“Don’t worry if you’re making waves simply by being yourself. The moon does it all the time.” – Scott Stabile
by Astara
Most days I have one thought that weaves itself through my every move. I’m thinking about being love in the room. To live such a quality of being into the world is a life-long practice, and it takes work. Very worthy inner work.
Eclipsing Love
A few years ago, under the influence of a lunar eclipse, I listened to a fantastic talk by Dr. Margaret Paul about the majesty of inner bonding. After, I began to incorporate her self-care wisdom into my coaching and healing work so my clients could also practice being love in the room. Just as the earth’s shadow stands in front of the light during an eclipse, my own shadows, projections, abandonment and resistance, can eclipse the love that I am. Any lunar or solar eclipse is a teacher, so we can awaken to how we eclipse aspects of our being and begin the delicate process of loving ourselves back to wholeness.
Looking Outside for Security
While hearing Dr. Margaret share her 80 year-shaped wisdom about the importance of self-love, I observed our dog, Brown Dog, on our walk. He was behaving strangely. Brown Dog usually loves walking or running free in an open park for a while. He can often walk off-lead with me or Orion, my partner, staying near us and playing.
When I unhooked him from his leash, he stood still and smelled the air, looking anxious. Surprised at his behavior, I reconnected his leash back to his collar. We walked a bit more and he was his buoyant self again. After a few strides feeling him relax, I tried to release him from the lead again, expecting that he would prefer the freedom. He froze with wide eyes and began to run back the way we came. When I connected the lead to him a second time, his enthusiasm returned and he turned pulling me forward again along the path he knew well. On that powerful lunar eclipse night, did he need the lead to know where I was and that all was well? It seemed so.
I saw a connection between his leash comfort and how I have relied on my mind to anchor me in the world. Just as the lead seemed to soothe Brown Dog, I have turned to various externals to find security.
“Under your waves of emotion flows a river of self-love just waiting for you to wade on in.” – Astara
We often sing the Beatles “love is all you need.” We know deep down that love is all there is. Yet, the frequency of love can feel out of reach when we abandon ourselves and eclipse that flow of love.
Surf the Waves
The gift of frictions, triggers, and conflict in our life is to mirror back to us our shadows. Ultimately, we can learn how to love the heck out of ourselves, which is to say, to love all of who we are. The moon along my walk whispered to me, “under your waves of emotions flows a river of self-love just waiting for you to wade on in.” But we cannot just dive under the waves and hope they will go away, we have to go through them.
That is the gift of inner bonding.
Do you let yourself receive the infinite abundance of love? Do you feel loved, worthy, and connected? Every day?
The brutiful truth (thank you Glennon Doyle for that incredible word) is most of us don’t. It is difficult to understand self-love or even know where to start. It’s true, we can’t love others unless we embody love ourselves, but most people don’t know what that looks or feels like. For many years, I knew it intellectually, but didn’t experience it firsthand.
Why It’s So Hard to Love Ourselves
Inside my earbuds came Dr. Margeret Paul’s reminder, “loving oneself is about taking responsibility for our own pain and our own joy.” She calls it inner bonding. She offers, “If we’re not loving ourselves, then we’re trying to get that love from others, which doesn’t go so well. This creates a relationship where we’re each expecting the other person to give us what we’re not giving ourselves and that relationship does not work. To have loving relationships, it’s vital for us to learn to love ourselves.”
So why is it so hard to bond with ourselves? Why aren’t most of us practicing it already?
There are cultural and personal reasons:
- Patriarchy: We live in a patriarchal society with a lack of emotional intelligence in our education system. Society teaches us to ignore our body, our feelings, and see the authority of our worth and the source of love outside ourselves.
- Protective Personality: When we were little and we had big painful feelings like loneliness, grief, heartbreak, and helplessness, we didn’t know how to manage those feelings. We learned to live in our head and ignore our body so that we wouldn’t have to feel our big feelings. It is a natural effect of the ego or protective personality.
- Upbringing: Ignoring our feelings was reinforced by our upbringing. As adults, whether we know it or not, most of us are still doing that. If we’re not attending to our feelings, then that feeling part of us inside—our soul, our essence, our inner child—feels alone and abandoned because we’re not showing up to our own full experience.
- Self-abandonment: We have been trained to abandon our feelings and needs to experience connection, comfort and love. We also intraject the abandonment we may have experienced as a child, and betray ourselves in small ways out of habit. Ironically, we need to attend to our feelings to experience true connection. When we abandon ourselves, we cause the very feelings that we’re trying to avoid. Anxiety, depression, anger, shame, are all feelings that we’re causing by our own self-abandonment.
Self-abandonment
The first step is to become aware of how we abandon ourselves. Here is what self-abandonment looks like:
- Ignoring the body and staying in the head. Not attending to our own feelings and instead living in the mind where we think we will be safer.
- Judging ourselves. Most of us tell ourselves we’re not good enough, that there’s something wrong with us, that we’ll never be enough.
- Turning to compulsive comfort seeking (also known as addiction). Anything we do to avoid or numb our feelings out with food, alcohol, drugs, work, sex, shopping, movies, television, etc. is a form of self-abandonment.
- Making other people responsible for our feelings. After feeling abandoned (by ourselves) and blaming others, we try to control others by anger, withdrawal, resistance, or compliance, which creates all sorts of problems in relationships and in life.
