Do You Love Yourself Too Much?

What is self-love? What does it look like? Do you love yourself?  Are the motivations to self-love pure? Or is it just seated in the ego? This whole movement fascinates me because the true Self, is Love!

Instead of loving the Self, we need to open up to let the Self love us. The Self doesn’t need consideration or need to manifest anything it is already the magnificence of creation.

This is a little bit of my self-love journey to my present place… which will probably change!

Last year I facilitated a retreat in Bali, the volcano erupted and my flights along with the flights of the participants were cancelled. I managed to get on another flight but no-one was coming, the whole thing was going to be a disaster, a failure.

I was in a state, worried, catastrophising, my pride being hurt, I was taking the whole situation totally personally, like a volcano erupting has anything to do with me?

“Why is this happening to me!”. My spiritual teacher was watching me, and I knew he was, I was just trying to hold myself together and not collapse into a crying heap on the ground.  He approached me and said “what’s happening with you?

Trying to hold back the tears I said “ I am just trying to love myself through this ” (yes, I need to love myself in this moment of perceived failure).

His response was, “you don’t love yourself enough?  I said No, I don’t think so or this would not be happening, he said, hmmmmm maybe you love yourself too much!

This stuck with me and I often think of it when I am getting upset or taking some thing or situation too personally, when I think I deserve better or want something different.

Over many years I have found myself in deep pain around my life; not having the things that I want, life not looking how I want and not being who I want.  I have been a hopeless mess, feeling I must be the lowest person on the planet.

Then I got hold of all that self-love business and went through the stage of telling myself that I am worth it, and I deserve, and that the childhood trauma’s were not karmic but just a mistake and you didn’t ask for that, you didn’t deserve that blah blah blah.

I continued on with this for a long time, trying to manifest and attract until it nearly sent me crazy, because of course I still didn’t love myself enough to get what I want.

Then having enough of it all one day I just said to myself ‘I am nothing’  I am nothing!!! I am a speck of stardust on the assh#%e of the universe, why do you think you should have all this and that, look around be grateful.

This is not I am nothing in a self degenerative sense but just common sense, there is 7 billion people on this very small planet and I am just one, really I am not much in the scheme of things, we are actually nothing!

This helped me immensely, helped me move through a massive “what about me” stage.

I just say “I am nothing” and suddenly all this weight is lifted and I am free to enjoy.  When you are nothing everything is a gift!!

When you are nothing you become grateful for just being able to experience seeing a tree, feeling the sun, smelling the breeze, witnessing a flower, or doing your duties.

We build ourselves up to be somebody, something and then we feel we deserve something or somebody… its just our personality and then it gets angry, greedy & envious because it feels it deserves….

And it feels ripped off, dismissed and embarrassed when it does not get what it wants.  If you listen to the new age BS, “If you just love yourself!!! You will get what you want” or be patient, everything comes in divine timing…. Like I did.

This is the wrong direction if you are after realisation, true happiness or true love of self!

If you actually truly arrive at Self Love you realise the “be patient, everything comes in divine timing” doesn’t mean be patient because soon you will get everything you want, it actually means be patient because a little further down this path of realisation and you will let go of all the things you want, which will allow for something else.

This is a bitter/sweet realisation, well it was for me anyway… there I was being patient just knowing that soon everything was going to come together just the way I wanted it….. hehehe…. not so.

When you are No thing or No body you allow just the pure love to be, to just love what is, to be in awe of nature and be so grateful that even me, a tiny speck of stardust can experience so much!

Even if that experience is perceived good or bad or average. That is why the great sages of humanity say to ‘slow down’, “smell the roses” and just “realise what already is” the magnificence of creation; nature, trees, ocean, air, life, your body, your feelings, your mind, your relationships.

As with everything the trick is in the paradox, when you drop everything and just be nothing, you allow yourself to become everything at the same time. 

To have the humility to let go of your pride, your personality, your profession, your desires and just be nothing, you are no longer narrow in your ambitions, bound to an identity, or driven by desires. You expand and can allow everything in.

Maybe even receive the Grace of God, to see and feel everything as it truly is.

To grow forward and arrive at authentic Self Love, we must stop behaving like spoilt brats that just want more, more, more…   We live in a time on planet Earth where conveniences, comforts, luxuries & prosperity is unprecedented!

We have so much, but we want more and we feel we deserve more, maybe it’s because we don’t love ourselves enough yet? All these comforts, luxuries, materialism are depleting the most loving of all, our Mother Earth.

Our radical pace of consumption is out of control and our appetite for more seems to be fuelled by deserving more, or is it greed, envy, gluttony, laziness & pride.

People have become very exclusive in who they are and what they want, they feel they deserve and deserve more than the other, despite what it causes.

People want to be on top looking down, be the king of the castle! People are becoming increasingly separate from their family, neighbours and community and their own hearts and true nature.

Unfortunately we don’t include each other, we exclude each other.  On every level of society there is exclusiveness e.g. this is for me, but not for you.  What’s more this exclusiveness is sold to us through propaganda as a good thing and something to aspire too!

