Love Thyself Comes After Know Thyself

'Love yourself'- the flippant answer to solving your life's eternal conundrum.  

For most of us, though by no means all, loving ourselves doesn't come easy.These words are easily dismissed as advice from kitschy self-help books or well-meaning people who seem to have no basis in the reality of what it takes to make ends meet.

What's the point of making ends meet if you're tired all the time or need to escape from who you are to get any peace at all though? That's a life barely lived.This is where your healing journey comes in. What is a healing journey, you ask? It is the rainbow that in stories is said to lead to the pot of gold. 

It requires some cataclysmic storms but is a path laden with adventure, and surprises and transformation. It is not just the path to happiness, it is what enables you to walk happily on the path to your ultimate destination, whatever that may be. It's when you make a commitment to yourself to do the best you can to honour, respect, love and heal yourself on the level of mind, body and spirit. Allow me to elaborate.

From the time we are born, in a myriad of ways, fear is instilled into us. Fear of abandonment, fear of punishment, fear of the future, fear of change; fear of just about everything under the sun. Other people, coming from a place of fear and pain themselves teach us what it is like to be judged, to be scorned, and the value of 'fitting in'. In many, this creates a sense of hidden shame- shame of not being good enough and a deep fear of being found out, leading to abandonment. 

Both bullys and their victims suffer from these wounds too, though no justification for the bullies behaviour, the underlying causes behind that behaviour often go un-addressed in a society that seeks punishment and retribution over rehabilitation. 

Quite, often we don't want to face these hurts and pains, they're scary and they hurt. On some level we truly believe that they cannot be recovered from and the only other option would be to go through life impaired by these devastations. As a consequence we learn to stuff away the pain from our wounds into dark little corners where we figure we can't see them (or on the other extreme obsess about them to the point of self-induced masochistic insanity, allowing them to distort every experience we encounter in life) thinking that out of sight means out of existence. 

What you may not realize or be aware of is that the body remembers. Everything you figure you've stored away for good and will never have to deal with again is stored within your physical self as well as your energetic body. From here it determines the kind of life you lead and the choices you make. While people seem to realize that there is a connection between stress and anxiety and health, they frequently don't seem to make the correlation between other emotions and mental traumas that have a profound and deep impact on their health. 

We react to situations and people in our lives based on those past wounds. Our insecurities and the way we deal with them are proof of that. The journey of the healer means looking deeper to unravel the thread- to see where the original wound lay, which means sometimes going through layers of our emotional stuff. 

This is by no means easy and can often be painful, because as human beings we tend to get caught up in the story the emotion originated from. By engaging into the story we start living in the past instead of understanding that old wise saying- pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. You get to choose whether you relive that story and suffer the same pain again or whether you see it as having served it's place in the past, where it came with a lesson. 

You get the option of taking that lesson and letting the past go or hooking on to it and not allowing yourself to heal from it. Doing this comes at heavier cost than you would think. Imagine if someone told you that every decision you have made in your life, the situations you have created, the people you have attracted haven't really been chosen by you. You'd think that is absolutely absurd and ludicrous. It's the truth though. 

Not only have they been significantly determined by your fears and wounds, they also come from your conditioning. Do you really think that who you are is entirely determined by who society has taught you to be? You are more than your conditioning.This is why two people placed under the exact situation in every way and subject to the same conditioning will grow up and could still potentially react in completely different ways. It is what makes such a phenomenon possible. 

Your conditioning plays a huge role in who you become later in life but it does not regulate the entirety of who you are. An overwhelming amount of all that you do in life has deep roots in the places you have hidden away from yourself. It is why we enter certain patterns in our lives and wonder why they keep happening. 

When you make a commitment to yourself to heal, you're invariably also dedicating yourself to getting to know the real you. We attract certain people, situations and events in our lives based on our fears, not on who we really are. Layer by layer, as each is stripped, you get to know who that person you have spent your entire life really is. 

