Loving Yourself
By: Rishi Jones
Tags: Spiritual Growth, Anxiety, Joy, Stress Management, Self Love

Do you love yourself?

Most of us have a difficult time answering this question. It can seem egotistical or prideful to claim our self love. More often than not, we perceive ourselves as deficient, and judge ourselves rather harshly. This can generate an experience of the world, and of ourselves, that is hard to love

One thing we often forget, is that Love is a Verb.

The truest, realest form of love is Love in Action, love expressed towards some other being in a way that the other receives it, and is positively affected

So the question I began with should really be: How do you love yourself? How do you express love toward yourself, in a way that affects you positively?

And then… do you allow yourself to receive it?

One of my all time favorite albums is Jane Siberry’s When I Was a Boy, which charts the incarnation of the soul into a human body, through heartache and loss and healing, into self knowing, dying, and then to the other side. One of the songs has a chorus that goes:

“I see you looking around at the people on the streets,

Well things aren’t what they seem.

If you push them hard enough

You’ll find that most of them

Do not feel worthy of love.

How did this come to be?”

All of us are, to varying degrees and in various ways, are traumatized by the unprocessed events of our human experience. . These traumas keep us estranged from lour bodies, stuck on the endless hamster wheel of the mind, racing around trying to figure everything out, just so we can relax and feel safe enough to return home to our bodies.

Allowing ourselves to receive love is an act of courage, a denial of the stories we tell ourselves of our unworthiness. To make a practice of self-love is to revolt against the forces that keep us stuck living beneath our potential, below our essential innocent goodness.

About 2.5 yrs ago I began an extremely powerful self-love practice — though this was not the expressed purpose I’d had in mind when starting it. Within a couple of weeks, the practice revealed itself to be far more powerful than I had foreseen.

I was working with a coach around issues of consent. She asked me “What’s your consent? What does your body authentically want and not want?” I told her I didn’t know, that I spent most of my time in my head thinking all the time, only coming into my body for food or sex or dancing.

We created a practice where I take 3 breaths into my heart once an hour. I set an hourly chime on my phone, and when it goes off I pause what I’m doing, close my eyes if possible, and focus my attention on the sensations of my chest expanding and contracting, locating my awareness there in my body.

I’ve practiced sitting meditation in the mornings for many years,which was very challenging for a while. Over a long long time I learned to quiet my mind to some degree while meditating. Then I’d go about my day and for the most part would be consumed by all the events and actions, and forget the equanimity and calm generated from the morning practice.

Doing the 3 breath micro meditations through the day has brought me a greatly enhanced experience of serenity, groundedness, and awareness. Within the first day of engaging with this practice, I knew I would be doing it for life!

After about two weeks, I began feeling a sense of joy when I would focus on my body in this way. I’d be going through my day with tons of thoughts running through my head, and then the chime would go off, and I would slip into a hot tub of bliss, leaving all the cares and concerns of my mind behind , as I surrendered to the moment.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to come home to my body in this way! These bodies we’re incarnated within are our homes during these human lives, yet we spend most of our time “homeless,” searching for connection, stuck in our heads, trying to figure out all the things so we can simply relax and feel good in our body again.

I believe it’s our sacred duty to contribute to this world, through healing the ancestral traumas that were passed down to us, and expanding all of human experience through our own process of expansion.. In my own experience, this has required long term therapy, actively engaging in the process of becoming aware of wounding, and working towards integration, so we can feel at home in ourselves and the world.

This heart breath practice shortcuts this process, giving us an anchor within, a beachhead of awareness from which we can reclaim our abandoned bodies. It’s by no means a replacement for therapy and other forms of healing, but can massively support these activities by focussing our awareness in reality.

Our bodies are real, permanent, physical things, whereas all of the contents of our intellectual minds have no reality to them. We can think one thing one moment, and then the next have a completely contradictory idea.

To consistently tap into the real, permanent existence of our physical form grounds our presence and our experience of life — revealing our wholeness, our sovereignty, and our connection to/as the World. This is the strongest medicine to heal and dissolve our anxieties, addictions, and depressions. To know our interconnectedness with reality is the greatest gift we can give ourselves.

Giving and receiving love is a practice. If you would like to be experiencing WAY MORE JOY in your life, download an hourly chime reminder app (I use MindBell for Android,) set it for once an hour, and start breathing yourself back home.

After I’ve been practicing this for about a month, I realized that every time I chose to pause and focus on my body was a conscious act of self love. Then it struck me full force that I DO love myself because I AM loving myself! This acknowledgement flipped a whole lotta scripts I was telling myself, so that now I truly know…

I Love Myself!