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Loving The Hot Mess

2/25/2020

Love is a key spiritual element. Usually when we think about love we think about love in regard to giving it to someone else, or receiving it from someone else, but how many of us stop to think about and give consideration to self-love? In last week's post I shared some thoughts on self-love and an exercise designed to cultivate and support loving of oneself.

Because self-love is a topic that frequently comes up when I'm talking with people, I felt compelled to explore it further and to share some additional thoughts on loving ourselves.

In Matthew 22:36-40 the bible says, "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments". Hmmm...love your neighbor as yourself...what if we don't hold much love for ourselves then? How well will we be able to love our neighbor?

In her book All About Love, bell hooks states, "We are not born knowing how to love anyone, either ourselves or somebody else. However, we are born able to respond to care. As we grow we can give and receive attention, affection, and joy. Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment." Are you learning in the presence of a loving environment how to love yourself, so you can in turn love others?

I've often heard that relationships are like mirrors reflecting our strengths and weaknesses, showing who we are at that moment. Deepak Chopra says, "The world is a reflection of us. If you don't like the reflection, it doesn't help to break the mirror". And Joe Vitale puts it this way, "What you see in the world around you is a reflection of your inner self. Once you change the inner you change the outer along with it." What do you see when you look in the mirror?

A lot of us are in the habit of beating ourselves up and exercising self-loathing. I'll never be able to do that, or I'll never be able to do it as good as so and so, or I'm not as smart, or as pretty, or as thoughtful, or as well-read, or as traveled as I should be, or as much as the next person, I'm dumb, I sound stupid, I look fat. It seems we are often looking for a way out by seeking...a better degree, job, relationship, diet, or house. Some people seek a way out by self-medicating through drinking or overeating, by becoming control freaks and perfectionists, through an addiction to spending, by attacking others, and some of us just hide it better than others.

Marianne Williamson states in her book, A Return to Love, "The perfect you isn't something you need to create, because God already created it. The perfect you is the love within you. Your job is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self." She goes on to say, "To remember that you are part of God, that you are loved and lovable, is not arrogant. It's humble." Fear is the opposite of love. Fear and ego keep us from self-love. Just recognizing this goes a long way toward shifting and changing. Just shifting how we think about life produces a shift in how we experience it.

Cultivating self-love is a journey of spiritual growth and self-discovery in the practice of living consciously and intentionally. There are many layers to building self-love and many tools and techniques. I'll highlight some techniques that I've found useful in my own practice.

One technique that works toward building self-love is called mirror work. It's recommended that this routine be practiced every day for at least 30 days (it would be great to have it be an on-going daily practice). Look into the mirror, into your own eyes and repeat to yourself, "I love you, I really love you, I love myself as God loves me". It seems simple and maybe silly, but after doing this for a period of time you should start to feel an inner shift occur. During your first few attempts, you'll probably notice the bags under your eyes, or your crows feet, or hear the self-loathing talk and that's okay, go easy on yourself. Be intentional and keep working at it, keep working toward seeing the good in you and the beauty versus judging yourself. Many of us have a hard time loving all parts of ourselves, this exercise changes how we think, feel and what we believe about ourselves.

Another simple and yet powerful tool to help build self-love, as well as love for others is called Metta meditation or loving kindness meditation. The loving kindness meditation is a simple repetition of the following phrases...May I be healthy and strong. May I be happy. May I be filled with ease...first directing them toward yourself, then toward someone you are thankful for, then toward someone you feel neutral about, then toward someone who is frustrating you, and then to the Universe as a whole. Repeating each as many times as you would like. Here is a link for more detailed information on this loving kindness meditation technique
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/raising_happiness/post/better_than_sex_and_appropriate_for_kids

Another way to exercise self-love is to start taking care of yourself and making yourself a priority. Nothing sends a stronger signal to your unconscious self than when your conscious self places priority on doing things that nurture you. Taking a walk or a hot bath, going to an exercise class, eating well, getting enough sleep, reading a book, spending time with friends are all ways to nurture yourself. We often times back-burner our own needs/nurturing and get caught up in the tasks of life, even to the point of feeling guilty if we do spend time doing something for ourselves. Refueling and reenergizing our own spirit is an important expression of self-love and will go a long way toward causing us to be more productive in all areas of our lives. Take time to nurture yourself and don't throw yourself on a guilt trip.

