Hello!
Do you ever feel like you’re not making progress on your self love path?
Do you ever feel like if this path was ‘really’ working, that you would have transcended your negative emotions by now? That you would have learned how to have healthy self esteem, no inner critic and have gotten to a place of feeling total confidence in yourself?
Do you ever feel like so long as you still have coping mechanisms, self sabotaging behaviors and ways that you numb and stimulate yourself, the work must not be ‘working?’
Do you ever struggle with feeling like you MUST be doing something wrong or missing something because you’re not becoming the perfect, idealized version of yourself you are expecting yourself to become along this path of self love?
If so, I want to encourage you to keep reading.
Today we are going to be exploring the REALITY of this path, why it almost never looks how we think it’s going to look, why healing those ‘big issues’ that we think are the REASON we can’t be happy is likely the LAST thing we will see happen on this path, and why progress is not dependent upon these things happening.
This post will hopefully help you contextualize what this path is about and what it means to actually find happiness in this life.
So let’s dive in, shall we?
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The Self Love Path STARTS With ‘Invisible’ Inner Work
Here’s the most humbling reality of this self love, true healing path.
It’s always going to be a ton of inner work that doesn’t show ANY signs of progress on the surface, before we can start to see the subtle shifts start to actualize in our everyday reality.
This is because the work we do on the self love path STARTS with focusing most of our attention on our INNER world, and it starts with learning to become AWARE of the patterns we learned before our logical, reasoning, rational mind was even ‘online’, with learning to recognize patterns that have been so automatic for most of our lives that we don’t even recognize they are happening, and this awareness work is in no way ‘curative.’
Becoming aware, noticing what’s happening as we shame, blame and guilt ourselves and the whole spiral of thoughts, feelings and actions that come from that deeply automatic pattern - it’s a LOT of work and it doesn’t actually CHANGE anything on the surface.
It’s massively important work - we have to become aware if we want to eventually change things - but this awareness work is hard and again, it doesn’t lead to anything tangible in real life most of the time.
We’re going to start with having to tear down many of the foundations that we have built over the span of our lives in terms of how we view ourselves, how we view our emotions, how we handle our emotions, how we handle our thoughts, how we process negative experiences and how we speak to ourselves.
We are going to have to start with looking at all the ways we have been indoctrinated into treating ourselves like we are wrong, bad, shameful and guilty, and all the ways we have been trying to empower ourselves through self help, fixing, self improvement, self criticism and attempting to shame ourselves into changing, and looking at how these methods aren’t working.
We are going to have to start with simply becoming AWARE of all the ways self hate, shame, blame and guilt run our lives.
We are going to start with looking at all the ways we are interpreting our terrible feeling thoughts as ‘true’ even when the body is telling us they are false via pain, contraction and dysregulation, and we are going to have to witness our desire to believe these thoughts and to go down our familiar patterns of self fixing.
We are going to have to start with simply becoming AWARE of how deep we are in terms of self blame, shame and guilt, and how much of our lives revolves around trying to fix what we think is broken about us.
Again: awareness work is hard, and it doesn’t actually ‘change’ anything. It’s uncomfortable, it’s challenging and it’s deeply emotionally trying because looking at all of this and CHALLENGING it, even though it’s been our M.O for SO LONG, even though it’s been our filter for so long, means having to go through a period of repetitively seeing patterns, forgetting, going back into them, seeing them, forgetting, going back in and so on, before we are going to be ready to even start doing anything new.
Enter, Compassion And Curiosity
Then from here, we are going to have to start to do the INTERNAL work of shifting how we respond to ourselves when we are hurting. Shifting from shame, blame and guilt into compassion. Learning to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Learning to be kind. Learning to be gentle. Learning to see ourselves as fundamentally innocent and good instead of seeing ourselves as wrong, bad and hopeless.
This is likely NOT going to change our behavior. And learning to be kind instead of hard on ourselves is again, something we will have to practice over and over and over again until we finally learn to do it on a regular basis.
This is going to be something we continually remember, forget, are aware of, lose awareness of, that we are working on, that we let go of - because again these patterns were learned BEFORE our conscious minds were ‘online’ - and they are SO automatic, so programmed in as our way of being - that seeing them and turning the ship around in any reasonable way is a LOT of work.
Learning to have compassion for ourselves when we are hurting or struggling is a MASSIVE thing to do - and it’s going to take most of us a LONG time to learn to do this.
We aren’t going to see any external results from this practice - rather it’s going to be something that just subtly shifts how we feel INSIDE for a while.
