An easy way to make this concept concrete, applicable to self & others Consider first what unconditional love could look like directed toward the self. Below, I offer a list that contains two components followed down the line. We begin with a) a possible thing that makes you feel good about yourself and automatically creates a sense of self-love, followed each time by b) the flip side of that, which you generally don’t want and feel bad about—the stuff that stirs up self-disapproval and that sense of being wrong, unworthy, not good enough. Which can lead to all manner of what is not self-love, from walking around feeling subtly off and not quite up to par (without even verbalizing it, but it still feels bad, and it’s unfair to yourself) all the way to pure self-loathing and vicious self-talk (which feels rotten). What if you FULLY, equally, loved yourself in both the wanted & the unwanted aspects of your behavior? Of how you feel? Of how others see you? That’s unconditional self-love. Make it about others, and you’ve got unconditional love as directed to others. Want to love unconditionally? Notice the conditions that get the inner or outer critic in motion. INTERRUPT THE CRITIC. Drop into love for what’s here right now, the good, the bad, the ugly. Consider whether you might at least try saying (writing!) that you love yourself on each end of any spectrum, and all the way across. I love myself when I feel great & strong in my body. I love myself when something hurts or feels tender, off, painful, fragile. I love myself when I’m strong & stable. I love myself when I’m wobbly. I love myself when I’m kind to [my mom] & soothe irritation that arises without expressing it. I love myself when I notice I’m being critical, unkind, mentioning what doesn’t need to be mentioned. I love myself when I’m inappropriately instructing & suggesting. I love myself when I feel the love & joy flowing effortlessly. I love myself when I’m not in the vicinity. I love myself when I show up to do processes (like inquiry, focus wheels, EFT), getting out ahead of old negative thought patterns before they can build momentum or wreak havoc. I love myself when I reach for those processes after I’ve reacted or thrown myself off in some way or even after I’ve gone wayyyy down the rabbit hole and must walk myself through the whole climb back to ground zero. I love myself when I’m happy & appreciating others & all of life.
I love myself when I’m sad & full of discontent. I love myself when people hold up beautiful mirrors telling me I’m great, brilliant, talented, loving. I love myself when someone looks at me funny or declares everything they think is wrong with me. I love myself when I pause and choose a kind, calm, clear response. I love myself when I’m reactive or triggered and don’t even know I’m puking on someone till the mess has already dropped. I love myself when I [do qigong] and grow the practice. I love myself when I skip it. I love myself when I’m [do qigong] in presence, consciously growing my relationship to presence. I love myself when I phone it in, just do it to get it done, call it good enough. I love myself when I just simply and easily say what’s true for me. I love myself when words get stuck in my throat or I tiptoe around the issue. Hey, to be clear, the idea isn’t to condone or excuse what feels off to you. It’s to love what’s actually there, reject no part of yourself. In fact, when you’re loving yourself in any current condition, you’ll be much more able to swiftly course-correct. You’ll feel what’s off and head toward alignment fast. Getting out judgments and filling the space with love makes thing clear and more spacious. There’s room to shift. Maybe you can see that better with others, and it’s just as true for yourself. I invite you to make your own list. You could approach it from either direction: instead of what I did above, you could start with a statement of loving the least-preferred part (especially if it’s present here & now) and go from there to the stuff that easily feels good). You could also sit down on a day you notice you’re carrying around a critical play-by-play narration of yourself or another or your day, job, whatever, and write out both parts. Get yourself squarely situated in the acceptance that you’re not your idealized self, and you don’t need to be. Love yourself (or another) in writing, and you’ll be able to love yourself (or another) in talk, in actions, in the day-to-day now-now-now of it. It’s always helpful to write your thoughts down on paper so you can see what they’re up to and write out what you prefer to think to support really taking it in. Writing helps with focusing. Focus yourself into unconditional love. Love & blessings, Jaya P.S. Monday-night group-coaching drop-in sessions are FOR EVERYONE, and new and repeat people come all the time. Let me repeat that they happen on Monday nights whether there’s a mailing that week or not! Come talk to me and/or listen in about any topic and participate in body, heart, and head processes for release, clarity, alignment. Let’s clear out unnecessary suffering and live in joy from the fullness of all that we are.
