LOVING OURSELVES

It is a beautiful Morning! Sunny and bright, near perfect! Jamie and I took the little truck down the driveway to pick up a load of wood we had piled up. Jamie is stacking some up on our front porch at this moment. We like to have wood stacked on the porch for emergency or when we just want a cozy fire. We have an excellent heating system, a geo-thermal heat pump, when it is -20 F it needs a little help to keep the house at the temperature we want. If we were willing to live with 68 F we probably would never need the boost.

Our marvelous October weather is about to end. Snow is in the forecast for Thursday. It will probably warm again soon after, but it is a reminder we live in Minnesota. Winter is a reality.

The thing that is most essential to our awakening is learning to love ourselves. Personally, I have become aware of how my negative behavior flows from the feeling that I am not lovable. I am a reactor. I might get my feelings hurt because of some miscommunication and not even be aware of the hurt feelings and go right to irritation. There are two problems here, not being aware of my feelings in the moment [actually a fraction of a second] and getting the message that I am not understood, loved, appreciated etc.

When we love ourselves sufficiently and an incoming feeling, comment etc. feels critical, we can pause, assess how we feel and know or 'see' the reason. Perhaps the comment is a reflection of where the other person is at or we may understand that our behavior elicited the comment. Our forgiveness can be automatic. This whole process may take only seconds.

When we don't love ourselves sufficiently, we are on-guard. We may be only slightly on-guard. We may feel accepting and not have any awareness that we are vulnerable, but if the right person says the wrong thing [or right thing] that seems to be an attack, we can leap right into attack mode ourselves.

I have gone for weeks without one of these negative incidences and then an argument will raise its ugly head seeming to be out of the blue.

It is easy to look at the other. It is amazing how good we are at diagnosing other people's hang ups. It will never help. We need to look at ourselves.

The root cause of these problems is some form of fear that we are not lovable or not capable of love. Regardless of the nuances, and they can be interesting to discover, the basic problem is that we don't love ourselves sufficiently. We have not experienced unconditional love enough to erase whatever negative conditioning we have experienced.

Only we can do this. No matter how many people loved us unconditionally we wouldn't believe it. We need to love ourselves. We need to give up our old programming. If we could be dropped in paradise we wouldn't see it. We wouldn't believe it.

Fortunately we are works in progress and we can radiate love and receive love even though we are sometimes 'nuts'.

Wouldn't be nice if we could never have another episode of pain due to our craziness?

Meditation accomplishes a great deal helping folks get to that loving space where they recognize and experience unconditional love.

As I have said before I write this blog for myself. I recognize that a teacher can only teach what they are trying to learn. I want to love myself so I will never react negatively. I can do it. We can do it. I don't want to 'shit in my own nest' much less in paradise.

Let us talk more about this on Wednesday.

Love and Peace, Gregg