How To Find Love For Your Journey
Find love for yourself and your journey, wherever you’re at.
I had the honor of partially raising a step-daughter before I went through my divorce. Her 9 year old taught my 22 year old self how to love, how to protect, and how important my example was to not only her but everyone else around me.
Even though she’s not in my immediate sphere anymore, I find myself thinking about our relationship when I’m struggling to find love. I never struggled to find love for her- her spirit, charisma, and big heart made that a no-brainer. The love I struggled to find was deeper and more complicated, and it was tangled in perfectionism and anxious motivation. The love for a child is the love we all need for ourselves:
that ‘I see you and it’s okay’ kind of love.
That ‘I know you’re suffering right now, and you’ll get through it my dear’ kind of caring.
The crack your heart open and let it all spring forth because there’s no limit to it- it’s a wellspring that grows within you - type of love.
We have that for children, we have that for our friends and families, and what if we also had it for ourselves?
Integrating the whole self
My mind has divided my life up into chunks- it’s ever organizing nature likes to endlessly sort and categorize, and these categories were chosen based on relationship status. There’s the: BB (before boys), the HSS (high school sweetheart), the JG (my ex-husband’s initials), and my current partnership (no abbreviation yet, we’ll work on it).
In each chapter, I can look back on myself and see all the silliness that ensued. At each stage I see myself as childish, naive, tuned out, and a myriad of other negative judgements, which keep her wisdom buried and out of reach.
Each relationship involved a total lifestyle overhaul in which I ‘threw out’ everything I’d previously imagined myself to be in order to reinvent myself in this new orbit. ‘Who am I with you?’ I asked each of my partners.
In hindsight, it’s easy to label each of these parts as ‘Old Stephanie’ or, I used to be _____. I imagine these old relics buried in the earth because I remember casting them away, wanting the old to not inform the new, a clean slate, a fresh start, a rebirth.
These parts of me are unearthed in life’s cyclical mind-game, like a merry-go-round I’m stuck on and can never get off. I might throw up over the edge from time to time, but I still frequently pass it, and even though I’ll make a turn and seem to see fresh scenery, the same parts of me resurface again and again in new ways.
The resistance of the ‘old’ her, the parts of me I buried, the parts of me I judged for living and breathing break my form into a million pieces. I can honor only one part at a time, like staring at a painted flower on a broken piece of China, and disregarding the vessel it was once part of- perfect and beautiful in it’s simplicity.
The judgement of self is tricky- because we think it helps us become better. If we didn’t judge ourselves, how would we ever make decisions to be different? To progress? To move forward?!
This attitude enslaves us to our judgements of ourselves, as we desperately try to become separate from our experiences.
Self integration and self-love, in the same way one would love a child or a dear relative is the only way to access all parts of one’s self, and truly transform.
When you’re caught in the denial of who you are and were, everything you do is a statement of resistance, a line in the sand between what you are and what you are not, and in fact, you are all of it or nothing at all.
Love the one who was doing the best they could with what they had.
Honor the one who only knew how to self-motivate through anxiety and fear- they had great survival instincts and got through some deep darkness.
Embrace the one who chose to be naive because they couldn’t yet deal with what they were hiding from. They did what they needed to do in order to cope, and right now you’re going to do the best you can too. You’re you now, and you were you then too.
Dropping resistance
Resistance loves change, because they cannot exist without one another. If there was nothing to resist, then what is there?
The parts of yourself you judge, the parts you resist and turn your heart and mind away from are strengthened by your refusal to accept them.
Acceptance doesn’t mean it’s yours forever, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed, and it certainly doesn’t mean you have no choice to change it. Acceptance is simply honoring your personal experience and letting it happen. This is the only way to move through and with life rather than pushing or running from it.
Resistance comes out to play when we think like our ‘old’ selves. When we feel feelings we thought we buried, or when we encounter situations that seem unconquerable. We say ‘no, this is unacceptable, I can’t look’. These obstacles seem to threaten our sense of security and freedom, and our refusal to see feels productive, like a fight between good and evil.
When we wake up to our refusal to see, we’re truly free to be, because we’re no longer being controlled by the cycle of reaction to resistance. See everything. Honor it all. Let what you no longer want and need to pass through you, and move forward anyway.
Letting love in.
We wind ourselves up tightly because we imagine ourselves strong, wrapped in armor and ready to fight, except the enemy isn’t trying to pierce our skin from the outside, it attacks us from within.
Our greatest foe is our own refusal to let ourselves love and be loved.
If we could truly honor ourselves in who we are and the uniqueness of our journey, dropping resistance and integrating with all of ourselves, past present and future- if we can accomplish that type of love and acceptance, we’re truly free.
Turn your mind inward objectively- can you see yourself as you would a friend or a child? Can you allow it all to be there and be okay? Can you see your own humanity, your connectedness to the rest of us, and that we’re all doing the best we can, even you?
You are life sighing, stretching, and singing. You are perfectly you.
Find my free toolbox for change (with love!) here.