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… and be kind (and ACTUALLY helpful) to your entire self Warning. This is an invitation to self-love. I promise not to get weird about it. I’ll make it actionable and invite you to keep it up. Now & now & now. Sometimes someone I’m working with tells me they don’t know how to get through some specific moment and actually apply the things we talk about. I then typically give them a few simple reminders. I invite them to simplify things. Just remembering a few simple things, you can learn to walk yourself through KINDLY. As in, ACTUALLY, be your own best ally and make yourself feel better instead of worse. That’s a great start right there. To simply value feeling good so much that you’re committed to catching yourself feeling bad, interrupting it, and quickly pivoting to walk yourself toward feeling better. That’s already HUGE. I love to remind folks to BRING IT TO NOW. The now part is crucial. Don’t try to figure out how to fix everything or fix something in some done-with-it-once-and-for-all forever sort of way. That dip into everything and forevermore is overwhelming and feels bad. (It also puts you in the Universe’s business, which you’re not qualified to manage.) Don’t do a quick, warped scan backward over the past. You might mistakenly grab the lens that makes it look like you’ve never gotten it right and it’s not getting any better. (And, yup, you’ll be in the Universe’s business again.) Just RIGHT NOW. What would feel kinder, truer, better now? Do that. And keep doing that. Now and now and now and now. Do not ALLOW yourself to sink down into the worst of what you’re able to believe about yourself. If you stop walking yourself kindly toward what feels better, that probably means you’re using a bunch of NOW moments to accept being mean to yourself. And just to accept feeling bad (which is not that nice). I’d like you to HABITUATE to walking yourself through as if you were aware of your younger selves that need and deserve to be gently guided along. That, my friend, is self-love in action. At some point in my growth journey, when I was having some obvious successes and actually feeling better a lot of the time, and I was ALSO feeling bad or impatient about what I wanted to manage better or have success with faster, I started thinking in terms of NOW much more.
Right now, am how am I walking myself through? Right now, how am I talking to myself about what's happening? Right now, am I making myself feel worse or better? 3 directions to focus how you walk yourself through Here’s a great clue about what to do for yourself, your entire self, in any NOW moment you realize things aren’t feeling good. Know and remind yourself that you’re a 3-centered being. That is, you have
They all three need tending kindly. And they all three have wisdom and guidance for you (that comes in NOW, in the actual moment you need it). And if you’re stuck in one center, either tend it, or GET OUT. Reach for one or both of the others. Body tending Ask yourself, Right now, am I even in my body? Am I taking in that my body is tense, contracted, agitated, overrun with adrenaline [whatever it may be]? Am I moving nervously or frenetically, or am I going frozen or stagnant and need to rev things up? Your body wants you to tend that, soothe it, calm your nervous system. There’s also simple stuff like HYDRATE. EAT GOOD FOOD. Back to body basics: ground; connect to the felt sense of the breath (and stay with that a while, even as you go about your business); connect to the five senses (or however many you’ve got). Do something that feels good physically: Move, dance, exercise, stretch, do yoga or qigong, walk. Take a bath, take a nap, take yourself to a natural setting where your senses will be filled with life-giving, soul-soothing stuff. Take an action: The realm of the body is also the realm of action. Is there one thing I could do right now that would feel good to do? That would make me feel good about tending any corner of my world? That would move something forward and potentially start some momentum toward what I actually want to be, do, have? Find your point of least resistance and do one thing. Heart tending Right now, as I notice I feel bad emotionally (frustrated, angry, sad, discouraged, scared, disappointed), am I making room for it and soothing it, or am I judging it or evaluating how I’m doing or telling myself what I should be feeling itself? Heart tending isn’t about thoughts, so stop analyzing or evaluating or explaining your emotions. Maybe stop talking (to yourself or others) about them. FEEL THEM. If you must bring the head in, then notice whether you keep going from one thought to the next to keep matching and probably revving up what feels bad. And could you instead tell yourself kind things that are likely to make you feel better? The heart wants you to ground yourself (see body tending above), feel the feeling in the body, breathe it (make room for it with the breath), allow it. Just let it be, let it have its life, and give it 2 things:
