Why Loving Yourself is the Hardest and Most Important thing you will need to do before 2018 ends…
When I teach positive psychology and resilience, 90% of what I teach is about having a healthy mindset (which sees the negative and positive and can balance the disequilibrium), being compassionate to others, having self-love and gratitude.
I have encouraged those in the training rooms to write a love letter to a loved one and it has been the toughest activity ever. It seems there is so much pain wrapped up in the love sometimes and we remember more the pain than the deepness of connection we feel with the person. Or there is some form of disappointment with ourselves and the role we play in the relationship and we don’t know what to say. Many times people are just uncomfortable expressing the love and their feelings. In a country where many people prefer to feed me to show how much they love me — yes that’s our Singaporean/Asian way of showing love; the actual words ‘I love you.’ are seldom heard.
The first time I managed to say that to my mother and her to me was when I left for graduate school at Harvard in Boston; nearly a day’s journey from where her by plane. She never really understood what I was doing and she missed me dearly. Some family members tried to guilt trip me into staying, saying who would take care of my mother? Obviously they didn’t know the tenacity of my mother and forgot that I had a brother still in the country who definitely could care for her.
I realized after coaching and counseling for more than 27 years now; how difficult it is to appreciate others and say “I love you” when we do not love ourselves. We cannot give what we do not already have.
In my latest digital product I write about how we need to really feel empowered and have self-confidence before we can have a greater impact on the world and access more wisdom and intuition and abundance. You cannot go from unworthiness to worthiness easily. In self esteem research, it is shown that we have a generalized self concept and also specific areas of self concept. So a teenager who is doing well in school may still have poor self esteem with regards to dating and being popular and that makes his or her world seem darker and less satisfying simply because he/she tends to focus on the negative aspects more than the positive. The prettiest girl in the school could be told to focus on her studies or on a sporting ability and she would never see or view her beauty as an asset or have any self confidence from that natural inherent part of herself. So one aspect of self can bring our entire generalized self concept down. Basically we have poorer self esteem always. We focus on the lack rather than what we do have.
This love of self — is not the one which the media hypes about when they ask you to treat yourself to a stay-cation or better mattress or body butter. This love is where you see yourself warts and all and you see into the spirit that lives inside the challenges faced by a body and mind easier affected by the world around us. This love celebrates your tenacity to overcome challenges, learn new skills and your vulnerability as we face pain, death, suffering and all of the world’s challenges.
I have been enjoying a deep inquiry into the concepts of “intimacy” and “commitment”. Unlike many in their mid 40s, I am without any personal relationships of a intimate nature — I am single and not in a romantic relationship. I was not divorced or widowed. I simply chose to be alone. However that’s not from a lack of desiring or wanting intimacy. I needed to understand what intimacy first meant. I had no problem with commitment. I am not a commitment-phobe. I have long service awards from my work and I was at the bed site taking care of two parents as they breathed their last. I know how to commit.
A marriage is a commitment — sometimes with the intimacy which means “close familiarity or friendship” and many times with the physical intimacy.
A family is a commitment — again sometimes and hopefully often times with intimacy, companionship, affection, warmth.
For many families are a noose tied around one’s neck rather than intimacy. A commitment bound by blood and history and financial ties rather than self-chosen.
A romantic partnership can be intimate and is also a commitment — the lightest of all the commitments I have so far mentioned. Afterall it is the testing ground for a commitment tied by a legal or blood or genetic contract. Once commitment comes in many lose the intimacy they first had.
Today I write to encourage you to commit to the one person whose intimacy with you need the most. Yourself.
Too many of us forget that we journey this life mostly alone — in our psychological mindspace. We may have others around us. We have children that remind us of ourselves when we were younger. We have parents who remind us of aging us in the future. However we are essentially the only thing we hear 24/7 in our own heads and the only person who feels the feelings we have. We need to have a deep and true intimate relationship with ourselves. We are already committed.
Yet we run from this inner discussion or inner love-making by distracting ourselves with politics, weather, pop culture and games. We do not write the love letter to ourselves and remind ourselves that we know who we are even when the world doesn’t see our full beauty or us at our best.
I would never have been able to write this post a year ago. Because a year ago I still didn’t understand intimacy. A year ago I understood commitment. I have understood the pain of commitment from a young age watching my mother stay with a man (my father) who abused her emotionally. I understood commitment when my brother stood up to my father even though he had left the house and started his own family; when I rang him to say I had to stand up against my dad when he raised his hand and slapped my mother. My brother told my father in no uncertain terms that should he do that again, he would take us in and all of us would leave him alone. I understand commitment when I hear countless of friends my age stay in marriages of no intimacy because of the vow they made to love the person in good times and in bad.
