Why You Can’t Love Yourself
We are born into the world needing a mother’s love to survive – entirely and totally dependant on love from another being to get through our early stages of development.
The child cannot tell the mother why he is crying. She has to figure it out and come up with the solution to the problem herself. There is no language the child can use to tell her, limited expressions to get the point across – the child is totally reliant on the love and understanding of a mother.
And then it hits.
The love was conditional – another sibling comes along and replaces you on the breast, or the mother gets frustrated and raises her voice, making the child feel worthless.
The Ego
This is where the young developing ego gets it’s first sense of separation – that first sword that slices through the seeming unconditionality of love.
The ego’s nature is narcissistic, meaning it perceives itself as the centre of attention at all times. This nature causes the child to believe that it did something wrong – something that caused the mother has another child and replace him. ‘Did they have another child because they hate me’?
And this is where it begins – the child’s traumatised ego is now perceived to be unloveable.
Feeling ‘Enough’
There will never be a point in your life that you’ll be able to pinpoint precisely ‘what is missing’ – because there isn’t anything. It is the ego’s selfish core, putting itself at the centre of the universe, which has created a myth.
The mind will say things like – ‘I’m not skinny enough’, ‘I’m ugly’, ‘I’m not smart enough’, ‘I need to do this, I need to do that’. But whatever you do in life, it just doesn’t hit the spot. Nothing brings back that sense of wholeness. And to make it worse, everything you do to try and ‘feel enough’ takes you deeper into despair as you feel more and more hopeless with every effort wasted in vain.
‘When I have my own family, then I’ll be whole’… ‘When I become a success, then I’ll be happy’…
This is an inability to love and be loved.
Spiritual Path
This could be what propels people onto the spiritual path – the suffering. Perhaps this is even in our coding, and the ‘split’ is purposeful to drive us towards higher levels of being.
What you are seeking is Self-knowledge – the realisation of your true essence.
Before the ego structure, it was there, shining in all of its glory. Thoughts and emotions arise, which create that sense of ‘not being enough’. Being still, quietening the narcissistic egoic tendencies of unruliness, is what cracks this open and allows the light of love to shine again. There is nothing you can do in a sense. Only stillness and silence reveals this magic.
This is Love from source, and the only Real Love.
And this is why the path less travelled, your journey back home, is the only path worth taking. Once you arrive at love’s infinite nature, you can share that infinity with the rest of the world.
“This could be what propels people onto the spiritual path – the suffering. Perhaps this is even in our coding, and the ‘split’ is purposeful to drive us towards higher levels of being.”
It’s been my experience, that the pain of that “split” has been the very thing that has driven me towards a higher level of living, although I confess, I fall short all the time.
Very weirdly. Now. I have thought many times in recent years, that the pain and suffering of my earlier life, was a blessing in disguise. Precisely because, as you say, it FORCED me to go elsewhere for truth. To develop inner resources, and riches beyond what this world has to offer. I’m lucky.
I followed the Sedona Method for a long time. I’ve grown out of it a bit now. Same as I grew out of the church/religion too. But I do not regret any of it. They served their purposes for me, when I badly needed it. I love the expression “eat the fish, but spit out the bones”
One thing I learned from the Sedona Method, and experienced directly, was that bliss of the ego dropping away.
It was explained to me like this.
We are love. At source. Just divine union. Connected. Our authentic being.
Painful experiences cause us to become disconnected from that. We/our ego, puts walls up, boundaries, defenses, against the “bad” stuff, to protect us from the pain of that disconnection. Unfortunately, how we do anything, is how we do everything. Those very walls we put up to protect ourselves from the perceived external pain, also cause us to disconnect from our true nature.
That love is never not there. It’s endless. As you say exactly above. There is NOTHING missing.
It was also explained to me this way. We CANNOT feel someone else’s love for us. It’s not THEIR love we are feeling in that moment. They aren’t GIVING us anything. In that moment, when we connect with someone else, in such a way, that we have that experience again, of love, it’s a temporary collapse of our walls, our defenses, and it’s actually US we can feel. Our own love. Who we truly are. The same experience can also be attributed to alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or a simple perfect sunset. We just get it mixed up. We are what we are looking for.
Gabor Mate explains it very very well too. In his work with addicts. At a very early age, we have to choose between authenticity, that original connection with ourselves, or connection in the outside world, as a survival tactic. This is pre-verbal. Beyond our own consciousness, and reasoning at such a young age.
And so begins the painful disconnect, further fostered by all the constructs of society, and living in this earthy plane.
“Before the ego structure, it was there, shining in all of its glory. Thoughts and emotions arise, which create that sense of ‘not being enough’. Being still, quietening the narcissistic egoic tendencies of unruliness, is what cracks this open and allows the light of love to shine again. There is nothing you can do in a sense. Only stillness and silence reveals this magic.
This is Love from source, and the only Real Love.”
As I said. I don’t regret my time as a christian. But my VERY first direct experience of what you talk about here, was because of the Sedona Method. It was amazing. And I still remember it vividly to this day. The ego dropping away, and the endless peace, and stillness. It totally surprised me. I never knew it existed before.
But it does.
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Beautifully written Fiona.