Loving Yourself Means Facing Yourself

Here’s what I’ve learned these past few years...

It’s not the absence of sadness and loneliness and grief that creates growth or change. It’s not eradicating it by pretending it doesn’t exist—that merely pushes it further down.

It’s sitting with your grief, your loss, your broken heart.

It’s saying, “I hear you and I understand your pain and I’ll love you through it.”

And you do...

You love yourself through your sadness, through your loneliness, through your grief.

You love yourself more fiercely than anyone outside of yourself ever could.

You love yourself enough to cry, to get angry, to let yourself feel whatever it is you need to feel.

And once the tears stop or the anger subsides, you don’t pick up those thoughts again. You let them go. You love yourself enough to release attachment to the story or the pattern or the mindset that created the pain.

This is part of loving yourself, too—the part that not everyone talks about.

Loving yourself isn’t all affirmations and meditation, though that helps the process of releasing the emotions and finding your way to the center of love within yourself...

Loving yourself is realizing how strong you are for facing the darkest parts of yourself and still appreciating every inch of who you are in that moment. Loving yourself is releasing those beliefs or patterns or mindsets linked to those emotions because you don’t want to stay in that energy anymore. Loving yourself is choosing to grow and change to become the highest version of yourself.

That’s the bravest thing you’ll ever do.

(This soul saying was originally published December 26, 2020 by Susan Dawn)