Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Learning to love yourself...


I am someone who tends to listen to my inner critic first, and the other guides and opinions later. If my inner critic has something to say, I'm usually half-way into listening to it before I realize that it may be over-reacting to a situation and not necessarily looking at me as a whole person.

Whether it's because my mother's generation felt that mothering included a healthy dose of criticism, or because I didn't have a relationship with my birth father.. or because I was born with some untended Karma.. I don't know. But I do know that getting older made me face up to the fact that I was not good at loving myself at all. So I started to learn. In places like this:
http://www.attractionmindmap.com/how-to-love-yourself-in-17-ways/

http://kalimunro.com/tips_self-love.html

Loving oneself is about slowly, step by step, learning to listen to the critic inside and then ask her or him to be quiet. Learning to love oneself is making choices and allowing the outcomes to be what they are instead of sitting on pins and needles hoping that they turn out a certain way because that will indicate that you're OK.

Love isn't an emotion that comes with judgement.
Love doesn't make people feel less-than, small, or insignificant.
If the people in your life made you feel that way, then that was their problem not yours....
...
but how do you remember that when you're in the MIDDLE of feeling foolish, overly dramatic, or unprepared for some situation where you are desperately hoping for a clue?

I take a step back. And I breathe. I give myself a certain amount of time to process the feelings and then I ask my inner critic why she's being so hard on me. Then I listen. Most of the time she's trying to help me avoid disappointment. But when she goes unchecked, she runs amok... and she sucks all the joy out of live and leaves me feeling empty and hopeless.

So she needs to be quelled. I am not serving anyone, nor myself, when I spend a disproportionate amount of time feeling sad, down, disappointed.

I think I just came to a point where I was fed up with trying to be perfect.
I was fed up with some unreal, fake, plastic, media created image of a mother, wife, etc that just didn't seem like it left any room for love, creativity, and humanity.
So I put my inner critic on probation. And she's been there ever since.

She's allowed to voice her opinion, but she knows that I'm not going to listen to her if she carries on for more than a few minutes, or if she criticizes me more than once or twice a day.

And that's how I"m learning to love myself...