THOUGHTS: LEARNING TO LOVE MYSELF

THIS IS ME


Whatever I do...there is always a voice inside me saying, "not enough. I'm not enough. There's not much joy in what I do, always trying to prove myself, just increasing exhaustion. Happiness frightens me. i have this sense that if that if I'm happy something terrible will happen. .Of all the judgments we pass, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves.We may never reach a joyful vision of ourselves because of negative input from others, or because we have defaulted on our own integrity. It is not necessary to hate ourselves before we can learn to love ourselves.The tragedy is that so many people look for self-confidence everywhere except within. We will stop telling oruselves" If only I can afford a big house, If only I had someone or more money...then I will really feel at peace with mysel. We will realize that since the quest is irrational, the longing will always be for one more.

Some part of my self-esteem is invested in the belief that my mother approval is necessary for my well-being and self-respect. I have to learn to withdraw that investment and take back my own life

It's hard to accept my body and face. But i have to remember accepting is not the same as liking...accepting does not mean we cannot wish for changes or improvement. It means experiencing, without denial or avoidance, that a fact is a fact, It means accepting that the face and body in the mirror are your face and body, and that they are what they are. If you presist, if you surrender to reality, if you surrender to awareness, you may notice that you have begun to relax a bit, and perhaps feel mroe comfortable with yourself and more real. We are always stronger when we do not try to fight reality. We cannot make our fear go away by yelling at it, or yelling at ourselves. But if we can open to our experience, saty conscious, and remember that we are larger than any one emotion. "I am feeling fear, and I can accept that fear, but I am more than fear". When you learn to accept fear, you cease making a catastrophe of it. Then it cease to be your master. you are no longer tortured bye fantasies that many bear little or no relationship to reality. When we fight a block it grows stronger, when we acknowledge adn accept it, it begins to melt because its continued existence require opposition.

I remember things....my mom was so sarcastic,,,her tongue could kill. When I was a small child, I couldn't handle that. I cried so much. WHen i was 11, there was a bully on our block who terrifed me. He would beat me up for a couple of months on my bus stop. Sometimes I cannot forgive the person i was before. I cannot forgive that I was so frightened of my mother, that i felt so unlovable, that I so hungered for attention and affection, that I wasn't populare at school, that i was timid, that i was shy, that i was afraid to disobey my parents ,that I didn't know what to do when I was being ridiculed.

The child we once were can were can be experienced as a source of pain, rage, fear, embarrassment, or humiliation. We reject that child just as perhaps, others once did, and our cruelty to that child can continue daily in the theater of our own psyche. We profess to find evidence of being rejected everywhere in our currend relationship, not realizing that the roots of our experience of rejection are internal rather than external. Our wholes lives can be cats of nonstop self-repudiation, while we go on complaining that others do not love us.

We must learn to forgive the child we once were for what he didn't know, or couldn't do, or couldn't cope, or felt, or didn't feel. When we understand and accept that that child was struggling to survive the best way he could--then the adult- self which is me is no longer in a adversarial relationship to the child-self.

First, I reject myself, Then I go around feeling rejected by others or looking for possible sign of rejection, which I am typically quick to find. I imagine that the problem is between myself and other people. I do not grasp that the worst of what I fear from others I have already done to myself