But commitment does not always come with the so needed intimacy which makes it a union of body and soul.
I like to call it “Into-me-see”
See Me.
Not your version of me.
Not the role I play in your life.
All the glory and grime of Me.
In some societies and cultures we have learnt not to see. In my world of conservative government work, we had colleagues who were gay but no one would acknowledge it. Those who could ‘see’ tried not to ‘see’ as it would be a challenge to the status quo of conservative values of the industries we were from. And there were so many who simply managed to “not-see”. Oblivious to the other way of life they did not know. This is where intimacy comes in. Who were their affinity and fellow feelers? Who were they comfortable letting that be known? Who did they feel safe with to be their full self with?
Regrettably, some die without this intimacy and die from the pain of the lack of it in their lives. I know of at least 2 gay male friends who have passed with that part of their life kept a secret from their church and family. I mention this because I know they felt they had to keep it a secret and they also chose to take their own lives. They didn’t do it as teenagers when emotions range high and many are impulsive. But as adult men. This is a common trend in the research of suicide.
I remember watching the funeral and knew instinctively how little the family knew of their own son. His gay friends did not attend the service and the hymns and the way it was conducted did not reflect their son’s preferences. I knew him well.
“We all have deep sacred longings we pray to have met” — Danielle Le Porte.
We walk the earth hoping for that person or event to fill us with the seen-ness we need, we crave, the gaping (w)holness. My journey these 2 years was into the non-seen. I took myself from all I know and where all my strength was and lived away from those who were my kin. The ones you assumed would know me best.
My familial kin could not fulfill my need for “Into-Me-See”. My mind and heart was either ahead of my time or beyond the boundaries of the Asian mentality. For years I bore the pain of being an outcast of my own making. Seeing things in interactions that no one else could see. My sensitivity my gift as well as my curse. I felt and saw things that my kin and my society could not understand. I felt lonely and alone.
So as I began to take on a global and perhaps even non-physical identity (spirit or being rather than merely mortal) I allowed myself to not ask from them what they could not give. And instead asked of myself for the intimacy I asked of others.
Intimacy starts with the self. I needed to know and claim without fear who I really am and being able to decode and decipher what I feel. What the hurt meant for me, the pleasure, the pride. What triggered me no longer became things to avoid but rather events to collect and learn from. I looked at myself and my reactions as a sum of experiences about myself. I became present to the presence of me. The gift that I was to myself and to the world. All my quirkiness, my temper, my fierceness, my sweetness, my intellect, my suffering, my darkness… ALL OF IT.
I allowed for a strong sense of my own identity. The one I hid before afraid that like an X-Man if I showed all of me, people would run in fear or kick me out of the house.
To finally feel safe and vulnerable within myself allowed me to be able to be open and vulnerable with others. I could be both strong and weak, courageous and fearful, adult and child-like. I could be inconsistent and real. Not professional and stable and safe — what I had trained myself to be for years— which was what was comforting to others but lost me my soul’s expression. I could be the roller coaster and the calm surface of the sea. I was both.
Intimacy involves trust. We must be able to trust ourselves and trust that we can be truly ourselves with our partners and they are safe to be themselves with us. We hide parts of ourselves because we feel them to be unworthy or would cause tension to the other. However in doing so we cut off parts of ourselves that keep us truly alive and truly real. When we begin to hide parts of ourselves first to others and then numbing ourselves to that pain we become zombies in life.
This year, I found strength and “Into-Me-See” when Kat told me to feel everything. When Hazel held me to my smartest advocate self and said let’s do this together. When my sexual experiences were allowed to be free and not censured by my conservative values. I allowed all part of me to be seen and heard and have a voice. I did not need to like what they said. They just needed to be expressed. They were parts of me.
I allowed myself to fall in love with Me.
And that set me free — truly free.
Not from pain but from lasting pain of guilt, unworthiness and shame
If I did something I regret or hurt someone with my words, I still feel the feelings but they become part of the mystery of me and the entity that is me. I apologize and I forgive both the event and myself. I do not dim my light for fear of striking again. I am going to be fallible. Into-Me-See.
In a year where I lost 3 friends to death. The toll simply increases each year with age.
I claim my right to Into-Me-See.
And I urge you to do the same.
The friends that see this are the friends that should remain.
The partners at work who cheer this on are the ones whom you can truly build empires with.
The disappointments that you have with yourself that keep you playing small. Will vanish.
Your full glory is worth celebrating
And should I die now. I know myself.
That is the only journey worth taking in this life-time. The journey into one’s own heart and soul.
Into-me-see.