Then we start to get into curiosity. We start to look into where we learned our habits. Where we learned that all the things we think are ‘wrong’ with us are ‘bad.’ Why we cope the way we do. Why we have the habits we do. We are going to do the work of getting curious about where we didn’t get our needs met, where we weren’t safe, where we were antagonized. Where we weren’t supported.
We are going to have to move past that shame and guilt and the instinct to ‘fix’ ourselves enough to be able to engage with ourselves on a level of truly wanting to know the INNOCENCE that lies behind all that we are and all that we do.
This work is some of the HARDEST we will ever do, because it’s PERCEPTION work.
It’s learning to see the water that we’re swimming in, and how polluted it is, when we weren’t even aware there was water there at all.
This is really, really hard work, and it takes SO much effort, time and repetition to become aware of all of this, and to start shifting from blame, shame and guilt to compassion and curiosity.
And NONE of this work is going to LOOK like anything on the surface.
Which is why for so long on the self love path, it can genuinely feel and look like nothing is happening, no progress is being made and like we aren’t doing anything.
Because changing the ruts of self blame, shame and guilt to patterns of compassion and curiosity is HARD WORK and will be something we have to work at over and over and over again until it becomes something we can do consistently.
Again, we really have to recognize and come to expect that this is going to make it seem like nothing is happening on the surface.
We simply aren’t going to see big shifts in our behavior, in our capacity to change, in how we respond to the world around us.
We aren’t going to see big shifts in our thought patterns, in how we think about ourselves and others and in the ways we actually DO things.
This first phase of the journey is all about witnessing, seeing the patterns, seeing what we are currently doing and seeing how we want to change those things.
It’s about SLOWLY learning how to shift our inner response to ourselves.
This means it’s NOT about taking action in the outside world.
The Seed
This is akin to that planted seed.
When we first plant a seed in the ground, it would be totally unrealistic to expect to see a plant shoot up right away.
It would be totally unreasonable for us to believe that the moment we put that seed in the ground, we should then be able to turn around and harvest fruit.
Rather we all know that when we first plant a seed, we need to expect that there will be weeks or even months where it will appear to us on the surface as though nothing is happening - because all the growth that’s taking place is happening where we can’t see it.
On the ground level, all we see is dirt.
But under that dirt - inside that little seed - SO much activity is happening.
That seed is first setting down roots.
It’s spending its energy NOT in a way that is going to directly lead to a shoot bursting through the soil surface, but rather it is going to be growing those long, snake-like tendrils downwards towards the center of the earth.
It’s going to spend its energy laying those foundations that will keep the eventual plant rooted, anchored and stable so that it is able to keep itself planted through the challenges of wind, rain, foot-traffic and anything else that may eventually threaten its capacity to stay planted.
It’s going to be sending those roots down in order that it will be able to nourish and feed itself well as it absorbs nutrition from the soil around it.
It’s going to be spending its energy slowly growing the baby parts of the plant that are so delicate that they need to stay contained within the shell of the seed in order to be protected.
Eventually it will start to send up a tiny shoot - one that again needs the protection of the soil as it’s not yet strong enough to hold itself up and to hold itself together in the face of any external challenge or force.
That baby shoot will have to develop its strength as it muscles its way up through the dirt, reaching towards the surface - and as it does so it gains the fortitude it needs to eventually be exposed to the elements of the world above the ground.
All of this under the surface work, all of this invisible growth, all of this seeming working BACKWARDS to send energy down into the ground vs. up towards where we can see it, all of this having to fight through the thick ground to eventually break through the surface, all of this is VITAL and all of it sets the plant up for the challenge of existing in the outer world without the protection of the seed shell and the soil.
It’s invisible to us on the surface, but it’s vital and required for that surface growth to happen.
THIS is exactly what the self love path is like.
We must allow ourselves the time and space to learn these observation tools. To learn how to recognize our shame, blame and guilt instead of automatically following the paths they send us down. We must allow ourselves the time and space to re-work our ‘fixing’ ourselves patterns and to shift them into compassion and curiosity patterns.
We must allow ourselves the space to do this work that seems like it’s having no effect - because these are our roots, this is us building that shoot that will eventually have to fight through the dirt to get to the sun - and then will have to survive the challenges of the external world.
It’s not going to look like anything is happening at first.
But SO much is going on inside that MUST happen in order for this work to eventually show itself.
And it’s vital that we give ourselves the time and space to have this inner growth without expecting that it changes much in our external world.
This is just what the path looks like.
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Let’s take a break here, and come back next week to explore why this path isn’t going to lead to us becoming who we think we have to become in order to be good enough most of the time, and why seeing our coping, numbing and self sabotaging behaviors change is usually the LAST thing that happens when we are doing this work next week.
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