Some spiritual leaders would say that love is our purpose here on earth, that to experience love in ourselves and others is the meaning of life. That is a powerful statement, but love so greatly impacts all of the other elements of spirituality that I have to agree that it is clearly a very important piece...love your neighbor as yourself.

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The Definition Of Love

2/5/2020

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M. Scott Peck's classic self-help book, The Road Less Traveled, defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Whoa, I love this definition of love, it really resonates with me.

When we understand or define love in this way, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful or abusive...whether to another or to ourself. Love and abuse cannot coexist together.

Most of us, instead of nurturing our relationship with ourself, spend a lot of our time up in our head doing the opposite... creating and spinning negative self-talk. Can we truly love others if we don't love ourselves? Do you love yourself?

A lot of us don't love ourself and don't know how to love ourself. We may occasionally "treat" ourself to massages, baths, special food, etc. under the guise of "self-love", when in reality we are trying to fill a void inside our hearts. Not that these acts of self-love don't have their place, but they typically don't fill the void and don't cause us to actually learn to love ourselves.

Confronting our own lovelessness is part of the healing process. bell hooks, author of All About Love, states, "When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities or, if they are already a part of who we are, we can learn to extend them to ourselves." She goes on to say, "Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else. Whenever we interact with others, the love we give and receive is always necessarily conditional. Although it is not impossible, it is very difficult and rare for us to be able to extend unconditional love to others, largely because we cannot exercise control over the behavior of someone else and we cannot predict or utterly control our responses to their actions. We can, however, exercise control over our own actions. We can give ourselves the unconditional love that is the grounding for sustained acceptance and affirmation. When we give this precious gift to ourselves, we are able to reach out to others from a place of fulfillment and not from a place of lack."

Elizabeth Gilbert engages in a daily practice that works at a deep spiritual level to nurture self and develop self-love. Every day she writes to love. She starts out by saying, "I need you" as the first sentence, and in the second sentence responds with, "I am right here." It's a way to engage with your own self...your higher self, and/or with God. She proceeds to add what she needs/wants to hear. Writing down anything and everything you want to hear, everything that you wish you could hear somebody else tell you. Being kind, loving, generous and expressing gratitude toward yourself. Highlighting your accomplishments., writing down what you love and appreciate about yourself.

Elizabeth Gilbert further describes her daily love writing practice:

"There were nights when I sat up for hours, writing words like this to myself again and again, through a scrim of tears and waves of panic. And often another (angrier) part of me would scrawl at the bottom of the page: "This is bullshit. I don't believe in you." Then I would patiently begin writing again at the top of the next page, "But I believe in YOU. And I will not leave your side. I will love you and take care of you forever…" On it would go, until I could finally fall asleep. Then again the next night…and so on.

My promise to myself is this: I will walk beside myself for as long as I live, holding my own hand, taking care of the soul with which I have been entrusted.
I will do that always, whether anybody else is in the room with me or not.

You must learn how to tell yourself that you are loved. You must tell yourself this again and again until slowly you learn to believe it. Start writing yourself love letters. It feels weird at first, but keep going. Practice. Practice more. Practice EVEN more. You'll need it someday — or you may need it right now.
Life can be hard, but without your own certain love for your own tenderest self, it is simply impossible."

Deanna Heiliger author of the blog, Me to the power of We: Because Together is Better, shares this, "Writing a love letter to yourself will help you with self-criticism and negative self-talk. We all talk to ourselves in a not-so-loving way from time to time, but it is not really a very healthy thing to do. By focusing on the attributes you love about yourself, those positive things will become more prominent, they will gravitate to the forefront of your mind. And when you love yourself, you naturally love others with less effort and with less judgment. Yes, you can also say positive affirmations about yourself, which is a very powerful exercise and habit to get into…but there is something extremely powerful in the whole writing process. Writing involves your brain, your hands, your eyes and your focus. As you write, emotions tend to surface. The more senses and emotions you can involve in your writing, the truer it becomes to you."

For Valentine's Day give yourself the gift of love. Grow your own self-love, so you can go out into the world and extend that love to others, allowing for your own and other's spiritual growth.

