Falling in Love

I just recently started admitting to close friends that I struggled with an eating disorder in college.  It has taken a long time to even be able to say it aloud.  I’m still haunted by it.  I still think of all the tricks I used to stay thin and how maybe I could just use a few now to loose a pound or two.  Then I realize this type of thinking is what I have been fighting against and trying to get away from for years.  Why is it still here and how do I make it go away?

It’s hard to define healthy.  As a culture, we are obsessed with image.  T.V., movies, magazines, etc. lure us into this ideal feminine shape that somehow we end up craving and thinking we can have. However, we are all so uniquely different and comparing ourselves to any other person is crazy, foolish even, yet we still do it.  It’s as if we enjoy the self-torture of knowing we can never look like someone else, yet take extreme measures to try.

Deborah Adele speaks about the harm that comes from not loving ourselves in her book, “The Yamas & Niyamas”: Our ability to stay balanced and courageous has much to do with how we feel about ourselves.  [In truth] how we treat ourselves is how we treat those around us.  If you are a taskmaster with yourself, others will feel your whip.  If you are critical of yourself, others will feel your high expectations of themselves as well.  If you are light hearted and forgiving with yourself, others will feel the ease and joy of being with you.  If you find laughter and delight in yourself, others will be healed in your presence.

Love lies at the core of nonviolence and begins with our love of self.  Not a love that is ego-centric but a love that is forgiving and lenient; a love that sees the humor in the imperfections and accepts the fullness of the human expression.  Only when we find this love for all the parts of ourselves, can we begin to express fully the love that wells up inside of us for others.  Finding this love for all the parts of ourselves means we have to forgive ourselves.  Without forgiveness, we carry guilt like a heavy burden around our hearts.  Guilt holds our love for self and others hostage and keeps us bound to a one-sided expectation of the human experience.

I cannot say this enough times.  Our inability to love and accept all the pieces of ourselves creates ripples-tiny acts of violence-that have huge and lasting impacts on others… These attempts to change self, rather than love self, keep us trapped in vicious cycles that we can’t crawl out of…

As silly as it may sound, practice falling in love with yourself.  Just for one day see what it would feel like to love you without any expectations or judgments.  Falling in love is such a wonderful thing—the other can do no wrong.  The loved one is always beautiful and desirable and everyone around the lover also feels the love. Simply become curious what affect falling in love with yourself would have on those around you as well as yourself.  For one day, drop the negative thoughts, self-talk and unrealistic expectations and love yourself.  I give you full permission to be selfish.