How simple is that? That’s it folks. Your heart space, when in pain or discomfort of any kind, wants those two things. Review them: awareness & breath, awareness & breath, awareness & breath. Head tending Right now, am I believing and carrying on with thoughts that feel bad or interrupting them? As you notice that thoughts are making you feel bad, consider some version of this: maybe they don’t match what your Inner Being knows to be true; or they don’t match the way Source gazes upon you; or they represent an assessment that isn’t useful and isn’t coming from the part of you that’s seeking to believe in yourself and step consciously toward your full potential, or the best you’ve got right now, or the truth of who you are. You can simply reach for better-feeling thoughts. Just tell yourself or write down one thing after another that makes you feel better instead of worse. Go general at first (I don’t have to figure this out right now, I’m okay and my needs are met, I’ve gotten through worse before and other human beings have too). And go from there. You can do a focus wheel. (I just did one this morning when I noticed I felt bad about something and wanted to clear that up before I moved anything else forward!) You can do some inquiry (including a short-cut version of processing unhelpful thoughts). You can check out whose business you’re in and then look for what your actual business is here (where you have agency and what’s yours to manage). (Hint, it’s always your business to soothe yourself and to shift your state if you don’t like the state you’re in—or, to keep it simple, if you don’t like how you feel.) Bring it to now, and walk yourself (all the parts of you, body, heart, and head) toward what feels better right now. My intention for myself and my ongoing practice are to keep going deeper with this, keep getting more subtle. I invite you to it. You are worth your own kind, gentle, patient walking-yourself-through. You are worth feeling good much more of the time. You are worth interrupting quickly what doesn’t feel good and responding kindly to what feels bad. Take care of yourself, body, heart, and head. Walk yourself through, lovingly. Then you can truly feel good much more of the time. Love & blessings, Jaya P.S. New and repeat people come to group-coaching night all the time. You too are so welcome to join us on- or off-camera, to speak or stay silent, to come take care of yourself by receiving teachings & moving through processes that apply to all, whatever the presenting story or question. I always invite you to follow your inner guidance system to take what you like & leave the rest. where maybe you haven’t been Want fewer than 11? Skim the list (bold print is here to help) and go in where you see a spark of something that would represent you showing up for yourself. It could be game-changing. 1. Clean up a stupid little pile somewhere, on a wrongly used chair or stagnating desk corner, that’s really not hard to sort through at all but you keep acting like it is. ENJOY DOING THIS. Notice how easy it is to make something right. 2. Clean the bathroom mirror. That’s it. That does something. Harness the symbolic value, if you want more, and tell yourself, I’m clearing things up. I’m seeing more clearly. I love a clear view of things. (Apply this harnessing and naming of the symbolic with anything you do. It adds layers of meaning otherwise lost on you.) 3. Move more slowly, not just in your walking gait, but in your gestures. Do this especially if you typically move fast; especially if you think you have a lot to do and you need to get it done. Move slowly. Move deliberately. Feel yourself moving through space, through time, through your life. (Note this is a presence practice, a SIMPLE trick to be more conscious.) Feel that your life matters, this moment matters. Your life is not to be rushed through. 4. Talk to yourself out loud (double-duty accomplished if, as you talk, you’re walking the dog or watering plants or wiping surfaces or stretching your amazing body) and give yourself a whole bunch of good and real and true LOOK AT ME messages, just between you and you. Here’s a brief audio example, just between you & me. 5. Pause with every apology you hear yourself make (until you can pause it before it gets stated out loud, until you break yourself of this habit), and consider whether there was actually something to apologize for. You’ll mostly find there wasn’t, so take it back. I mean this: quit apologizing for little stupid things like not responding to a text when you think someone wanted you to. Categorically DO NOT APOLOGIZE WHEN YOU’VE DONE SOMETHING WRONG. Or hear yourself and take it back (at least between you & you). Learn to say I’m sorry only when you’ve actually violated your own code of ethics, when your own integrity feels affronted by your own actions. And then it will mean something, and you won’t be walking around apologizing for your existence, for taking up space, for being a human being born onto this planet. Here are some examples of sorry apologies if you want more guidelines for that. 6. Have more fun. Feel good more often. Laugh more. This does a million times more good than a gratitude journal, so if you like things like that, like this too. Feel good about whatever part of current conditions you can feel good about. Focus on what’s fun, what’s easy, what feels good, what you’re proud of, what makes you laugh, what brings pleasure. Cultivate all of this. Make it a project. 