The mysticism of self-love

As I was writing my memoir The Love Liar: A Memoir of Codependency, Narcissism and The Pursuit of Self-Love, the notion of self-love became an obsession. I knew it was not only the key to my healing, but the key to the rest of my life, yet it's difficult to just start yammering on about to the average public. 

Why is that? You mention self-love and people tend to get squeamish. Being highly empathic, I notice that people are uncomfortable with the topic, but I also notice how they try to slide right past that feeling because they want me to know they're "definitely self-loving, no problems with loving myself here!"

This guarded response in people has had me scratching my head a lot over the last several years. I'm attempting to build a business around this topic of self-love, but I really struggle because of something I have come to realize:

Self-love is actually a mystical experience. 

To genuinely believe that we love who we are is something that no one is ever really sure of, but we're damned if we are going to admit it. On a level that's deeper than most of us are willing to visit, we suspect we don't really love who we are. We know all too well the pervasive self-talk that's in our heads that's berating us over every little thing. Even when we're self-aware and try to fight those thoughts, they creep in like weeds in a flower bed because they are actually part of the soil. 

Dictionary.com defines mysticism as:

A doctrine of an immediate spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding, or of a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or ecstasy.

Self-love is a "spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding," because to be self-loving means to transcend the ordinary understanding of ourselves as flawed humans and connect to the truth that we are not. 

Because humans believe we are inherently unworthy. I go into detail as to why exactly this is in the first module of my Loving Yourself Whole program, but in a nutshell it has to do with the origin of our physical form. Our having bodies and living on this planet came about from a decision that, collectively, humanity has regretted and has been beating itself up for since the beginning of time. Self-love is a practice of getting over ourselves and aligning our thoughts and behaviors with our true nature which is loving, all-knowing, and free of judgment, fear and shame.

See, it's mystical, it's "woo," and people get twitchy about all that kinda stuff. This is why meditation is a purely self-love activity. To meditate is to quiet our minds of all the chatter that distracts us. It is a time to lovingly witness our spastic thoughts and—if we're doing it right—let go of the judgment of what we're thinking, or the judgment that we are even thinking, and connect with or "form an intimate union of our soul with God."    

Have you ever had a moment where you felt intense love for someone or something that filled you with so much joy you thought you were going to explode? You know that feeling you have with a child you love so strongly that you're afraid you're going to break them in two with the power of your affection? This is the love of heaven that I often tell my children I have for them. It's pure, unconditional love, the pursuit of which is the very purpose of our existence.  

That's the love we can have for ourselves if we just "learn" how. I put that in quotes because we already know this but we've unlearned it through our "sins." Our sins being the negative, judgmental, guilt-ridden, shame-filled thinking that creates all that we don't want in life.  

"We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by our sins"

Dr. Joe Dispenza makes this statement and I love it because it helps us to reframe where our lack of loving ideas come from. It's not God. We are not, nor ever have been judged by the divine, we only judge ourselves and always have since the beginning of time, since we turned our back on love and unlearned heavenly love.  

This is why the conversation of self-love often goes sideways with most people because they want to avoid the truth that they aren't loving themselves because they forgot how. Although we'll admit we've gotten too caught up in worry and stress, this love thing is too mystical, otherworldly, and woo, so we deny ourselves of it because we ultimately do not believe we deserve it. 

The sooner we can dispense with that line of thinking, the sooner we can get on with it and love ourselves with the unconditional love of heaven. In the meantime, any thought we can pull into the light of love and out of the darkness of fear, be it a thought of ourselves or others, will be a practice of self-love. 

Because ultimately, self-love is when we connect to the divine source of our being. To love ourselves whole is to make it a habit to find this connection whenever we lose it.