Are you at war with yourself? Are there times when you feel you are not enough? Does the caption of your life read “Something is wrong with me”

So many of our moments are filled with judgment about ourselves and others. This affects how we are with others. Tara Brach says “It’s very hard to be intimate with another person when in the background you’re feeling like if they really knew who you were, they’d reject you. The sense of unworthiness gets in the way of intimacy. It stops us from being creative or taking risk or being spontaneous. There’s a sense that we have to kind of watch ourselves all the time. In a deep way, it stops us from really being able to enjoy our moments. We somehow get civilized to feel that we’re limited, that we’re defective, that we’re apart from other beings. Really, the spiritual path is one of coming back home to realize our belonging.”

Rumi puts it this way. He says, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Our path is to sense how have we kept ourselves from love, how do we keep ourselves from feeling connected to our own being and to others.

So where do we start? By practicing Mindfulness and Self Compassion. Mindfulness is recognizing what’s going on in the moment, really being with it, not judging it. Then you offer compassion, the sense of kindness to yourself, that richness of recognizing, “I’m not the bad self” sensing again that vast and tender presence as really being who you are is the taste of freedom.

The more that we practice pausing and feeling what’s here and offering compassion to ourselves, the more we experience the essence of transformation which is our sense of who we are shifts from being the bad person or the victim to being that space of loving presence, of compassion that’s holding our life. You might think of it in terms of neuroplasticity. That we have certain kind of grooves or patterns in our brain and our nervous system that are correlated with beliefs and feelings of being not okay. You are beginning to create new patterning and it just needs to be repeated many times.

What’s so beautiful is that the more you trust your own goodness, that basic goodness in yourself, the more you could see that same light and goodness shining through others. One of the greatest gifts that you can give anyone is to see their goodness and remind them of it. People forget.

In the words of Thomas Merton “Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin or knowledge could reach, the core of reality. The person that each one is in the eyes of the divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

Start by practicing loving kindness meditation https://www.tarabrach.com/guided-meditation-loving-kindness/