7. Get faster & faster at interrupting trains of thought that don’t serve you. That means anything about what’s wrong with you, how you’re not doing enough, how you’re doing it wrong, how this isn’t good enough, how this isn’t okay. That means interrupt it as it comes up, now and now and now. IMMEDIATELY give yourself kinder and truer messages, as many as you can string together. Ideally, do this out loud or in writing. 8.Deal with something, one thing, that’s kind of big and pretty much ignored. Lighten the thing that weighs you down. You know what’s waiting for you. Just start it. And then do another bit another time, soon. Go in via your point of least resistance, just to show yourself you can. Do on bite-sized piece until you’ve found your inner pac-man that can gobble up anything. (Is pac-man still a thing?) 9. Go to bed feeling good about the day. Appreciate all it held and all you did. If you can’t feel good about today, for some reason, at least be done with it. Put it down fully. Be done with today. You did enough. You did well enough. LITERALLY NEVER GO TO BED CARRYING WITH YOU A SENSE OF AN UNFINISHED NOT-ENOUGH DAY. Never. Never. Just quit it.
10. When you go to bed, tell yourself, Tomorrow, All things new, All things possible. If you want or need help to really set yourself up for letting go of today and looking toward a tomorrow full of possibility, go to sleep listening to affirmations or soothing music. My current favorites are from Crea tu frecuencia. Yeah, they’re in Spanish (I personally think this beats Duolingo by a long shot). Lots of people provide them in English. Try Jason Stevenson, if you like Aussie accents & a soothing male voice. 11. When you wake up, do things INSTANTLY to set yourself up for a good day. Do not start the day telling yourself awful things or cultivating things like fear and dread and sorrow. If you wake up already feeling some kind of way, DO NOT JUDGE THIS. Be sweet to yourself. Get curious. Greet whatever it is with curiosity. What’s this, sweetheart? Do anything to soothe it, soften it, give yourself kind messaging that counters any thoughts that come hand in hand with this feeling. If you’re not sure what they are, write down, “I feel [whatever it is, as best you can name it], and that means that …” Getting your thoughts on paper will point you to the turnarounds that will counter them, and often will start to shift how you feel. Value, at the very least, that you’re not just going with the thoughts that reinforce bad feelings. Because that, my friend, is NOT being your own best ally. I start most days with focus wheels these days (a process from Abraham-Hicks). Try it, you’ll like it. Whatever you feel a wobble about, write into the hub of the wheel what you want to feel or believe, and then stay put till you’ve filled the wheel with 12 reasons you can actually believe—you actually do believe—that center statement. My website has a whole page that illustrates and explains how to make a focus wheel and offers kinds of statements to reach for. Love & blessings, Jaya P.S. Monday-night group-coaching drop-in sessions are FOR EVERYONE (not just clients or current clients or anything else you might make up). Come talk to me and/or hear me talk with others about any topic and do body, heart, and head processes for release, clarity, alignment. New and repeat people come all the time. You too are so welcome to join us on- or off-camera. And another P.S. Did you know that I and a lovely colleague of mine (Rebecca Mehnert) do 3-Centers meditations (dropping in with body, heart, head) 6 days a week (Sundays off) for 15 minutes or less before noon ET (so, starting at 11:45)? Here’s the 3C med zoom link if you’d like to join. You can also find that anytime on the homepage of my website. (Scroll there all the way down.) Why is it that the very people who really show up for their personal-growth work are also the ones who love to lay trips on themselves about how they should be further along than they are? The more they get a handle on the equanimity thing, the more they believe they should be unflappable. The more they clear their judgments and divest themselves of should, the more they believe they should never judge. They're downright horrified when something really throws them off, especially if any reaction on their part makes them feel mean, judgmental, disconnected, unforgiving, sad, hopeless, despairing — go ahead, name your ugly. The shame they then feel (and doesn't shame feel bad enough?) packs a double wallop because they're ashamed of feeling shame. They've been completely bamboozled by this crazy thing they tell themselves, “I should be beyond this.”
