Cherishing You (From DailyOm.com)

Falling in Love with Yourself

Many people, in seeking out love, tend to look outward rather than inward. Yet falling in love with yourself can be just as wonderful an experience as falling in love with someone else. While the idea of falling in love with ourselves may be perceived as conceited or selfish, choosing to fall in love with who you are is a powerful act of self-love.

When you fall in love with yourself, you can’t help but experience a wonderful sense of discovery. You begin to look at yourself again through fresh eyes, becoming more attentive to the little details that make you so unique. Once you discover how much there is about you to fall in love with, you can’t help but want to treat yourself as lovingly and respectfully as you would treat anyone who is special to you. You start to give to yourself more because you become more attentive to your own needs and desires.

Choosing to fall in love with yourself is a very personal process that takes time. There is no magic wand you can wave to make this just happen. But there is the magic of your intention and the power of your actions, whether you are taking the time to do the activities you like, speaking to and treating yourself with respect, taking inventory of all your wonderful qualities and accomplishments, or nurturing yourself with plenty of rest and self-care.

When you fall in love with yourself, you begin to see yourself more positively, appreciate your unique outlook on life, and treat yourself in a more nurturing way. In loving yourself, you are acknowledging that you are special and deserving of love. Best of all, you are giving yourself one of the greatest gifts you have to give another. You are giving yourself the gift of your love.

Love is a Contact Sport

Should we be needing other people to love us too? Won't we be labelled "needy"?

We are sold a lot of buzzwords about needing folks. You might hear these from yourself or your friends, "I am too needy, I am co dependent, I don't know how to self soothe, I don't want to bother you" etc etc. It is so part of our culture which promotes individualism and independence. (Read up on Eastern Cultures if you want a different world view. Mark Epstein's Thoughts Without a Thinker could be a fun one to check out).

That said, I make a t-shirt line of I LOVE ME tees. The premise was more of a metaphysical one but the one thing that is clear to me, is I LOVE ME vibing or not, we still need to feel loved by others. Love heals but not in a vacuum. This is top of mind for me even more as I am learning to parent my first son and re enter my psychotherapy practice after maternity leave.

We humans are herding animals. We need to be in relationship with others to survive. My son needs my love, touch, holding and nurturing to survive and as adults the need for that same stuff never goes away. I still need it. But we do funny stuff, don't we, when we are looking for love and nurturance and reach for it only to have some folks respond with "OOO what is wrong with you?" or "Hello?" Reaching for love often takes us right back to those most vulnerable soft young places that reached for love and no one was there -so reaching as an adult can feel scary. And what's harder is often we need love the most when our behavior may be the most appalling - we get frantic in the reaching process sometimes. Check out Sue Johnson's book "Hold Me Tight". All kinds of interesting research on adult attachment and our need to bond with others.

So what does all this mean for I LOVE ME and the whole concept? It means I LOVE ME isn't all there is. Loving ourselves is often learned by feeling what it feels like to be loved unconditionally. But who knows how to love unconditionally all of the time? Um, no one. No mother is perfect. So we all get hurt at some point. That, then, is where I LOVE ME comes in. We can keep reaching to others as adults because we have praticed and feel we are entitled to be loved rather than that fear-of-not getting it franticness left over from younger times. In fact, when we pratice I LOVE ME we can tolerate when our loved ones can't love us unconditionally all the time without getting frantic about it. I should point out some folks don't even reach for love - they have given up and stay heady and judgemental of us reachers.

Finally, there is the art of giving love and maybe that is the point of the t-shirts. I get reminded of I LOVE ME but ultimately I am practicing "giving" love. There is a huge component to this LOVE thing that is about giving it. When someone reaches to me and I can give it, it feels so great to be alive in those moments yes?

So...love is a contact sport that requires giving and receiving; giving love to our self and others and receiving love from our self and others and we have to do them all - not just one. The practice is called a practice because it is never done perfectly, probably for our whole life, but what a worthwhile pursuit. It is an edgy one for many of us as we walk that edge of vulnerability - vulnerable to reaching and having no one meet us or vulnerable of giving and the other not fully receiving it or letting it in. ...don't take my word for it - try it out. Start your day off tomorrow by throwing your arms up over your head, let your head fall back and grin hugely while you yell out loud "I LOVE ME". Do it again. Then reach out to a loved one and ask to be loved, for a hug, for support...be vulnerable with them. And finally offer your love to someone...be vulnerable again.

How did it go?

When the Five Year Old Takes Over

I was just on my way to bed. My son fell asleep early tonight and American Idol is now over...yes I am a closet Dave Cook fan...now officially uncloseted. But mostly I was checking out in front of the "boob tube". Kind of funny that we give it that short hand as the TV literally becomes the breast at which some of us go to for soothing.

And so, soothing is the topic. I became aware this weekend, at how, even being an adult woman rounding the corner to 40 and a mother that inside of me still lives the same 5 year old who learned to avoid criticism and relentless teasing by "being the best" and who equates any kind of authority as abusive power mongering. Is that the reality in which I live now...no but all of us unconsciously find the familiar from the past in situations now and respond as if "it were so". The brain just does this...kind of how we were built to protect ourselves from danger.

Because of this brain reality, changing our behaviour amidst old familiar dynamics is slow. Sometimes the finding the past in the present never changes, we simply get better at catching ourselves in the act of bringing that past forward and make different choices. BUT sometimes we forget and we walk around for an hour, a day or a whole weekend as our five-year-old self resonding to a current event as a five year old would and as the events actually took place then and not how it took place now.

