Self-Love

Today’s drawing of Mary Magdalene

Everyone has their own version of spirituality and spiritual practice, some believe to have the truth, others mix many truths into one. As someone who grew up between a Catholic grandmother and 2 parents who rejected their early religious teachings, I grew up listening. I learned early that expressing a truth as you saw it might seem like telling an untruth when viewed from someone else’s point of view.

As I continued to listen to so many ideas expressed, I found that the only thing that is a constant in everyone’s speech is the role of love. That must be the only true truth.

Many years ago, I wrote a tiny bio for blogger that said that my religion is love and my political view is peace. What if everyone took upon themselves the impossible task of loving everything and everyone as oneself? Or perhaps, that’s the problem. We don’t really love ourselves enough.

A recent recurrent theme in all channels has been that “loving oneself” is essential to really evolve. But many interpret this as the typical “self-care” of going to the salon or lying down and doing nothing. Self-love cannot be a skin deep love. Self-love might be a radical acceptance of oneself, with all the good and the bad combined, while still being able to see oneself as lovable, unique, immense and necessary to the world.

That is a big task for mere humans who challenge themselves with going through life by making mistakes and struggling to find meaning in existence.

Fortunately, we are saved by certain moments of completeness that guide us. I know that I love myself the most when I am painting, or making a gift for someone, or sometimes, teaching. Those are mostly the moments that take me out of myself and remind me of glory.

Glorious moments full of love.

Then we return to our routines, and live half-self-loved lives. (I return to doing everything but painting… an act of self-unloving.) Routine is comforting, and it carries us through, but it also numbs us to all that happens outside and inside our bodies.

If this life is truly a game designed by gods, then we are losing it to boredom. If we live inside a simulation in order to learn something, do we need grand gestures that show A+ performance? If God is really looking down on us and judging us, then there is no hope, because we fail so much. Or are the moments of glory enough to redeem our souls?

I think they might be. Because it is in glorious moments that we glimpse the possibilities and it is through glorious moments that we find direction for our inner compass. And one day we wake up and believe that there can be a better balance of Glory and Pain.

Loving oneself into Glory is an ideal, of course, but creating and recognizing the feeling of timelessness and wellbeing in those short moments is not. Because we all have the capacity to love, and because love does not require forgiveness.