If you have any capacity for questioning your negative, critical, judgmental thoughts about others, then please don't believe the thoughts that would dictate a list of shoulds requiring you to move consistently through whatever life brings in the most serene and blameless way. If you've eavesdropped on your thoughts, you know how your version goes. I'd like to make a case that you shouldn't be beyond anything (except, of course, whatever you're actually beyond, and you may forget what that is because it won't be showing up anymore). And if you're capable of ever laying the I should be beyond this trip on yourself, join me now in considering it carefully so that next time you find yourself there, you may see how to show up differently and actually benefit from the experience. (It really helps to look at what we do while we're not doing it.) It's my belief that life's job is to throw you off and push you to your walls. It will use all manner of creative innovation and maddening redundancy to do this. Listen to yourself go over the evidence (out loud or in your head, again) of all that happened before you lost it. (And then I was going to run back in to get it, even though there wasn't a second to spare, and that's when I learned I'd locked myself out. Of course, this was the moment he had the gall to say. ...) Didn't it take a fascinating sequence of happenings or several things rushing in all at once for you to blow your fuse or let something so important fall through the cracks or go back to feeling depressed or otherwise forget yourself in such a spectacular way? Didn't it involve people or events pushing up against some major button — otherwise stated, something unhealed inside you that's tender and vulnerable and oozing with something ugly that you don't know — haven't yet known — how to clear? Life's job is to clear your unhealed places. It will do this by creating whatever situation or sequence of events you need in order to have it all brought right up to the surface. When this happens, chances are very good that you'll sometimes React. You'll sometimes behave as the worst version of yourself — the one you may have thought your spiritual practices or personal-growth work or even the simple fact of time made obsolete. This is where you might feel horrible about your response and take it as evidence that you're a bad person after all, that you're not worthy of being a parent (friend, lover, spouse, teacher, mentor, therapist, boss, coach — whatever), that you're a complete failure. Here's another possibility: welcome the whole experience. This includes catching (but not believing) the thoughts that judge your behaviors and emotions and tell you you should be beyond this. Please don't confuse welcome as meaning bright smiles and joyful feelings. This is not a Tupperware party or a picnic of any kind. But it could be your liberation. To welcome it, start by simply saying, “I am willing.” If you're not there yet, make it a question: “Are you willing?” Here it is, like it or not. There's not a thing you can undo about this moment or the ones that preceded it and landed you right here. It's good to get to I'm willing in those moments when there's nowhere else to go. And I'm willing can certainly coexist with I hate this and This is not what I wanted. Still, it acknowledges, Here I am. (Here's a quick illustration in case you need one: If you're walking in the snowy cold and you're not home yet and there's no one stopping to offer a ride, what good does it do to tell yourself the lie that you're not willing? Of course you're willing: here you are, walking in the snow. I am willing puts you back in alignment with reality, it's honest, and it reconnects you to choice — because it certainly is an option to choose that moment to lie down and die.) Why should you be willing? Because when life pushes you to your walls, those are the moments you get to move closer to the very thing you most want for yourself, speaking on the soul level. It's interesting and maybe ironic that those are also the moments when you feel farthest away from that, and the times you potentially like and believe in yourself the least and see a bunch of evidence accruing all at once for the likelihood you'll never get there. But will you take in this radical thought? This very scenario, all of your reactions and self-judgments included, is precisely the thing to get you where you want to be. What is it that you most want? Maybe you want to be and live love. How can you do that