Loving ourselves is loving the world.
Published: April, 11 2022
As a white girl — and a privileged one — growing up in upper middle class Santa Barbara, I still had struggles. My struggles were not the uphill battle and marginalizations of race and class that have haunted our country for years, which have come to bear on our current cultural and societal psyches. My struggles were not from the outside in, from an oppressive system. But rather, they came from the inside out.
Yes, everyone has challenges. No one — no matter how privileged — escapes the fate of being human, and no one can shrug off the challenges and frailties that are served up to us simple by being alive. But I created blocks and self-sabotaging behaviors. I let my own inner demons get the best of me time and time again. No one is perfect, surely we know this, but when I look at my own life — when I look deep inside my actions and my sometimes skewed motivations — I see a path strewn with logs and boulders that I could have, had I been paying closer attention, avoided. And yes, we know the adage, “I did the best I could at the time with the tools I had.” And that’s comforting, and very true. There’s the saying, “If you know better, you do better.”
Well, that is my mantra now. To do better. And in order to do that, I need to know better. That means I have to learn. So how do I begin to learn the things that will keep my path free from self-imposed obstacles? And, how do I do that without engaging in self-hatred or engrained regret?
While there’s always room to do better, I find I must love and accept who I am now. That the starting place for my learning — my “doing better and knowing better” — must start where I’m standing, with an acceptance of who I am and how I’ve gotten here. I’ve been extremely hard on myself my whole life, stemming from struggles in school as a kid and into my teens (a story for another time), again and again putting myself down and keeping myself small for fear of failure. Those fears then manifested into an avoidance of success and trying new things…a condition I’d describe as a fear of being seen for who I truly am. Which, in the end, is what I desire the most. (Don’t we all?)
So while I can learn tools to do better, I must also learn tools to love better. For loving myself is loving the world. Loving myself and loving the world allows me to love others, too — to allow for their humanity as I come to know other souls who are trying, just like me, to find acceptance and growth and a clear path to walk in this life.
That’s why I’m a coach. I want to help people gain practical tools to improve their lives, so they can live an authentic life. To work with the power of self-love and acceptance brings with it the open path that lets us know that anything is possible, and everyone is worthy of love.
With love,
Isabel
