The
Art of Loving Yourself
I understand that my love
for myself is the greatest possession I will ever have.
Love for my self comes into
being only when I accept and experience my feelings as they are, at this very
moment, both pleasant and unpleasant. As I welcome my painful self, it heals.
Loving myself provides the power for transformation.
The
Acceptance of Feelings
The acceptance of joy seems natural, but may not be clear why we should
accept anger or fear. Negative feelings like these are exactly what we want to
avoid. We normally think of negative feelings as preventing or interfering with
happiness.
We all have some concept of ourselves as we would like to be – without
certain faults, limitations, or emotional “problems”. We fight these
conditions, expecting to be happier if we could only get rid of the negative
aspects of ourselves, but the truth is that by not accepting, we perpetuate
negativity instead of releasing it. Accepting is a difficult concept to grasp,
because we have been trained to resist and fight what we don’t like.
We create pain through resistance and non-acceptance. To go beyond pain,
and to enjoy wholeness, we must learn to integrate those parts of life we find
painful and would like to avoid. Once integrated, they are no longer painful,
instead, they add new dimensions to our existence. Life becomes richer,
resulting in real, not pseudo, spiritual and material prosperity consciousness.
The creative is allowed to manifest. Happiness becomes unconditional. We become
artists of life, and realize that what we were resisting was really inside
ourselves, not in the outside world.
When
I accept my self and my feelings as they are, I become whole. I am no longer
split-fighting or condemning part of myself.
The
power of self-acceptance and self-love builds within me. I acquire the ability
to heal myself and the conditions of my life.
I
awaken the power for transformation.
Accepting means opening to your
feelings…
Acceptance doesn’t mean
automatic approval of any event, whether an inner feeling or the interaction
with another person or happening in the outside world. It means rather that we
are open to the experience of the event. We may retain our intellectual
discrimination, preferring that something be different from the way it is now
manifesting; however, we do not allow our preference interfere with the
experience. This is possible because experience takes place on a feeling level,
not an intellectual level. As we open ourselves to the full experience of
something on the feeling level, we accept it.
Feelings are our connection to
life; without them we are hollow, stale, and cut off from true fulfillment.
Self-blocking occurs on the feeling level. The feeling level is where we are
most unconscious
Working on yourself is not
constantly thinking about yourself…
Or your motives, or being
thoughtfully introspective, or trying to control yourself and do better, or
trying to be something you are not. Using the mind in this manner is
self-defeating. We need to learn to sense “what is” through the feeling center,
rather than project “what I expect” through the thinking center.
Experiences take place in the
moment…
Being in the moment is a
mystical perspective. Witness consciousness is activated, and we function on a
new and higher plane that results in a sense of well-being and euphoria as well
as calling into play transpersonal powers that have been blocked by the
personal ego. By accepting we go beyond. We reach the spiritual through the
mundane. We discover the spiritual in the mundane.
It is essential to learn how to
open up on the feeling level: Processing consists of four steps, each step
corresponding to a function of our individuality. The steps are taking to
achieve integration of any event. The event can be an inner feeling or emotion,
or a happening in the external world.
The Steps of Integrative
Processing
1- Awareness Intellectual: Knowing
2- Acceptance Mental:
Thinking
3- Direct Experience Body: Feeling
4- Transformation Spiritual: Transcending
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