Do You Truly Love Yourself?

I was asked to place my hand on my heart and ask myself “ Do you TRULY love yourself?” I was taken over with grief and pain when I found the answer. The answer was “No, I am afraid…afraid of loving myself. I do not find anything worthwhile in me to love myself. In fact I do not even know what to really love in myself! I do not know who I am, what are my likes and dislikes, what are my true desires and passions, what are my best and what are my worst qualities. I feel unloved”

I was very upset when I heard all these coming up. I knew it was my conscience speaking to me and communicating the thoughts and feelings that lay deep within me. So deep within me that even I had been for all these years unaware of it. 

As I heard this I felt the fear rise inside me. The fear of loving myself and the fear of not loving myself. I felt the sadness that had for all these years gripped me. What was this sadness all about? What was this deep rooted grief and pain that I felt often and what was it that made me so fearful of myself?

Our hearts are capable of such immense love, kindness and  compassion that we cannot even imagine. And yet it is this immeasurable ability of the heart to love and be caring and compassionate that we fear the most. We fear it because we are afraid that if we let go of our guard and go out to completely and fully embrace everyone around us with love and affection we will come back hurt.

To feel this is not shameful. For at some point in our lives we have been hurt and our trust has been broken, especially, by people who have been most close to us and from whom we had expected love, affection and kindness.  And when this happens our minds go into a mode of anger and distrust towards our self. Anger and distrust keep seeping into every layer of consciousness. Not only do we not trust others but we also stop trusting our own feelings, emotions and thoughts. We lose our innate ability to trust our heart and be kind and affectionate to our own self and others. 

When I was initiated into my path of self-discovery by my Guru J I was first asked by her to dive deep into my own feelings, thoughts and emotions. I found myself enveloped in anger and rage, hatred and jealousy, pain and suffering, guilt and shame. I found my heart enclosed in a fortress like wall, full of anger and defense…ready to push back anyone who tried to come near my feelings and emotions. For I did not trust them and neither did I have trust in myself to deal with anyone who came close to me and my heart. In other words I just did not want any company . As a child at home I was reserved and did not communicate much with my family. I had lot of good friends though. But no one too close or dear. I was the same in my adolescent, my teens and my youth.

During my early initiation I witnessed the source of all these emotions. I traced them back to my infancy, childhood and adolescence. Believe me it was not easy to see the people who you loved so much and who too loved you but had, sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly, contributed in creating these stress-full emotions in you! It was a mountainous task to re-live  the childhood experiences and memories of being hurt, grieved and let down by your own family and close ones. More difficult it was to work towards completely forgiving them, to break not my relationship with them but the bond of anger and grief that connected me with them. 

But this was not enough. Which is quite evident from the answer I got when I put my hand on my heart. What was more important besides acknowledging that I have been upset, sad, angry , grieved and hurt by all of this, but also acknowledging that yes these emotions do exist in me and yes that is why I have not been able to love myself. The whole thing was to own up responsibility for the presence of these emotions of my feeling worthless, unloved, doubtful and unknown to my own self.

With this owning up responsibility and acceptance I feel so much more relieved and light and peaceful. I have begun to pay attention to myself and listening to my self more than ever before and more than I can even remember. 

In my next post I will share more on this. More on how what are the many ways in which our hearts  close and clamp up to love and compassion. I will share my own childhood experiences, experiences some of my friends and family have shared with me. Meanwhile place your hand on your heart and ask yourself “Do you TRULY love yourself?” It is great if you hear “yes” and it is also great if you hear “no” because then this is a chance for you to get to know yourself more than ever before!