Loving ourselves the way we are meant to be loved

1. Remember what you are not. You are not your personality or your ego. The life force within you is deeper than those two impostors. They are simply tools for us to experience life.

2. You are not your thoughts. Your mind works for you and your mind's job is to figure things out, to assess for patterns, to evaluate, and to let you know, "Hey, there is trouble over here, but this other way is okay." It does its job and generates thought after thought, concern after concern, plan after plan, vision after vision on a conveyor belt of the mind, it organizes and penetrates for meaning. It tells us stories about what is happening. If we try to pick up all those thoughts or believe all those stories we end up out of our own driver's seat and in the bus stop of anxiety. We need our reasoning mind, but the things it thinks about are not necessarily important, true or wise. There is something that abides within us, that was there when we were born and is there for us now - an awareness with the potential for conscious wisdom, a wise mind. The wise mind does not live in the either/or of black and white thinking, but enables us to hold the wisdom of the both/and paradoxes of light and dark, of growth and diminishment, of joy and sorrow, of hard work and play. The reasoning mind is wonderful, but it is not who we are.

3. We are not our emotions. They are like thoughts, they come and go, unless they are a mood that hangs around for a while like an unwelcome guest. They are the roller coaster that we ride. We experience our emotions. They motivate us to move towards something or move away from something. They inspire us. They help us connect and give us empathy. They bring us wisdom if we step in and experience them and step back and learn from them with our wise mind and good heart. But the heart can be deceived and tricked, and it can be tricky. Like the raven the heart can fall in love with shiny things, not necessarily good or true things. It can fall in love with the body's desires and be compelled or addicted, or the ego's desires for power. The heart can be wounded by trauma. It can be entranced by the self-accusing voices within. Our emotions can be dark, as well as light, casting a shadow on our heart, taking us into pathways we don’t want to go. Any trauma survivor will tell you that. And, of course, the heart can be inspired, and at peace, pleased and pleasing and pure. It is the seat of courage, but we are not the heart. The heart like the mind is our servant.

4. There is something inside of us that asks us to live mindfully, being consciously aware of our experience of the movements of our heart and mind, not unconsciously reacting, but consciously responding with radical acceptance of what we find there, not acting it out unconsciously, but taking a sip of what is offered with gratitude and choosing what is best. And who is it that chooses, who accepts and loves the heart and accepts and loves the mind, and drinks from the cup of experience that is offered from both, takes a sip of experience and gratefully gives thanks for it all, every ounce of it? Who is that living at our innermost core? Our essential self.

5. Now we can begin to love ourselves the way we are meant to be loved by first sustaining that relationship with our essential consciousness, by listening to this wise mind, understanding our mental and emotional states, doing our dance, holding our paradoxes, healing what is wounded, blessing our innermost self in all its facets by staying within the precincts of our essential consciousness,- and frail as we are, loving the beauty that we are, having compassion for ourselves and others, remembering the source of it all.