January 25th 2012 ~ Loving Yourself

This one had the potential to be hard given all the post baby hormones floating around at present.  Regardless of my personal current state of mind it's actually a lot harder than it should be to love yourself. We are so good at building walls to protect ourselves from future hurt that sometimes, we even have the wall up hiding from ourselves.

When is the last time you really looked at yourself? Not in the mirror, but inside .... deep, deep inside. Inside, where there is only truth and nowhere to hide. It is only when you look deep within that you can then honestly begin to love yourself. Because love, real love, is honest and true and naked to all that there is.

It's really hard to love yourself when you kinda don't feel loved much yourself. At the moment my life revolves around soiled nappies, feeding and trying to get as much sleep as possible in-between it all. In addition there's the extra demand of giving my little boy enough attention so he feels loved and special and won't resent his new little sister. It's also hard to feel loved when your body has gone through the wringer! Still have the worrisome unexplained abdominal pain, an over supply of milk that my little girl is unable to keep up with at present, a stomach that is oh so very ugly that I can't ever imagine it being normal or even being remotely attractive to my husband. So yeah, I can feel the love ... NOT!

But the meditation isn't asking me to love myself immediately. It's asking me to look into myself and find something that is an original part of my being, something that is part of my original self before I started to modify bits and pieces to suit others.

So I ponder, and I search for an original part of me. Untainted, pure, me .... and I find, my laugh. My real laugh, the one where I lose control in the moment and (oh gosh) I snort! It's honest, it's true and it's definitely me. When I laugh like that my husband can't help but laugh too and then I laugh again at my laugh and we end up forgetting what it was that made me laugh in the first place.

So I great my days with my true and honest laugh in my mind and I look to find the true and honest in others. 

What would your true and honest trait be? Your laugh? Your love of flowers? Your stubbornness?