Love who you are, as you are
Artwork by Hannah Goldfisch
To walk a path of self-love one must prepare to encounter all of its opposites.
How we do this depends on our willingness to feel and our capacity for love.
Healing through the body is a process. It is about learning, at each layer of unfolding, how to hold ourselves lovingly through the process. To learn how to bring presence, love and care to the places that hurt.
It is a practice that teaches us how to stay with ourselves, our feelings and thoughts, to witness what needs to move through us. It is about learning to recognize what needs to release and what needs building back up.
Healing is a process of integration, of encouraging and supporting unconscious memory to surface up through and within the unconditional arms of the heart, our most conscious light.
To love what is inside of us is to give ourselves full permission to be who we are.
To love who we are is to feel welcomed home inside ourselves, just as we are. To be unconditional with our love.
Lately, what I have noticed most frequently arise in my private healing practice and group sessions is a collective theme around how we heal our fear of disconnection. In other words how we heal shame.
I love Brene Brown's definition of shame. She defines shame as the "the fear of disconnection".
No matter how hard we may try we cannot rationalize our way through healing shame. What we may understand about shame yields an awareness which is necessary to start, but what about the actual process that is required to love what we least love about ourselves?
Healing shame invites us to welcome all of who we are back into love.
It asks of us to develop the steady capacity to feel our way through. To practice loving ourselves all the way through.
Healing requires us to learn how to love. To acknowledge our fears of disconnection and gently summon ourselves back home inside the heart. To welcome back the fragments of you that ever felt abandoned, unworthy or less than. To welcome back the fragments of you that ever felt discarded, lost or silenced.
To love you back into wholeness and belonging from within.
Healing requires all of our love.
Our wounds are not to be discarded or judged, but rather regraded as the origins of remembering what will serve to strengthen our capacity for greater love to bring back greater wholeness into all areas of our life. The practice of loving who you are, as you are, yields the kind of intimacy that sets you free from deep within yourself.