When Self-Love is Gnar
Collage & Images by Leigh Aschoff | OMAYARI
Sometimes the most loving thing we can do for ourselves is to accept ourselves.
How do you love yourself when you are uncomfortable, challenged, triggered, and/or in the familiar karmic briar patch?
How do you accept yourself when you find you have left yourself in some way or when you begin to unearth new truths about yourself?
I believe there are precise parts of ourselves that only we can tend to for true satiation. These areas mark the path of our soul’s healing journey. Other people or things placed upon these areas act only as a temporary relief.
It is easy to choose distraction as a way of relief, or even to ask or hope that others will love us (so we don’t have to go within and do some of the gnarly work ourselves).
This is natural because some of this terrain can be overwhelming, dark (as in trying to love yourself when you cannot see parts of yourself clearly [yet]) and painful to make contact with.
Having what Alice Miller calls an “enlightened witness” (therapist, healing practitioner, mentor) and what Chögyam Trungpa calls a “spiritual friend” is incredibly helpful to this process as is cultivating an inner enlightened witness / spiritual friend / inner loving parent.
The spiritual work of self love can be incredibly gnarly. It can feel like the tip of a pin in the present moment, full of breath and just being in our own discomfort from one moment to the next. Learning to tolerate discomfort in ourselves and accept ourselves through these times is powerful work that I believe is incredibly valuable for us as a human tribe.