Whole Love
I don’t believe in a love rooted in self-abandonment or a love that prioritizes making other people feel better at your own expense. That’s not love. That’s codependence. That’s self-sacrifice.
Love - whole love- is self sustaining. It doesn’t need something outside of itself. Love is self-aware. Love is conscious - taking care to notice how you have come to benefit from man-made ideas that are not of love but of lack. Love trusts in the power of voicing your needs, and your feelings, and your truth. Not to control or change other people - but to make the world more whole. To fill the voids left by the idea that love is without discomfort.
I’ve found the opposite to be true. The path to love is often uncomfortable because whole love is not something we’ve been taught to practice. So it can feel unfamiliar and disorienting and vulnerable and scary. It can feel like going against your own instincts only to realize those weren’t instincts at all - that was your conditioning working against you.
Love is showing up for yourself. It’s holding the parts of yourself you were taught to reject. It’s listening to the parts of yourself you were taught to silence. It’s bringing compassion to the parts of yourself you were taught to hate. It’s acknowledging the parts of yourself that leave you feeling shamed and bad and less - love is being with those, too.
Love is standing in the company of truth. It’s voicing what hurts. It’s gathering all of yourself and refusing to be in situations that ask any of you to be left behind. Love is listening to yourself and creating a still place from within where you know you will always be heard. Love is taking action on behalf of yourself and your needs.
For all there is to say about love we frequently forget to mention- that love - whole love - is dangerous to the world as it is. It’s disruptive to the numbness and indifference that marks the status quo because it brings us alive to ourselves.
When we cultivate this kind of space, and understanding, and compassion, and truth and love in ourselves - we are then, and only then, truly able to extend the same to each other.
We can only give each other what we have first cultivated in ourselves.
Which means that choosing to love ourselves is an act of literal and actual revolution.