Belonging to Yourself

I want to offer you a healing invitation. No matter what you do with this invitation, it will bring clarity into your life:

Go to a mirror and really see your face. This is not a quick glance. This is seeing your face as if you’ve never seen it before. Be fascinated. Be interested! Stay with this as long as you can.

Now, one of three things happened when you heard this invitation. The first is that you reacted and contracted, saying, “Heck no!” or just thought, “I don’t have time for this.”  The second is that you went to the mirror and all you saw was what is wrong about your face.

If either of these happened, I invite you to pause for a moment and be curious about the stories in your head, which cause you to either completely resist this invitation or reject what you see. These stories can initially be hard to see because we believe them to be true.

If you can see a few stories, write them down – I can’t stand how I look, my inner ugliness shows up on my face, my eyes are too far apart, my mouth is too small, I am too old, my skin is ugly, I look sour, I hate my teeth, I wish I had better hair, my beard isn’t thick enough. This list is made up of how you have been conditioned to see yourself and if you can step back far enough, you can see that they are just stories whose origins go all the way back to when you were very young.

The third thing that may have happened is you really saw your face, not through your comparing, judging mind, but from your inclusive heart. You saw a totally unique expression of life with every single line, wrinkle, shape and shade, revealing a map of the journey you’ve been on. And if you didn’t spend some time looking in your eyes, go back to the mirror and look into the depth of who you really are. (And if it calls to you, give yourself a wink!)

It is a powerful moment in our lives when we realize that we put on a fractured pair of glasses when we were young and since then we have seen ourselves through the fragmented beliefs we absorbed from family members, advertising, religions, and the teachers we had along the way.

I am here to tell you that there is no truth in self-judgment. I know this because I almost died from the level of self-judgment I took on. My stories said I was stupid and ugly and selfish and less than most everybody else. In fact, the self-judgment got so strong, all I wanted to do was kill myself.

But then I was taught to be curious about what stories were going on in my head and slowly and surely, as I walked through the labyrinth of self-hate and out the other side, I finally could meet myself through the wisdom of my heart.

Having come home to my heart, I want to share with you some of the gems I have discovered along the way. A young Syrian immigrant, Shams Alkhouli was bullied in middle school because he couldn’t speak English very well. Being interviewed by CBS as he was entering high school, he was asked what he had learned from being bullied.  He said, “It doesn’t matter what other people think about you.  It matters what you think about yourself.”

With that in mind:

• You can come to the place where you care about yourself more than the opinion of others.
• You don’t need to change you in order to be okay. You are okay as you are! (I know, your mind may just have screamed, “No I’m not!” But that is just the fractured pair of glasses and it isn’t true!)
• No one is more important than you and you are valuable even if you can’t see that right now.
• It is okay to be you. You are a completely unique expression of life and we need you, just as you are!
• It’s okay to not be okay and it’s okay to be wrong. Both are simply part of being human.
• You will make mistakes They are not an indication of your inadequacy. Mis-takes are simply how we grow and mature.
• And maybe, just maybe, rather than everything that you don’t like about yourself being true, the exact opposite is true! And life is leading you to a time where you can see the truth of your unique exquisiteness.

So, I invite you to spend some mirror time and if that doesn’t call to you, ask life to show you the way to fall in love with yourself as you are.  For one of the most powerfully healing things you can do for our beleaguered world is to fall in love with yourself, exactly as you are. When you belong to yourself, your presence makes a powerful difference in the world.