Why didn't I love myself more?
I look at myself smiling in a picture a few years ago and I wonder why I disliked myself so much. People would say something nice to me and I’d come up with a “it's just çause you love me… you can't speak to me objectively… do you think so?… no, what's going on with you?” I looked at myself in the mirror and I always found something that I rejected. I wove my day to day life with love towards those who made up the fabric of my personal and professional life, but I failed to value myself enough.
I was always tired, I was always after the next objective. Hard, ah? And yet, the reality of so many women (and men) trapped in a perverse culture that enhances an image of beauty which is far from what the real person looks like and even further away from self-knowledge. We’re downtrodden under an eternal list of have tos and musts.
Today I look at myself and say "I was so beautiful, I’m so sorry I was so hard on myself" "there was so much love in my eyes, why was I not as compassionate with myself as I was with others?". Tara Brach points out that "when we are caught in the trance of unworthiness, we can’t recognize what is happening within us and we can’t feel kindness towards ourselves." I'm going to rephrase the question in the heading:
“What for didn’t I love myself more?”
It’s probably because I learned to wake up and feel one with the world one day at a time, I’ve also learned to meditate, I’ve dived in the self-knowledge path from another angle, I’ve got the tools to be attentive to my inner self and to tend to my wounds with a lot of love, I’ve learned to raise and hold hands with others more lucidly, I’ve fundamentally gone well beyond my ideas of how things had to be and started to live lighter.