Spending time alone with yourself (this doesn't mean you have to become a loner, just that you should take a bit of time for yourself) doing what you love helps you get to know that inner you, the one that has less to do with possessions owned, relationships with others, and the masks worn in front of others (because let's face it, there's a different mask most of us have for the different roles we play in our lives), and more to do with the inner core- where your creativity comes from, your zest for life, that stuff that really makes you, you. 

When you engage in creative play, you learn to become more curious about yourself. Generally in the past when people suggest to other people to take up hobbies they usually do so trying to encourage the other person to be more outgoing or how to occupy their time or to make other friends who enjoy similar hobbies. I'm going to suggest something different to you- explore different activities to find out what it is you love to do so that you can learn to do it by yourself. 

I'm not saying that you can't ever engage in this with other friends and family or get to know other people this way, but first do it by yourself. It is only when you do it by itself that you learn the value of really getting to know yourself. This is the beginning of your relationship with you. How can you ever begin to love yourself if you can't ever bear to spend time on your own? 

'Know thyself'- this ancient Greek aphorism is important for a variety of reasons. For one it helps you understand more about yourself, for another it helps you establish healthy boundaries with others, it helps you trust yourself and take responsibility of your life without being daunted by the concept. It also helps you understand that no matter what happens, you are there for yourself and that this is a good thing because you are entirely up to the task. You only just about have to spend the entirety of your life with yourself, after all.

Many have been taught that to be happy isn't as important as being rich- for what? If you have enough to be secure in life and have happiness, how is that less important than having a lot of money and having a deep void inside? 

Being aware of who you truly are and committing to your healing journey doesn't mean you have to be a homeless, jobless drug addict wandering the streets (though they have their reasons for being who they are, and being compassionate towards their plight, even if choosing not to engage in it, will not damage you in any way), it means taking control of your life but in a way that is healthy, not in an overbearing, overworked way that comes from a place of fear. 

Above all, the journey of self-healing means choosing to come from a place of love, rather than fear, in all that you do. It means doing the best possible for yourself on EVERY level, not just on the level of physical gratification, but meeting your needs on an emotional, mental, spiritual and bodily basis.

As you heal from your past wounds and confront your weaknesses to work on them like a muscle so that they become your greatest strengths (for a weakness when worked on thoroughly becomes so well understood to you in all it's facets that when it turns into a strength it is extremely potent). A healing journey is a way of life, it is not a one time only deal. 

It means changing the way you eat, the way you deal with situations in your life, setting up healthy boundaries and as mentioned before, always choosing to come from a place of love rather than of fear. This is the path of happiness- note I said 'of' not 'to', for happiness is only found in the now, the moment you breathe in. Your healing journey will transform your life and you, so that when you do get to know the real you, you will be amazed at who you discover especially because you will no longer be operating from the place of those wounds. 

Whether you choose the aid of energy work like Reiki (which really helps the body release these issues on multiple levels. The best decision I have ever made in life is to become a practitioner because this way it's helped me heal on an extremely deep level and it's helped me help others on their own healing paths) or acupuncture, or body work like massage or psychotherapy, or any number or kind of modality, the most important thing to do is to commit to getting to know yourself with courage, knowing that no matter what you've hidden in the dark, it's worth bringing it to light, because that's the only way you can ever be free of how it acts out in your life in invisible, yet powerful, ways. 

That's when 'Love yourself' will suddenly no longer seem like the Herculean task it once was. By healing from all these wounds and building on your weakness and what you previously looked upon as flaws you couldn't stand, you start to turn into a person that you truly respect. Everything you have ever looked for in a partner will be what you embody- for we seek in our significant others all the highest qualities that we aspire to ourselves. 

As you become all that you truly are, it is impossible not to love all of yourself, integrating all that is you into this love. This allows you to be more forgiving and compassionate towards yourself, for while you may still have certain characteristics that could use some work, they are no longer looked upon with the same derision and frustration by you. You begin to appreciate them as lessons to help you become the person that you were always meant to be. 

Be kind to yourself- you might as well, otherwise you're going to view life as being 'stuck' with yourself for as long as you'll ever know in this lifetime rather than realize the joy of being you. 

This is when loving yourself will come as naturally to you as the breath you inhale to exhale.