
What is self-love like?
I know. The idea of self-love doesn't fit so well with our Western sensibilities.
But it touches on a topic I'm eager to explore with you.
Recently, I had an experience about self-compassion and self-love that was something of an eye-opener for me.
As a Mindfulness Meditation teacher, much of what I teach and share with people has to do with developing and encouraging self-compassion and loving kindness. The Buddhist term for this is Maitri.
There are different ways I incorporate Maitri into the teaching I do.
Self-compassion takes work
But self-compassion is not a one-time thing. In my experience, you don't just “get it” and then be ready to go.
Self-compassion (or self-friendship, as Pema Chodron likes to call it) takes work.
As with all good things, it takes time to reap the rewards.
And like all our important relationships, it requires an investment. This is even more true in our relationship with ourselves. Because that relationship is primary. It fundamentally influences all our other friendships.
This became very evident to me recently.
Losing touch with my heart
The other day I had a challenging interaction with a dear friend. Afterwards I felt plagued by a whole range of emotions. I felt paranoid. I was angry. I was frustrated. I was lost.
But I could see that most of the internal feelings and narratives that emerged were directed outward.
And I knew I needed to stay with all of that because I felt disconnected from my heart and my deepest experience. That optimal point that would help me metabolize everything.
When self-pity is absent
And then, while I was exercising, the penny dropped.
I saw the whole carousel of feelings and conflicting narratives going around and around, and it suddenly occurred to me.
This is what it feels like when self-compassion is lacking.
All my attention had been magnetized toward trying to fix something about what I was feeling. And replaying the exchange in my head.
But then I said to myself, “I love you. It's okay, everything is okay. “I love you and everything you feel is right.”
Can we have some love here?
These words came directly from my heart. Instantly there were tears.
But these were tears of understanding, liberation and relief.
The idea is, “Oh, I don't need to fix or solve anything, I just need to give myself a little love, a little compassion. Everything else is a distraction. Everything else is secondary or not even real. “You’re trying to solve something that doesn’t really exist.”
The entire structure of the outer projection suddenly became an object and became transparent to me. I was seeing it instead of being it.
What do I mean when I say it was an outward projection? I mean, when things like this happen, it can be hard to stay with our own experience. The pain, the pain, the vulnerability.
These are the wounds that, when not attended to or taken into account, give rise to those familiar narratives of self-recrimination and guilt.
As a result, we often search our minds for an explanation or justification to help us make sense of everything. But more often than not, that means we are moving out and away from our moment-to-moment felt experience.
The place where pain and confusion truly live within us… in our bodies and hearts.
The logic of the heart
As I am learning over and over again, we cannot begin to heal until we begin to feel.
Then, in that moment of self-pity, everything became clear and simple in the integral logic of the heart.
I saw everything as a structure. A cultural structure, a family structure, a personal structure of self-recrimination, self-criticism and the predictable result of an achievement-oriented culture focused on perfection and presentation.
What a relief to see through it. Return home, to myself.
I don't know about you, but I can say for myself that these patterns and narratives that obscure self-compassion and self-love run deep. We learned them a long, long time ago.
Self love takes work
And we have to really work at loving ourselves.
I appreciate that, to our Western sensibilities, that sounds self-centered, self-indulgent, and narcissistic. But I'm starting to see that this is a serious misunderstanding of what we're talking about.
What I am talking about is the perception and integrity of the self and the soul.
It means that we are not divided against ourselves. May our energy, our spirit, our heart and our mind not divide and disintegrate as we move through the world.
For me, this opens up a new, deeper understanding of self-compassion, and I am grateful for it.
Involving the sky AND Land
I have been meditating for 29 years and much of it has been spent in the singular pursuit of transcendent experiences. I had a lot of those and they were amazing.
But it is clear to me that no amount of sitting in the blissful lap of God will help us deal with the reality of our earthly being.
In my experience, those experiences don't really help us compost our deeply ingrained cultural patterns of perfectionism and all the neglected wounds we harbor in the shadows of our soul.
And they won't help us gently touch our own hearts or tune into what we really need at any given moment.
In an ideal world, we involve both Heaven and Earth in our meditation practice. Because? Because we are made of a little of both.
As I understand it, a key function of our daily practice is that it serves as a driver and container to help us metabolize pain, distress, and frustration.
In the process, we not only get to know ourselves more deeply. We also make deep healing contact with our own wounded hearts.
But that is not all.
Meditation is also the place where we can finally let go of everything (all our desires, worries, concerns, neuroses and obsessions) and discover that we can fly.
And by the way, yes, I resolved things with my dear friend. I had to figure things out with myself first.