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Doubling Down On Love

2/4/2020

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Since Valentine's Day is right around the corner, I wanted to share you with you a few posts on the topic of love. Several months ago, I read a post by one of my favorite authors, Brene Brown, on love that I resonated with me. I'm sharing the entire post below (warning it's longer than usual, but worth the read).

For those of you who are local and interested, I'll be facilitating a book discussion on bell hook's book, All About Love, on February 12th. Details can be found at "Tracy's Upcoming Events" tab.

Doubling Down on Love
By Brene Brown

I’ve been offline and in struggle since the shootings in El Paso and Dayton. At first I thought it was a combination of physical and spiritual exhaustion, or maybe low grade cultural despair with a side of burnout. I tried to combat the strange sense of emptiness with more work and more grind. This solution came to a grinding halt when I fell off my favorite pair of platform shoes. I was walking out of Charlie’s school when I hit an uneven patch of concrete. I turned my ankle, and the top strap of my shoe wrenched my foot and broke three of my toes. For the record, I put the breaking of toes at a 9 out of 10 on the pain scale. Holy shit. Nothing puts a stop to running hard as a distraction like an inflatable boot and crutches.

I can be ornery when I’m hurt or sick, so the combination of not being able to work out or spend too much time on my feet exacerbated the emptiness. After three weeks of feeling untethered and increasingly hollowed out, I realized something more serious was happening than the usual exhaustion or burnout. I couldn’t access hope or possibility. I poisoned every good thing with thoughts of potentially horrible things. I didn’t want to let my family out of my sight, but I didn’t feel like I had much of myself to offer them even when they were within arm’s reach.

One night, I sat straight up in my bed at 4am, strapped on my boot, pumped it up, and hopped on one foot to the top of the stairs. Too hurried to navigate down on my crutches, I sat and scooted down the stairs on my butt – like my brother and sisters and I did when we were little. Using one hand to brace myself against the wall, I hopped into my study and grabbed bell hooks’s book, All About Love.

Could the problem be lovelessness? Was the lovelessness in the world seeping into my life?

I went straight for the passages that I had highlighted and tagged over the years. By the time the sun came up, I understood what was happening. Yes, the world is suffering from traumatic levels of lovelessness right now, but what really brought me to my knees these past few months was how susceptible I was to perpetuating lovelessness in my own response to our collective pain. As I started to untangle everything I was feeling, I realized that over the past few months, I had unknowingly turned away from love – the only fuel source that really works for me. Instead of being fueled by love, I unconsciously had turned to fear, contempt, self-righteousness, and maybe a touch of high-octane disdain to navigate hard news and hard people.

I’ve learned the most about love and lovelessness from bell hooks. I’ve been reading her work for the past twenty-five years. Her books Teaching to Transgress and All About Love expanded my teaching and activism so much that I often say that her work is responsible for 90% of the stretch marks on my heart and my mind.

In All About Love, hooks writes,
“Taught to believe that the mind, not the heart, is the seat of learning, many of us believe that to speak of love with any emotional intensity means we will be perceived as weak and irrational. And it is especially hard to speak of love when what we have to say calls attention to the fact that lovelessness is more common than love, that many of us are not sure what we mean when we talk of love or how to express love.

Everyone wants to know more about love. We want to know what it means to love, what we can do in our everyday lives to love and be loved. We want to know how to seduce those among us who remain wedded to lovelessness and open the door to their hearts to let love enter. The strength of our desire does not change the power of our cultural uncertainty.

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political, among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise.”

I don’t claim to know what fuel works best for everyone, but what I know for sure is that I believe in love’s promise and I run best on love. For me, love is sustainable, renewable, and it burns clean. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry. Anger is a soul-sucking lifetime companion, but it’s also a great catalyst for two of the grittiest, truest forms of love – justice and equity.

Cultures of Domination
hooks explains that we can only awaken to love if we let go of our obsession with power and domination. While All About Love was written in 2000, her observations about domination, white supremacy, the patriarchy, and power offer important insight into what we’re experiencing right now.

She explains that people who are willing to speak out against injustice are not smarter or kinder than their neighbors, but are “willing to live the truth of their values.” hooks shares this example:

“If you go door to door in our nation and talk to citizens about domestic violence, almost everyone will insist that they do not support male violence against women, that they believe it to be morally and ethically wrong. However, if you then explain that we can only end male violence against women by challenging patriarchy, and that means no longer accepting the notion that men should have more rights and privileges than women because of biological difference or that men should have the power to rule over women, that is when the agreement stops. There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society.”