unless you're willing to show up and love yourself when you feel hideously ugly after you've screamed and yelled at your kids or your lover? Maybe you want to stand consistently in your power. How can you do that if you don't encounter the person or circumstance that makes you wilt and clam up and fail to draw an important boundary? Maybe you want to be and live peace and practice tolerance and forgiveness. How can you do that if you can't pardon your murderous self on death row? Do you want to be self-sufficient? Then don't you need to face the thing that makes you abandon yourself? Then there are those who actually want to reach enlightenment. Wow. Well, if that's you, if there's even one thing left that could make you drop that intention in favor of attacking someone else or yourself, don't you need to bump up against that thing? Wouldn't you welcome it? Are you willing? Whatever you're trying to get to in this life, all of life will help you get there. It's a blessed fact that this sometimes looks like loving faces beaming at you, things falling into your lap, helpers showing up right when you need them — that's the good stuff. And it's just as true (and truly, just as good) that it sometimes looks like you weeping on the hard stairs or putting a hole through the wall or speaking hate to the one you most love. Sometimes it looks like you all wrapped up in the cloak of shame with no idea how to peel the thing off, and suspecting you deserve it as a permanent outfit. Maybe you could find some nice scarlet letter to embroider on for a nice splash of color. ... So when you lose it or behave badly or get hopelessly confused; when you go back to whatever version of angry, jealous, mean, vindictive, clueless, or spineless that you thought was way behind you; when you react in any way that feels mean, judgmental, disconnected, unforgiving, sad, hopeless, despairing—go ahead, name your ugly—can you make space for that, too, instead of then turning all of that on yourself? What if this too is admissible as part of the growth process you know you're showing up for? What if your essential beauty is still intact? And what if exactly what's happening, including the worst of what you feel about yourself in the moment, is your one-way ticket home? love & blessings, Jaya Join me, if you will, in a new vision of love. As you read this to try it on, you might put many faces & kinds of relationships to the word BELOVED. I invite you to stretch yourself in love, stretch your ideas around love, stretch into new behaviors in love. I invite you to a love overhaul--a grand experiment, if you will. My aim, which I may grope toward gracelessly & will only achieve imperfectly, is to love as purely as I’m able at any given moment. I love myself at least enough to let love be pure perfection in the imperfect ways I give and receive it as I evolve. I love others by appreciating and accepting the gorgeously imperfect love with which they grace me. I am willing to grapple with, to keep meeting, what challenges me in the realms of love. Toward the beloved, I seek to be in a state of ongoing discovery (awe, curiosity, joy!), instead of holding to all I’ve decided so far about who they are (and worse, letting that become an accruing list of here-we-go-again grievances). My love gets to allow their becoming, and to acknowledge the journey that they’re on beyond me and sometimes (I am wowed by this privilege daily) with or near me. I allow the journey of the beloved to follow its own timeline, not the one I would draw up—as if I had such drafting skills!—and not the one my impatience or discomfort would demand. When I require others to make me comfortable or to pander to my fears or to fix what’s unhealed inside me, I have stepped out of love. I accept this. I must and I will step out of love; others must and they will, too. It’s madness to expect anything else. I aim to witness with no judgment when either of us slips off-track—or to witness the judgment of self or other, and start there, soothe that first. I aim to simply call myself back to love. My ongoing intention is swift course-correction back to love. I am in love with this very intention! Maybe I don’t instantly feel love in such course-correcting moments. I know there’s no problem. Sometimes simply reversing the direction of my focus is all that’s needed to get me back to love (and eventually the feelings always follow): I shift the focus away from changing, correcting, instructing the beloved (even with the