The Journey to Self-worth, Self-love and ultimately, Love

(This blog is an extract from a forthcoming book I’m writing with the working title, How to be a Friend of the Devil Within)

Three Constituents and their Dualities…

Accept vulnerabilities: as necessary to the human condition. Avoid allowing them to dictate your actions. Avoid denying them. Learning from vulnerability is fundamental to knowing what being invulnerable means. That’s the paradox of duality – you know something is wet because you know it’s not not-wet, i.e. dry.

To understand invulnerability, allow yourself to ‘be ok being vulnerable’. As you learn more about vulnerability (defencelessness), you learn more about ‘not-vulnerabilty’, invulnerability.

Image courtesy of Cernonnos

Defencelessness becomes your strength – when you learn to apply its wisdom.

Learn to be okay with uncertainty. For example, when you commit to a journey, you may not arrive at your intended destination. Likewise, when you allow yourself to fall in love, that love may be rejected or lost. Learn to avoid trying to control people to adhere to your will. Love is only achieved through choice and freedom and living with the uncertainty that choice and freedom imply. Put another way…

If you want to change something stop trying to control it.

Self-love does not mean that you or life has to be perfect. You were designed to be incomplete. By all means strive to improve yourself or the life you lead AND ‘don’t beat yourself up for being imperfect’. You, your friends and acquaintances, your children and your enemies, none are perfect.

This is what researcher and storyteller, Brené Brown, says about raising children in a generation that has the highest rate of drug dependency, obesity and debt in history…

Our job is to say (to our children), “You know what? You are imperfect, you are wired to struggle – BUT you are worthy of love and belonging”. That’s our job. Show me a generation of children raised like that and we’ll end, I think, the problems we see today.
Brené Brown: The Power of Vulnerability

Be clear about your intended outcomes and commit to the journey to achieve them. The outcomes will not necessarily be spiritual. Yet the journey to complete – that which is incomplete (incomplete self-worth, incomplete self-love and incomplete love) – is always spiritual.

Your True Nature Creates Love

Being okay with the three states: vulnerability, uncertainty and imperfection, means that you no longer hold yourself back with emotions (anger, shame, hurt and fear) that stop you from expressing your true nature. Not feeling angry, hurt, ashamed or fearful allows you to embrace these four disabling-emotions’ dualities (enabling-emotions):

1. Not-anger = compassion and patience

2. Not-shame = self-worth and faith-in-self

3. Not-hurt = joy and serenity

4. Not-fear = love.

Your true nature is to…

Create love, moment by moment, through a cocktail of compassion, patience, self worth, faith-in-self, completeness, serenity, and joy – with a twist of enthusiasm and will-power.