You know, those days where you get so emotional about something that the rational part of your brain - if it ever comes on line - says "Whew, this is a rather strong emotion for a small situation". Like a tunnel vision or where all of the air in the room is being breathed through a straw and all of your attention is on the incident that got you so emotionally reactive that nothing else outside that incident can be seen. Somtimes we can feel the familiarity of our own reactivity. "Oh I used to do this exact thing when I was five." Most of the time, unless we have done a huge amount of work on ourselves in therapy or meditation, we don't even notice we are five.

One of the things I have noticed for myself, after years of self-work and working with clients, is these moments grab us when we least expect them and we have most been neglecting our self-care: I LOVE ME meditation, eating well, sleeping well, communing with friends etc. And as a new mom all of those have taken back seat to mothering my son and starting back to the corporate world. And so my own inner five year old got the best of me.

But I saw my way thru and I was reminded of this neat way to practice I LOVE ME. When we find ourselves in these "regressed" or "young" states we can imagine some figure of the ideal parent that lives inside of you/me/us and in those moments where the five-year-old has taken over, that ideal parent steps in to put that five year old in her lap, ask her what is wrong, hold her, rock her and tell her it is OK without telling her to "get over it" or ask "what is wrong with you". Total love and acceptance helps us see our way out of the reactivity...abusive judgement keeps us stuck there. We can't expect friends to do this for us either...it is most powerful and shifting when we can learn to hold the five year old. Just holding the five year old is another way of practicing I LOVE ME and in giving that child part the love and support it needs the air comes back into the room and we can make a better choice at how to respond to the present moment - the adult world.

Next time you find yourself five, try out finding that ideal mother inside of you and put that five year old in your lap and see how your outlook shifts. And for new moms, just because we are moms, our own inner child doesn't disappear...she is still there and the more we practice loving her the more loving we can be with our flesh and bone children. That is what I am finding anyway...

Off to bed.

Back to that Soft Spot with my Ego

I have been caught up in an old complex of mine this week and in true "traci" fashion I try to solve it with my brain...it is a very very old behavior pattern...stuff I can remember doing at age 5. But the head never seems to be very kind in the way it tries to sort things out or change my behavior...

As I moved thru this material, I was reminded of the "soft spot" discussion from my last blog entry and how to be with this pattern in a soft, compassionate, open-hearted way. To take the whole matter right to the softest part of me and be still and quiet and wait...no solving. I also was reminded how much of this stuff I was struggling against was about my ego...and a teacher of mine sent some of his favorite quotes from Ekart Tolle's latest book ...but even my ego entanglements I can be tender towards. The quotes are provocative and I am reminded that they are to be read with a great deal of compassion towards ourselves and the suffering our egos cause us, not as another standard to use for self judgement...judgement is STILL the work of the go and so we/I chase our tails.

Here is to soft hearted or "soft spotted" awareness of our egoic foibles.

New Earth Quotes:
In a genuine relationship there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever. That alert attention is Presence. It is the prerequisite for any authentic relationship.

The ego always wants something, or if it believes there is nothing to get from the other, it is in a state of utter indifference.

Three predominant states of egoic relationships are: wanting, thwarted wanting (anger, resentment, blaming, complaining) and indifference.

Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that's the ego in you.

It is not about me, It is all about me

I have not had a chance to write since giving birth to my son, Leif Leander Gantert, on December 22 here in my Half Moon Bay home.

Of course, there is no better teacher in my life than parenting a new born baby and the importance of living "I LOVE ME" for their sake. The funny thing about new little babies is they are still so unformed. They are one big bundle of "present moment" experience. So what I mean when I say, "It is not about me" is that it is easy to project all kinds of our own "shite" onto our infant, personifying them with all kinds of personality traits and assuming cause and effect tied to "me" the parent when in reality, they are just having their own experience and my job is to figure that out.

Simple enough and most people already know this. What is important is that the exact same thing is true about people. Sometimes I can get so completely self absorbed that I assume that someone else's reaction, tone, or even joy is about me when in fact it has nothing, whatsoever, to do with me. To be honest, this is a relief.

What IS "all about me" however, is how I choose to respond to my infant son or to the other person - be it friend, colleague, family member, etc. I often think of Pema Chodron's teachings of the "soft spot". We can take in the joys, sorrows and angers and reactions of others and simply empathize or see the world from their shoes. I always thought I understood what this meant until I had a baby. I intellectualize, so often, in how I empathize with others but with a baby it is literally feeling the cry of your baby and taking it right to the center of your heart, the softest part of you and feeling what it must feel like to have a gassy tummy without any understanding of why this huge tornado is building inside your stomach. It is more than a heady understanding, it is literally taking in the experience, metabolizing it and then turning it in to big hearted empathy rather than heady empathy.

The prerequisite, of course, for big hearted empathy with both babies but especially adults and most especially teens is the ability to tolerate dwelling in our softest parts. It is hard to do that, isn't it? It is for me. I have spent years and years in one spiritual practice or another trying to master this and am still working on it. Being a therapist and now being a mom have been gigantic teachers for inhabiting this place. I will say, there is a huge misconception that somehow this place is a stance of weakness...the eternal doormat...couldn't be farther from the truth. There is so much strength in this quiet, grounded, soft hearted place. Sometimes, the empathy comes in a package of firmer boundaries with an invasive person, but not out of reaction, out of genuine loving kindness.

Practicing the "I LOVE ME" meditation helps remind me to dwell here in my "soft spot" so I can know what is and isn't about me but more importantly so I can really see you. I was discussing with my dad this weekend, Divinity is found at that intersection of human to human authenticity. When we can make contact with another person from our softest places, that is where we find "God". Maybe a good title for the next blog post.

Anyway, here's to meeting you in the soft spot.