How to Cultivate Self-Love, Peace & Compassion
Unconditional Presence is the Key to Self-Love and Peace
The journey from self-hatred to self-love involves beginning to accept you and all your emotions in their entirety. This begins with letting yourself feel all that you are feeling, from your deepest pain to your deepest joy. By accepting your experience, no matter what experience you’re having, you free yourself from shame and self-blame.
Whenever you judge the experience you’re having, you’re not letting yourself be as you are. As a result, self-acceptance is not possible as long as you are resisting what it is that you are experiencing. And if you cannot accept yourself, you won’t be able to accept others as they are, as we are all one.
If you can open to your fear and pain, you’ll begin to realise that your openness to pain is much stronger than the fear of feeling the pain.
This realisation helps you discover your inner strength, awareness, and stillness. And through this journey, you’ll learn to accept others and things are they are.
Like the depth and stillness of the ocean hidden beneath the waves on its surface, your essential nature lies beneath your turbulent feelings that you’re so afraid to feel. Resisting feeling these waves of feelings keeps you on the stormy surface of yourself, disconnected from your authenticity and inner stillness.
Letting yourself feel your deepest emotions allows you to surf the waves and go beneath them. As you dive into the still waters, you begin to access the power, stillness, and openness of the heart.
In moments of allowing and opening to your experience, you are unconditionally present to yourself. You are accepting yourself as you are, as you are feeling right now. This, is an act of self-love.
And when you begin to extend love and compassion to yourself, even parts of you that you’ve been so ashamed of, you can then extend this love and compassion to the world.
*This article was adapted from John Welwood’s website.
