How to Achieve Results Using This One Weird Trick

(just joking)

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it’s tragic how we default to turning away from celebrating ourselves in fear of appearing indulgent, self-centered space hoarders. Yet we have the urge to shake our loved ones when they express fear about what others might think. 

Turning away from self-love is psychic self harm. How can we imagine a collective system upgrade if we are stuck in the lonely frequency of negative self-concept? Who profits when we doubt our worth?

Self-love is an endemically unmet need that can only be fed from the source. You don’t have to look outside, in fact, it won’t be there anyway.

me in the year 2069

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Close your eyes and envision your body as a forest. Maybe there are no manicured trails, only overlapping pathways. Marmalade slime mold, tree trunks like folded skin, dead ends asking us to look closer. A desire path somewhere in a meadowed area. There is rot, stuff that stinks, green shoots in impossible places. There is a branch that looks like a dick. A bird’s nest: evidence of genesis, and a boulder with lichen hair. The wind is chamber music. We love it here.

Now imagine a carnival mirror, the type that warps your reflection and makes you laugh out loud. Like the first time you opened PhotoBooth on your rich friend’s computer. Consider that this reflection keeps us in a state of perpetual distortion- much like the systems that thrive on our division from our selves. It can be existential torture!!! Or, we can move on to the next attraction, bellies warm from laughter. Peace of mind intact through the calm-scary (?) embodied knowledge that we know our selves best, and that our commitment to lifting from the well of self love is really fucking heavy. It will take practice and discipline and calloused palms.

Like spring water in a remote place, our reserve of self-love bubbles, endures, and invites us to drink. 

Open your eyes (and the rest of you) to the possibility of choosing love. How would it feel to assume the role of an agent of transformation? From resistance to curiosity, to surrender, to practice, to familiarity, to ease, to a joyful repatterning.

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i used to feel physically afflicted around people with their shit together, people who kept their shoulder blades close to their spine and their throat open. i felt resentful of all the things i was hypnotized into thinking i could not have. not tangible things, i mean the stuff beyond words. raise your hand if you’re trying to hack the human condition and unsubscribe from generations of shame. we can be mutual accomplices, an easy first step is to normalize reminding each other of how excellent we are.

and don’t forget to acknowledge grief. try it loudly, like we used to. it helps.

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I still roll my eyes at myself in the mirror when i try and practice affirmations. I squeeze out something like: “i am beautiful and i am grateful for my ass and i am really good at cooking fish” and then i look around to make sure no one heard me. What can be more embarrassing than expressing love for ourselves out loud? Doing the opposite. To be brave enough to step into this difficult love is not just an intimate accomplishment, it overflows so that we can all wade in.

in my earphones, Alexis Pauline Gumbs shares her daily practice in conversation with Prentis Hemphill. She suggests it can be nothing more and nothing less than looking into our own eyes in the mirror and engaging in attunement, in listening to what our ancestors want to tell us today. She says, much like a single cell, we cannot protect ourselves and grow at the same time. Here’s to paying attention to that part of us that knows when it’s safe to let go.

bisous,

sara