Not aligning in loving ourselves feels like a massive, collective ache…and ultimately, a pandemic. Although the old saying is simple, it really does hold true: We treat others how we treat ourselves. Our society is on the cusp of a monumental wake up, and there are amazing shifts happening that can move our civilization towards being one that is based off of equality, kindness and love. If we can learn how to align with our true nature, break down our own invalidation stories and align in self-love, we will naturally treat others with a higher level of love and respect. And then THE ENTIRE WEB of our society will shift. Can you imagine a world where you know you are enough 100 percent of the time and you love yourself despite your mistakes? Can you imagine a world where you radiate compassion and love other people despite their mistakes and don’t take it personally? What if we all believed that we are doing the best we can with the knowledge, understanding and awareness we have and chose to love instead of discriminate? Most of us can readily offer knowledge, advice or support to others on situations or topics that we have been through. On the flip side, it is very difficult to offer support or information to others that we were never given or never learned. This is because we LITERALLY do not know it. For example, for many years I harbored anger at my father for not being able to connect with me emotionally, but when I started looking at his family and their inability to provide emotional support for him, I softened. I realized that what I expected him to offer me, he had never been shown, and so it became my work to learn how to practice asking for these things from him, rather than expecting he already knew how to meet me and support me emotionally. Additionally, it also caused me to step into my power and to learn how to stop this cycle by fiercely loving and honouring myself, while also finding a community that would provide emotional support while I learned this. Ultimately, I refused to pass this ancestral trauma on, and made a firm decision that it can, and will, stop with me. When we authentically love and honour ourselves, we radiate this wisdom and identity to others. And when we know something deeply in ourselves, we also can see it in others. This means that by treating ourselves better, we treat others better. We also begin to look for these positive cornerstones in others, rather than focusing on the negative. Buddhism believes in basic goodness, which essentially means we are naturally enough at our core. Truly, we come into this life aligned in love. So, if love and feeling enough is naturally our belief about ourselves at our core, we can see those things in others and also emit this knowledge when we stand in our truth. However, as I mentioned above, our upbringing, family and friends, cultural background, identity, gender and the way our society puts values and judgments on these pieces shape how we value ourselves and others.
Each difficult and/or traumatic event we experienced in the past, where another person either outwardly or silently told us we were not enough through word or action, likely resulted in taking on an invalidation story. If we believe all of the invalidation stories we have collected from others, we block out our own goodness. And it increasingly becomes more difficult to access our own internal brightness and we stop seeing that we have been enough all along. Additionally, we also stop being able to mirror this core truth to others because we cannot see it in ourselves. Our core truth is love, and it is our environment that invalidates this truth. Coming back to this realization literally requires that we believe we are enough, and peel away the layers that block it, which are no longer serving us, and are not real.
Coming back to self-love doesn’t mean you have to do things outside of yourself to somehow increase it: it is naturally there. You are automatically enough, and you have everything you need to heal yourself already.
Authentically claiming that we deserve love, and loving ourselves more fully, aligns us with our highest selves - this creates a higher capacity to love others. If everyone makes this internal switch in themselves, we will literally shift our entire planet. I often hear people talk about how busy they are, and tired, and that “doing more” doesn’t feel possible. Truly, you don’t have to “do” anything here – you just have to let go of what isn’t yours. You don’t have to create or buy or push. All you have to do is recognize the places where you are stuck in someone else’s untrue invalidation stories that you took on, and then release and recycle them. When you do this, you are aligning with your true nature, your true soul essence. And the more you align in that soul essence, the better you begin to live from a place of self-love and life begins to transform.