give way beneath our feet. What if self-love is our super-power? What if not always feeling worthy doesn’t mean we’ll never feel self-love again?
How do we return to a state of loving ourselves? Are we hindered by looking for self-love in all the wrong places? Do we believe our mental chatter’s varied reasons for not loving ourselves? Do we connect self-love with self-indulgence? ‘If conceit were consumption, you’d be dead long ago,’ was a phrase I was taunted with as a teenager, if caught eyeing myself admiringly in a mirror. Do we view ourselves as having a limited supply of love and using it on ourselves leaves us lacking in love to give to others? Do we look at ourselves too intently to find reasons to love ourselves? Do we turn self-love into conditional self-love? I’ll love myself ‘as long as’…as long as I don’t mess up, as long as I conceal or erase my flaws. Do we narrow self-love’s definition down to slogans: ‘You deserve it!’ ‘Be worthy of love,’? And the declaration: ‘You’ll become yourself.’
‘Self-love is not looking for ways to love ourselves, self-love is looking for ‘the self that does love.’ Self-love is the difference between ‘loving me’ and ‘being a me who loves.” (Abraham Hicks)
1. The ‘Self That Does Love’
The ‘self that does love’ does not obsess on who we are (I’m successful) or what we have (I own a mansion). The ‘self that does love’ rides high over mental chatter that tells us we are unworthy. The ‘self that does love’ loves the people, happenings and things in our lives, unconditionally, regardless of them being ‘loveable’ or ‘unloveable.’ We reach out and activate love in our hearts, emotions, vibrations to love everything: the dog, the sky, the howling wind.
2. Becoming The ‘Self That Does Love’
We live from presence, perceiving, appreciating what we have, allowing ourselves to feel love. We love our lives unconditionally, even faking it to get us to that love vibration. Some days we ‘do’ love better than other days. We accept days we will suck at ‘doing’ love. Accepting is part of ‘doing’ love. The roughness and smoothness of life merge. There is no straight A to B road to ‘doing love.’ Allowing ourselves to love imperfectly at times forms part of the shimmy and shuffle of life.
The more we ‘do love’, the more love is available to us. We don’t get hung up on loving ourselves. We feel the high of ‘doing’ love and accept the ‘low’ of not getting it. We allow love to focus ‘through’ us instead of craving love to come ‘at’ us.
3. ‘Doing Love’ Leads to Self-Love
The gap to ‘self-love’ closes as we love the world indiscriminately because we perceive ourselves and the world through a self that ‘does love.’ We turn the self that ‘does love’ in on ourselves to see ourselves in an equally appreciative way. This is the essence of ‘self-love.’
‘Doing’ love means we mostly live from a place of enough-ness, with a sense of belonging. We feel connected to ourselves. Even if we do not always feel enough-ness or belonging, we accept our whole spectrum of feelings, the ebbs and the flows, knowing that our reality is based on our fluctuating perspective of the world in a given moment.
4. ‘Doing Love’ and Receiving Love From Others
Being loved by others feels divine but leaves us craving: ‘I want this always.’ At 17, a Valentine Card I received said: ‘I Wish We Could Always Be Like This!’ A week later we parted. We got cornered into the ‘always’ trap. Hungering for outside love means the other needs to be always switched on to their love vibe and hold us always as their object of appreciation. Impossible. This doesn’t mean they love us any less, it means ‘self-love’ isn’t dependent on others loving us. Being ‘loved’ is amazing but ‘loving’ is incredible. Instead of pleading for someone’s love, we love the feeling of loving them irrespective of how they feel about us. And BANG! We are free from depending on others’ love. The other is free from supplying love. Self-love is solely dependent on us.
5. An Obstacle to ‘Self-Love’
Paradoxically, an obstacle to ‘self-love’ is focusing on not having ‘self-love’ and our need to find it. Instead of seeking self-love, we set out to be someone who perceives; someone who communes with the people, happenings, things in our lives thus evoking an emotional response of love for the world in us, which in turn allows us to create a great ‘vibe’ relationship to ourselves and our lives.
Self-love, as part of the wavering nature of the human experience, is susceptible to ebbs and flows. Accepting this is what holds self-love steadfast within us, paradoxically.
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