So is Pride and Envy. People were much happier and self-loving and inclusive when they had less material things, more time, all lived together and shared more with their family & community.

To grow up, is to be LOVE, to be LOVE is to consider others first, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, to help people for no other reason than, it’s the right thing to do, to grow up is to be LOVE.

To be childish is to be self-hating; this is a very immature state.  To be actively trying to love yourself is to be juvenile; like rebelling against the true self, trying to control everything.  To just be LOVE is to be mature.

A stage I hope we all get too, so that we can model that to the young.

“You have got to love yourself, before you can love anyone else” is a statement of untruth, it is a ridiculous statement, because the other is just an aspect of yourself!!

On the contrary if you learn to love the other, you come to love yourself, that is actually the easiest way, the way it is planned so we spread the love, not keep it for ourselves.

When you can accept in another their faults (perceived by you) then you can accept that fault, which is hiding from you, in your own nature.

To truly arrive at self love is to also accept and love the darker aspects of yourself and God makes it very easy, because its so easy to see the your darkness in everyone else!

If you can forgive and give to someone whom you think or feel does not deserve it, then of course you demonstrate to yourself that you also deserve Love, even though you are flawed and not perfect.

It is seeing yourself in others that creates Self Love, that is the key!  And actually allows you to let love flow through you. Let the Self love You.

We are trying to love ourselves, instead of letting the true Self love us, all of us.

The issue is; we are conditional with our love, we love our children but not another’s children, we love do gooders and we do not love rascals, our love is conditional. We love ourselves and not the other.

LOVE is not conditional just as GOD or the SUN does not discriminate, LOVE does not discriminate.  It is our personality that discriminates and our personality is prejudiced & conditioned and is really only out for itself, parading around as self love!!

This kind of self-serving love can be just a higher, more virtuous way, or if you like a more slippery way that our ego serves itself. The only thing we should be discriminating about is OUR own personality; how we behave, think, react & give.

If we believe in reincarnation or that we have had other lives, do you think they have all been saintly? Perhaps you have been involved in violence, abuse, war, greed, deceit and many wrong doings in past lives.

Perhaps the reason we can’t stand a greedy person, or an abusive person or violent person is because we once lived like that and have not accepted or forgiven ourselves for that yet… Thus the reason WE are so triggered by it? Because it’s US.

Or better still, in this life we may have been a perceived or real victim of abuse, violence or greed, like I have been. Could it be a gift of Self Love in disguise?

Experiencing the victim side is our opportunity to forgive our perpetrators, which may represent ourselves of the past, in order to arrive at self forgiveness & Self Love. Is this how the true Self is loving us?!!  This is big concept.  * Read this paragraph again.

To be Holy is to become whole, to love all parts good and bad, to integrate the dark is to forgive those around us with qualities we label as dark.

If we are all one, as often people say, well that dark must be a part of us, even the worst kinds of atrocities is part of you & me, can we accept that? Can you love that?  An Enlightened one has integrated the darkside.

Through my own experience I have remembered that a Woman is Love she is a channel for the divine, her source of giving does not come from her, it comes from God, Source, The Universe, the Mother whatever you want to call it.

This source of love is not ever depletable or exhaustible.  It is only when we feel we (the little I – a.k.a the one that is trying to love itself) is giving something that should be ours like my time, my money & my love that we come to resent and feel depleted and exhausted.

I have realised that for Women our biggest responsibility is to embody our ability to be the vessel for the divine that is our true nature; we are vessels and hold the energy of the divine that is why we carry the babies and our symbol the chalice.

This is true if you are a mother or not (I am regretfully not a mother) however I have received this knowledge from my own body. If you are in the body of a woman this is your gift.

This is not to say that Men are not vessels for the divine, just that the nature of woman is predisposed to Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion.

When the woman is connected to the divine, she just gives, she gives to the husband, the children, the community; neighbours, colleagues & friends at large, she includes and does not discriminate. She is selfless, not worthless; she is selfless because she knows her worth!

She feels the LOVE in her and she gives it absolutely unconditionally to all.  She is selfless because she is an instrument of the Divine, this is the most worthy purpose possible.

I feel the remembering of this truth, which resides in our bodies, must happen to evolve this planet by LOVE, by including of all within ourselves. Self-Love is an internal experience of realisation that expands out to be inclusive of all.

It has nothing to do with what life looks like on the outside.  This truth is a great power and blessing.

I feel it is the ultimate responsibility, power & purpose of all women to connect to the divine, heal her own heart and demonstrate true Love from Self to family and community through inclusion & selflessness.

Then she will be happy and totally bursting with LOVE from SELF.

I am not completely living this truth yet, but having arrived thus far to the point I am now I feel this to be absolutely my truth and where I am heading.

After going though a self-loving journey, which on closer investigation was actually seated in the ego and a case of pride, envy & loving myself too much.

Can we let the Self love us?

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Skye Hennessey – Breathworker & Therapist

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