You know what I want the most for myself, my students, friends, family and community? I want us to love ourselves more. I want to support love growing in the world in any way I can. I think that love of both self and others is a very natural state we have all experienced.
We love our dogs and cats, our families, kids, partners, and friends. We love the ocean, rivers, rain, and sun. We love food. We love art and music.
What many of us seem to be lacking is self-love. To not love oneself is a learned behavior. Thankfully, it can be replaced with new learning.
Self-love has been made into the industry of ‘self-care.’ We are told to love ourselves by going to get pedicures, working out, and drinking water. While I’m not opposed to those acts, and believe they can be an act of love, it is possible to do all the ‘self-care’ and still hate ourselves. We know this – because we’ve done it!
Similarly, we can extend love and care to others from a place of wholeness or from a hole we want to fill. We can give our attention, time and money away freely and care for ourselves or not. If we are giving from a place of lack, or a need to fill a hole, it will not lead to more connection or love. It will not improve our feelings toward ourselves. Chasing our value externally never works in the end.
My therapist used to say, “we can’t get enough of what we don’t need.” Think sugar, alcohol, bad relationships – the things you want to consume regardless of how they make you feel in the end.
The most basic form of love is attention. Love is an act. The world could always use more of it. It is not that there is never enough, but it seems like there is always room for more.
Many women I know are very good at offering love and acts of care to others, but when it comes to self-love, they get tripped up. We’ve been taught to measure and critique ourselves in a way that we would never hold others accountable. Some of us believe that our value is in pleasing others first, and ourselves later.
Extending our care and focus to people outside of us is a normal biological response from infancy and childhood. We are interdependent and need one another. This continues into adult dependency periods like pregnancy, sickness and in finance too. These are the realities of living as a social being with needs for survival. We need care and connection to survive.
Once while attending a trauma summit, an anthropologist said that the nuclear family was going to be the death of humanity. She went on to share what contemporary hunter gathering societies were doing successfully that we, in modern society were not. I think we all know, at some level, that we are not attending to the community, the needs of the whole, as well as we could given all the wealth and knowledge there is along with ways of distributing it. We need to care for ourselves and advocate for the group. We know that when the community is cared for, we are better off.
As babies we knew exactly how to do this, how to attend to our own desires and needs and then translate that to getting care from those we were dependent on. It doesn’t mean our caretakers gave us what we needed, but we knew what we needed, and we knew how to ask. The responses we got informed our relationship to our needs and desires. That is why I believe that the lack of love for ourselves, is a learned behavior.
In a recent workshop I taught, one woman shared that her family told stories about what a ‘large baby’ she was and how ‘unruly her hair’ was. They also told her she was always ‘happy and smiling.” These sound like sweet things to hear from your parents, but this story had become a burden for her. There was more to her self-image and who she knew herself to be that felt unseen and she felt unsure she should let it out in public. She was self-conscious of the size of her adult body and her hair. While she knew how to please others, she wasn’t sure it was okay to be pleased with herself.
Hours into the workshop, she asked me what she could do when the workshop ended? Could she do the lessons and movement explorations we did at home? “Sure” I asked her if there was something that gave her joy? She said she loved dancing. “How would it feel to dance for a few minutes a day? “Her entire face lit up. It was like I was there with her 4-year-old self with much joy and love to share. She was so happy to have permission to move her “large adult body’ without the purpose of exercise or some other goal. She was so happy to explore the freedom and love she had for herself in her body as a child.
Many women report that they know what they need and want when they are alone. Alone, the boundaries are clear as is the ability to attend to and know their needs. In the company of others, their attention is pulled primarily to everyone else or at least what is outside them.
Most of us could use a little time invested in attending to ourselves, our preferences, and patterns both positive and negative. We could use time learning to connect with ways to center on ourselves a little more so we can take that into the world of relating. When we can attend to and track what is happening internally in real time, no matter who we are with or where we are, everything and everyone benefits.
Deepening our connection to ourselves really does deepen the world of love and connection with others. We can learn to show ourselves to the world, to share our joy, talents, vulnerability and humanity. When we see it in others, it is permission for us to experience it too. We inspire. We are inspired.
As young children, we loved and accepted ourselves before we were socialized out of it through our relationships with dependent care givers. We can easily return to this state of self-awareness and balance it with our care for the world outside of us.
The body is the easiest way to connect to ourselves. The body us the clearest intersection of mind, heart and soul. Notice yours. It will lead you home each time.
Love, Astra