Purpose of Big Feelings
Feelings like anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, judgement, anger, aloneness, emptiness, jealousy all have a role, a gift, and a message. We call most of these difficult feelings “wounded” or “negative” feelings because of the bigness of the energy (soul information) they deliver. Our feelings are messengers from our soul delivering critical information to us through our body. There are no good or bad feelings.
If we let ourselves drop below the story or label of our feeling, we are left with direct sensation and awareness in our body.
Anxiety tries to illuminate how we are dealing with the energy of our life.
Depression shows us where we are leaking energy and where solid ground is that is safe to stand.
Jealousy shows us what we desire.
Anger helps us move energy and take action.
Judgement anchors us (a little) in the world and helps us draw boundaries.
Shame tries to shield us from pain. If we let ourselves drop below the story or label of our feeling, we are left with direct sensation and awareness in our body.
All of these are sensations from our protective personality trying to keep us safe, and each of them can be brought back to the energy they are trying to move. If we deny any of these, we deny ourselves. When we attend to these feelings, we honor ourselves and their message is heard. Our energy shifts and we transform. Sometimes slowly at first, sometimes suddenly. You wade into the river of love.
Inner Bonding Steps
I went back and listened again to Dr. Margaret Paul’s reminder, loving oneself is about taking responsibility for our own pain and our own joy.
Dr. Paul is right! If we’re not loving ourselves, then we’re trying to get that love from others, which doesn’t go so well.
I reviewed her steps and added my Heartifact Archaeology Eco-system lens over them:
- Get present in your body with your feelings. Breathe into your belly, your heart, and core. Slow the inhale and exhale down. Notice all of the sensations no matter what they are. As teach in my online course Project Awakening, this is when we come back to subject.
- Breathe into your heart. Make a decision that you are open to learning. Say, “I invite the presence of love and compassion into my heart.” Put your hands over your heart, breathe in, and get present there in the center of you. The heart is the seat of the loving adult. Your Higher Self (or Soulful Self, Meta Self, etc.) is all around you and within you. The loving adult is the one that connects your Higher Self with your inner child and small self and takes action on their behalf. Develop this loving adult part of yourself so that the protective personality (the ego or wounded part) isn’t in charge. If the wounded part is in charge, it’s like being and acting from the age you were when you learned that particular false belief or addiction.
- Begin an in-depth dialogue and inner exploration. As the loving adult, ask, “How am I treating myself? What am I telling myself?” Then let that inner part of yourself answer. Once you get answers and understand what’s going on, go a little deeper into the protective personality part of yourself that’s doing the abandoning and ask, “Why are you doing this?” That’s how to become aware of the false beliefs that are governing your life.
- Ask your Higher Self. Ask your Higher Self two questions: 1) What is the truth about any of the beliefs that I’ve uncovered? 2) What’s the most loving action I can take for myself right now?
- Take action, whatever it is. Once you do you will feel relief. If you don’t take action, your smaller protective aspects of you know the truth. Over time this inaction compiles and you won’t have direct access to the love you are made of. You won’t feel it.
- Go within and evaluate how you feel as a result of acting on your own behalf. If you’ve taken loving action, you’re going to not only feel relief, you may feel a return of energy that creates more vitality in your system.
The Greatest Love Story
The greatest love story is the one where you embrace all of who you are, no matter what. Do not leave yourself when the going gets tough. Love all of you, the parts you don’t like and the parts you do, and create new habits of inner bonding. Let your inner small parts know you are there for them.
Over the years I took the natural flow of feelings and froze them in time and translated them into thoughts, dark stories, and wounded beliefs of those root emotions. I unconsciously abandoned myself in a myriad of ways to avoid pain. For me it was often in the areas of romance, work, and food, but other ways as well.
Through successful early childhood therapy in my thirties, pages and pages of journaling, tons of self-reflection and embodiment practices, bit by bit, year after year, I uncovered my abandonment patterns and embraced this hard-to-pin-down notion of self-love.
When I was younger and looking for a partner, my protective personality would cringe at the wise words from my elders, you have to love yourself before you love another. I winced because those words were true when I didn’t want them to be. Like many a romantic comedy movie or book of yore, I wanted to fall in love and have someone else take care of me and those big feelings and dark stories.
As I have matured, I woke up to my dark stories and self-abandonment patterns–that were trying so desperately to protect me. I halted the awful abandonment habit and replaced it with inner bonding. Through inner bonding I am able to love old myths to a new place.
Self-love is rooted in listening to my soul and giving attention to my own needs, which begins with listening deeply to messages from my body and then responding. Now I have the uncanny ability to thaw out old stories, let the root feeling flow, and land in the present moment.
In the years ahead there is slated to be celestial intensification of our evolution. There will be, it seems, no pause between the amplified reminders from the cosmos that come through supermoons, eclipses, and other celestial events. Let our Sound Alchemy journeys, Inner Space Academy courses, and guided meditations we share help you build resilience for the evolutionary intensity ahead. Use the healing sound and tools to guide you in to a space of deep inner bonding.
The greatest love story is the one where you embrace all of who you are, no matter what. Do not leave yourself when the going gets tough. Love all of you, the parts you don’t like and the parts you do, and create new habits of inner bonding. Let your inner small parts know you are there for them.
Inner space is the greatest space program there is. Using Anita Moorjani’s wise words, “love yourself like your life depends on it. It does.”
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