The Courage to Love (Your Self)
The other day, my sister, Tara, told me a compelling little story about one of my favourite humans, my two year old niece, Ila (pronounced eye-la)
Tara usually tells her “Ila makes mama happy.” To which Ila responds “Mama makes Ila happy.” This time she also went on to say, “Ila makes Ila happy.” And then proceeded to give her reflection in the mirror a wholehearted kiss.
(Full disclosure - Ila has four planets - as well as her Sun - in Leo, so she's naturally unapologetic of the luminosity of both her light and shadow).
That aside, there is much inspiration of the lion-hearted courage variety to be gleaned from this innocent expression of non-GMO Self-Love. Notably, Tara did not recoil in horror and chastise her daughter for such a brazen display of self-love. Instead, Ila received a big hug, and was told that her mama was pleased she felt that way.
There’s a powerful seed planted in Ila right there: the knowing that it is safe for her to feel complete and whole with and as herself, and express her pleasure about this without shame; that she does not have to hide her light away.
For so many of us, this has not been the case.
Here’s another story that you may be able to relate to on a felt-sense at varying degrees.
As a child, when I expressed this organic feeling of self-love in whatever way it naturally arose, in a way that often felt like a swell of gorgeous, expansive pleasure and eros in and for myself, I was met with shaming and abuse - both verbal and physical. I was told I was too much and that my too-muchness was deeply unacceptable.
This spontaneous and unconditional current of (Self) Love was injected with shame and fear and remained trapped inside my body, turning into fissures of trauma. From a somatic-energetic perspective, trauma is energy that becomes stuck and pathologized in the body.
Being a child surrounded by adults who were projecting their own- mostly inherited - fear, shame and unmetabolized trauma onto me, and who were therefore unable to teach and guide me in how to move and alchemize the stuck energy, I internalized it all.
The meaning that I had to impose on myself in order to survive enforced the experience that not only was there something inside me that was deeply dangerous and untrustworthy, but that it was also perilous and unacceptable for me to feel this naturally occurring expansive love for myself. It was safer for me to feel bad and wrong; it was safer for me to feel myself as a wretched victim, and receive malnourishing attention through pity and sympathy - which was still infinitely more preferable to abuse.
This manifested in chronic and undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) - conducted in shameful secrecy - which in my early twenties shapeshifted into autoimmune conditions and the numbing delights of drug + alcohol abuse. And of course all this continued to confirm my false belief that something was inherently "wrong" with and so it went for a time.
Eventually, after breakdowns and breakthroughs my spirit’s loving presence found me again - found my soul entombed in a deathly slumber, dreaming that she was bad and wrong and damned; dreaming a dusty old dream that has been unconsciously handed down through culture and family from generation to generation the world over - a dream of illusory safety through living in fear, shame and distrust of the regenerative power of our indigenous eros.
In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi Scriptures - excluded from the official versions of the Biblical canons - Jesus says:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.”
Like so many, I had divorced myself from the dangerous too-muchness of my wild and loving Self in order to be safely accepted in society. I had to bury, hide away and punish myself into forgetting that my soul was not here to be chained and muzzled into victimized compliance; that she cared not a jot for scraps of genetically modified love and approval from the imperialism of a soulless monoculture.
And this siphoning away of my innate life force of unconditional Love was killing me.
As children, many of us have no choice but to submit to this colonization simply in order to survive. And then by the time we’re adults, this inner tyranny has created deep grooves of trauma within our psyches and bodies, to the point where it feels safer to remain in silent submission than to courageously feel and claim the deep, pulsing, innate Love that is our fundamental birthright, and give ourselves the awakening kiss of True Love infused Life.
To feel and know and embody that we are whole and complete and deeply, unconditionally lovable just as we are: it feels downright dangerous to the ego, does it not?
Go towards it.
Let this megalomaniacal version of your ego die, and let the loving union of your Soul + Spirit (re)birth the organic, unified, Love-conducting version 2.0. Because all this time, the ego that has been running the show has been a puppet-dictator of the fear-conducting colonizer.
So: Forget Everything And Remember.
(There’s a wink from the Universe right there).
Remember back to the first time that you felt this organic lion-hearted self-love arise within you.
And remember also that the word ‘courage’ has its roots in the Latin cor and the French coeur - meaning heart.
Courage is part our heart’s natural vibration, and it has our backs as we reclaim the Love that we are - free of conditions - the Love that all creation wants to express through us.