LOVE MONTH: DAY 10: “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” -Buddha
Many addicts use the healthy idea of self-love as a reason to stay completely self-serving and focused only on self.
That is not self-love. That is self-obsession. True love of self means that I am free of me and can bring my love to others without agendas, hooks or conditions.
I can sit with you and your story, no matter how painful it is for you to tell it. I have no agenda for changing your story, only for giving you the tools that have helped me heal.
This thing is all about selfless love. I have had a few friends who were capable of giving that. They have changed my life forever in so many wonderful ways. They gave me radical acceptance and loved me enough to tell me the truth, even when I was sure they were wrong.
This is all we can do. I don’t want to run your life. I will never have enough insight or time for that. It keeps you crippled and dependent on me. My ego may love that shit, but it is deadly for all concerned.
And I don’t want to make your decisions. Again, this is going to be something you require for the rest of your life. Figure it out, listen to your heart. Go with your gut. Stand up and pull on your own boots and see what happens.
Pay your prices and learn your lessons. If you need to repeat it 500 times, I may get impatient with your self-abuse, but I will let you go. That is what love does. Parents have a difficult time with this concept. I am blessed, because this was one of my most powerful early lessons around this deal. We do not know what their journey is all about. And we need to do the job of giving others the things they require to make a life, not keep them dangling on dependence to fill our ego’s empty nest bullshit.
I am grateful for these lessons, because they are the foundation of the work that I do in the world and how that unfolds.
Loving myself means that I am invested in doing the work that keeps me here and keeps me working on being better every day. That is a process. I am not a product of just doing this once and then going out and giving it away. I see what that looks like in the world around me, and I am not inclined to want it. I need to continue to develop and grow and search and learn.
This is never-ending. I did not love myself like I do today in those first few trips around the steps. I am glad to continue to go deeper and back into those things to learn what I need to see.
Not everyone learns to love themselves here. I have seen the difference. As with all things that kept me loaded, I want the deepest possible fix I can get, both before and after.
Working with others to deepen our own recovery is a challenging concept. I maintain that few are ready to do deep work until they have done it. That does not happen in the first 5 years. That does not happen in the first 10 years. My experience is that it is never going to happen completely.
As I grow and learn more about myself and those old ideas, I must explore how that works for others as well. I must continue to love myself enough to rest on my laurels. Recovery is a spiral that goes deeper every day and circles back around to the place where I thought I had done the work before. There is always more to know and more to love.
Dolphin Hug 