When we have a president who repeatedly uses language and rhetoric to dehumanize immigrants (including some of the exact language used by the shooter in El Paso), and a gun lobby that uses racism, nationalism, and fear to recruit and maintain members rather than advocating for safe and responsible gun ownership, what do we expect is going to happen? Lovelessness in words becomes lovelessness in deeds. This is a culture of domination at work.

The shooter in Ohio had a “rape list.” We know from a growing number of studies that there is a strong connection between mass-shooting incidents and violence against women. Again, lovelessness and domination.

For me, the short, well-lit, well-worn, path from theory to action – from words to deeds – seemed so clear that all I could feel was hate and rage toward not just the perpetrators of the shootings and the inciters and normalizers of violence, but I was indignant toward everyone around me who didn’t see the connections and weren’t sufficiently outraged.

Without love as the driver, my rage and contempt didn’t fuel action or serve as a catalyst. They killed my hope and resolve. Some days, my lovelessness just pulled the covers over my head, and other days it dressed me up in a “Death to Extremists” t-shirt and sent me into the world.

Erich Fromm writes, “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation,’ which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.” Ouch.

A Love Ethic
“Individuals who choose to love can and do alter our lives in ways that honor the primacy of a love ethic. We do this by choosing to work with individuals we admire and respect; by committing to give our all to relationships; by embracing a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet. Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by. In large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions.”
bell hooks

I’ve lived by a love ethic my entire life, and I want to double down on love again. Right now. I want to nurture and protect love and kindness in myself and in others. The doubling down is going to require some changes in my life. I’m going to start with these:

I’m not afraid to have hard conversations or face pain, but I can be skittish when it comes to inviting joy and grace into my life. Joy fuels love. Grace allows me to reflect. I need to find a way to open that door more often. Even when it feels so vulnerable.
Even though there are a million things that need to change, we all need to rest sometimes – even when there’s still a shit-ton of work to do. Burn-out drives lovelessness.
For me, self-love is making and taking the time to create. I can’t live a love ethic if I’m not researching and writing and thinking. Creativity is who I am and how I’m wired.
When the world feels tough and disconnected, I need to sink into the softness and connection of my family and friends. Family is my love ethic. Sometimes, my go-to is to try to get tougher and even more disconnected than the world so I can fight back. It doesn’t work and it actually feeds that domination paradigm.
I need to make sure my anger is a catalyst born of love, not justification for causing pain when I’m in pain.
I want to co-create a love ethic in our organization and in our facilitator communities – an ethic that informs how we show up with each other, serve the work, and cultivate belonging. Lovelessness corrodes organizational culture. We need love wherever there are humans – that means at work too.
I need deeper, more meaningful spiritual connection. I need to rekindle things with God in some way that makes sense for me. Maybe I’ll take a run at meditation again, or renew my Daily Examen habit.
PS I don’t think you’re supposed to “take a run at meditating” but you know what I mean.
I’m going to live into my values and stand up for what I believe in from a place of love. And I’m not talking about rainbow and unicorn love. I’m talking about learning how to stay fueled by a gritty, dangerous, wild-eyed, radical, change-the-world kinda love when disdain, judgment, and contempt are so much easier and when fear is seducing me into staying quiet. hooks writes,
“Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture. No wonder then that we are a nation of people, the majority of whom, across race, class, and gender, claim to be religious, claim to believe in the divine power of love, and yet collectively remain unable to embrace a love ethic and allow it to guide behavior, especially if doing so would mean supporting radical change. Fear of radical changes leads many citizens of our nation to betray their minds and hearts.”

I’ll take radical change over betraying my mind and heart every time.
Doubling down on love demands that we be brave enough to straddle the tension of staying awake to the struggle in the world and fighting for justice and peace, while also cultivating a love ethic in our own lives. We can’t sacrifice the micro for the macro, or the macro for the micro.
Love, belonging, connection and joy are irreducible needs for all of us. We can’t give people what we don’t have. We have to live love to give love.

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Loving The Hot Mess

The Definition Of Love

Doubling Down On Love

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