Turning my will over to my Higher Power does not mean I'm no longer taking responsibility for my life. It means simple that I'm trying to align myself with the focus of the Universe. To me that means Love.
Love is the primary purpose of all creation. I truly believe this. All things come from love and return to love. I need more love in my life - I think we all do.
One of my greatest struggles is love of self. I fear being selfish more than anything and I struggle with the concept of self love not being selfish. In order to show kindness, compassion and love to others unconditionally, I need to have love for myself. In essence in order to be unselfish I need to love myself. That is where it all starts.
Ultimately what it comes down to, is that my Higher Power loves me unconditionally even when I'm messing up - even in the worst of my compulsive eating, my Goddess was with me loving me and supporting me - I just didn't acknowledge it. Who am I to be so self centered as to think that my Higher Power is wrong and shouldn't love me. I was created to be a being of love and light. I love others for their potential why do I inside on hating myself.
I love me and that is a selfless act - it makes life for all those around me better, because it allows me to love them.
I will not apologize for my self love and I will probably not stop struggling with it - I've been conditioned to believe that my defects of character and my mistakes make me unloveable. This isn't so - I can still love me - it's imperative for me to love me more because I need love to over come those defects of character and to learn from those mistakes.
So for today, I will forgive myself and I will take time to love myself.
Blessings.
Wanna hear something that I just read recently that *BLEW* my mind??? Basically, it said that depression is actually a form of being self-focused Basically, when one focuses on the self so much that we become so overly critical of ourselves ("I'm not where I want to be" "Why me??" "Why another struggle this week for me?" "I can't (insert activity or goal not achieved)" "I want (x) but do not have it" etc).
ReplyDeleteWhen we look outside of ourselves more, we can break away from all of those patterns of self judgement, self worry, self pity, etc. I took that idea into myself and really thought about it deeply. One of the remedies the article offered was to focus more on others - whether that is others around us, our community, the world, animals, higher powers, etc. Whenever we start to think "Oh, I am not kind enough to myself" (or whatever it is we start to think about ourselves), we should then exchange that for "Today I will focus on something outside of myself".
It's not about us and doesn't need to be. That's really liberating to me right now and is really helping pull me up and out of myself and into a place of more peace. That's not to say, of course, that *WE* don't matter. We totally do! We just need to remember that we are perfect just the way we are in this exact moment. Our journey is perfect. There are no mistakes. We can't "mess up". We can never be anything other than perfect. There is no judgement from god (or the goddess, or mother nature, the universe, the One, whatever one calls it).
Isn't that pretty liberating?!
This makes so much sense. I know that while I'm in a depressive episode I'm all about me - I can't see past myself to all the beauty that is around me. That's one of the reasons I try to focus so much on gratitude and service. In AA and OA the way to our Higher Power is through service, service to our fellows in OA and service to our families and friends to those around us. Getting out of our own heads for a while works wonders.
ReplyDeleteIt's a wonderfully liberating concept. So glad you took the time to share it with me. Thank you.