innocent motive to help them get me!) and bring the focus inward instead, toward soothing and perhaps better understanding myself. (The conversations with the other can follow, from a more grounded and kinder place.) If something in my interactions with the beloved pushes a button or rubs up against a raw, unhealed place inside me, I am not shocked or dismayed; I do not believe something has gone wrong. I do seek to soothe myself. I do deconstruct the old, wrong decisions I made about myself or about love or about the way life works. I will bring love to myself first. I will love the beloved so much that I will take care of myself first, so great is my clarity that my well-being is no one else’s job and that my purest love comes from a place of self-love, of wholeness within myself. (I also allow my self-love and wholeness to be works in progress, dynamic entities or energies that wax and wane.) I understand that it happens, in love connections of all kinds, in both directions, that buttons are pushed, core wounds are triggered, pain arises. It is not the job of love to prevent this. It is not a failure of love when this occurs. In fact, it’s the opposite at play: the job of love is to expose what needs to heal, so the hand of love will brush against every available bruise without meaning to, without trying. When it’s my button pushed or my pain prodded, I well know the tendency to make that about the wrongs of the other: what they do wrong, how they don’t show up for me, the maddening way they phrase it, the way they’ve done this before and have failed to hear what I said about the impact on me. I aim to make it about me instead, my greater self-understanding, my healing and evolution, my expansion into greater love. I aim to hear in my own mind and speech anything that resembles: Correct yourself faster for me, see what you can’t yet see because I insist that you see it for me, do the impossible to please me and make me feel loved, be who you are not—so I can relax. I know how to course-correct. I can come back to I release you to your life; I release myself to mine. I can and will come back to love, even if all that means at first is feeling the pain, soothing myself, loving the beloved for a moment from afar, as best I can, coming close again with nothing understood or just a fragment of wavering light to tender. I will sing with Iris Dement, Just because I’m hurting, that don’t mean that you’ve done something wrong. I am willing to apply that going in both directions. People hurt on planet Earth. People hurt in human relationships. Sometimes I hurt in mine; sometimes the beloved hurts in relationship to me. Still, I’m willing to love. I love myself so much that I’m willing to let the beloved be mad at me or disappointed in me --and I won't use that as an excuse to believe there’s something wrong with me. In those moments, I go after my pain to soothe it--I do not go after the beloved to see who they want me to be now. I go after love to embody it. I don't go after the beloved when I’m unclear with myself. I will not abandon myself. I will not think I’m bad or wrong when their pain is called forth, when their buttons have been pushed (as they must be; as they will be). I am willing to hear them talk when they’re ready and to listen carefully, to listen with love. This does not mean that I rush to fix their reactions—never mind seek to prevent them! I allow the beloved to be in their process. I invite them back to connection, to communication, and to love in right timing. I may get that timing wrong. I’m willing. I am willing to listen to the beloved and I am willing to look at myself, but I am not willing to automatically think that I’m wrong just because another thinks I am. I will always feel compassion when my phrasing or timing—or whatever—came in the wrong package for them and brought up their pain. I am sincerely sorry when my reactivity or wrong interpretation or personality tendencies got played out in a way that was hurtful to the beloved, and I want to make it right however I may be able to do so. But I will not grovel. I cannot be sorry that their stuff comes up with me: it must, it will, and I trust they’re equipped to meet it; I trust we’re both equipped to find love again together. I will not be sorry when my stuff comes up with them: it must, it will, and I trust I’m equipped to meet it; I trust we’re both equipped to find love again together. Love & blessings, Jaya |
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