As I have become more fully enmeshed with my commitment to love myself and be fully alive, I have noticed that I now have even more for which I am grateful. Love is such a generative state of being and when you generate that within yourself – for yourself – then you have the experience of being in a relationship that truly never ends.
When I first began hearing the message, “Angie, you need to love yourself,” I rolled my eyes and waved my hand, hoping to whisk away the messenger. Pa-shaw! I don’t need to love myself. Sheesh! I! Love! Myself! Yes, well, my friends, what I’ve come to understand is… if I need to defend anything then I’m most likely in denial about what the truth really is. Defensiveness is the first sign that something is out of whack in my life and, hearing that I needed to love myself set off all kinds of defensive battle systems in the beginning.
Plus, it didn’t make any sense. No one could tell me how to love myself. Just like falling in love with another person… there really isn’t a “how” to do that. It just… happens. I’m the kind of person, though, who likes to know the “how,” so not having that drove me batty. That is, of course, only after I started realizing that there was actually something to the concept of loving myself.
So, I asked a lot of questions and got a lot of, “I can’t answer that. You have to answer that for yourself.”
Then, I got familiar with recognizing how I show love to other people and asking myself if I did that for me. No. I usually didn’t. I was always with me so I took me for granted. Or… I did in the past.
Now, I take the opportunity to be with me as often as I can and to fill that time with laughter and activities and people that generate loving feelings within me. As I feel more loving toward myself, I automatically gravitate toward things that light me up until it becomes a snowball that is rolling down hill all on its own.
Several years ago, I asked my daughter for feedback about how she experiences me. At that time, the feedback was something along the lines of, “You always seem angry, Momma.” Yes, well… I imagine I did. I was running a lot of anger and it was the underlying emotion in practically everything I did. And, eventually, it got tiresome because it was old anger recycling. When I made the commitment to be fully alive and love myself, things started to shift for me. Anger, sadness and fear didn’t run the show. While they were present, they weren’t the captain of the ship. And then I started experiencing the sensation of feeling anger, sadness or fear while still feeling love, which was a huge paradigm shift for me.
This morning, my daughter posted a “friend tracker” on her facebook profile. She got to nominate friends for specific emotions. She tagged me as “Always Happy” and I smiled. That, my friends, is one of the beautiful transformations in my blessed life… always happy.
