Whether or not you celebrate love via chocolates and roses, this time of year is a wonderful opportunity to connect to a sense of love: for self, others, and the world. I recently read (Eastern Body, Western Mind) the above quote: “Love is a feeling created from action” and was reminded how interconnected the human experience really can be. We have these emotions and feelings, but they don’t only arise from nowhere; often what we feel is the result of what we’ve been doing (and vice versa!).
What I’ve learned from the Alcohol Experiment, both in the reading and in our discussion group, is that you can change what you do by changing how you feel and think. And it can work the other way as well: sometimes to change the way you feel, you change what you do. The therapists I work with at Mind Body Health Associates refer to this as either a “top-down” or “bottom-up” approach to change, and either can work. There are many ways to grow the quality and quantity of love in your life.
And with all this talk on love, let’s make something clear: put yourself on that list. I don’t think it’s a mistake that Jesus offered the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” However, somehow we’ve been programmed to believe we innately love ourselves. Sure, we have plenty of examples of the selfishness of humans, but selfishness is not the same as self-love. Often selfishness stems from a lack of love: we feel so unloved by the world and ourselves that we get all grabby about things.
I’m beginning to see our inability to love our neighbor not because we reek of too much self-love, but because of our lack of self-worth. When we are able to acknowledge and honor the innate beauty of our own being, we quickly see that same thing in others. (You know that feeling of someone annoying you to no end and then discovering that you’re annoyed because it’s YOU, at your worst? It works the other way, too!)
That’s the namaste of it all: by noticing the divine light within me, I can actively notice and acknowledge the divine light within you and all beings. Like our children and our partners and our best friends, they don’t have to be perfect to be loveable: and neither do you.
