Self-Love is an Act of Justice
We’re five weeks into our nine-week mindfulness program together where we’re learning to honor the whole spectrum of our human experience without needing to change it in any way. We’re learning to hold the whole of our humanity as a loving mother would tend to her distressed child. It is still one of the greatest gifts of my life to hold space for all that a human (including myself) may carry and I have come to realize this practice is a radical act of sanity.
I have learned over the years that we’re relentlessly taught to be really hard on ourselves. To be honest, in many cases, we are downright cruel to ourselves. This is not our nature. We’re not born this way. It’s a destructive aspect of our culture that is ingrained in us by modern Western narratives. This is a deluded function of systemic oppression and its effect is to keep us engaged in acts of filling the deep hole in our hearts, a kind of spiritual poverty, in all kinds of adaptive and maladaptive ways.
The antidote is awareness (developed through practice) coupled with self-compassion. And healing happens immediately. Seriously. We’re building neural pathways of LOVE. We even see the effects of this in brain scans of people that engage in this work. This is truly social justice work that dear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was referring to because it gets to the root of human consciousness.
Just to give you an example, here’s a testimonial from a participant this week: “I’m learning that I deserve to treat myself like I treat others. I’d be understanding if a friend, child, a relative was stressed or angry, but I notice that I beat myself up for having those feelings. I deserve to love myself, which is honestly something I never thought of doing (loving myself) which seems silly saying that, but it's true.”
It's not silly, it is true. Self-hatred is a delusion of consciousness that our culture thrives on. Stepping off this treadmill is an act of sanity and profound healing. I see it as a kind of activism because it goes against our standard cultural narratives that keep us in cycles of trauma and re-trauma. Once we are aware of it, everything shifts and we can choose not to engage in those narratives any longer. And we learn how to cultivate the inner loving mother that so many of us did not have. We learn to practice extending gestures of kindness and self-compassion toward ourselves. It’s truly profound and life-changing.
We reclaim all the energy we expend toward self-deprecation and turn it into love.
In this work, we become the change.
