Feisty Bitch: Spiritual Creativity and Authenticity

Holy smokes...what a beautiful day today! I guess I don't feel so much of the feisty bitch part of myself today but I realized in talking to folks from different communities and walks of life how some folks can't identify with this message of "self-love" or "I LOVE ME" bc it feels too mystical, ethereal or cheesy spiritual and for others just straight "spiritual bypassing".

I can relate bc the feisty bitch part of me hates all things spiritually formulaic. At the same time I LOVE ME has peneterated the core of me and I can't deny how surely it has worked to change me forever. Still the disdain for spiritual formulas and automatan language really gets to me.

While I totally believe in the tenants of the movie The Secret, for example, it can push my formulaic automaton button. But my own prickliness doesn't stop me from trying the stuff out. Whenever I am resistant to something, I am always really curious and I have discovered that after growing up in a rather strict organized religion there was a way we were taught to use a particular kind of "god speak" that didn't feel authentic to me - I just hadn't internalized love. Some feel that about the I LOVE ME practice...like if we embrace this practice every other word out of our mouth has to be gratitude, manifest, Love, abundant etc etc. I can say for a fact that isn't my experience. You can be spiritually creative and authentic.

I just read Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love (great book by the way...I think everyone should read it bc it makes this authenticity point so brilliantly!) and she, like me, has to revisit self love over and over as she confronts the selfish, shameful, grudge holding, judgemental, critical, rejecting parts of herself. She has found the only way to get a grip on that kind of "ungrateful, violent, ungenerous thought" is not to "bliss out in meditation" but to actively and painfully love every difficult aspect of her humanity in her meditation...which by the way is what the I LOVE ME meditation that the Rodan Foundation teaches is all about...to love the feisty bitch within ourselves. I think some practices teach us to pretend it isn't there...a recipe, I believe, for depression.

She has a beautiful section in her book where the critic wanted nothing to do with being loved so sure that there was just too much ickiness to love and I will paraphrase the response the loving part of her said to this self-critic, "YOU HAVE NO [FUCKING] IDEA HOW MUCH LOVE I HAVE FOR YOU"!

Like Liz, once I decided to TOTALLY be on my side I can have a good laugh at all the mistakes I have made thru many well-practiced survival "techniques". I find working with myself from self-love and acceptance I move beyond these old learned ways of survival and grow into the new ones more quickly and thus create what I want in my life. I focus on accepting what is true now and then visualizing what I want...the two are important otherwise we abandon the wounded parts of ourself in search for the "spirtual reveal".

So, I say to the other feisty folks, embrace and love your feistiness. Create your own style and language for self-love. You needn't become a spiritual automaton to get this message...

So here is to TOTALLY FUCKING BEING ON YOUR OWN SIDE AND LOVING EVERY LAST DROP OF YOU! Yeah!