There is so much self help published in the world right now. Everyone and their sweet mama is a guru of the feel goods, publishing memes and books and e-courses faster than the grass can welcome spring. This is mostly good-ish, right? It pushes more positivity into our collective unconscious and encourages us to grow and not become complacent or fixed in our mindsets.

But sometimes it’s a little bad-ish. It’s bad-ish when it’s hyper-accomplishment focused; when it turns loving ourselves into the height of zeitgeist and makes it something we all must push ourselves, and our unfailingly high expectations of ourselves, into attaining, lest we be passé or slacking for struggling and being open about it. It’s bad-ish when it doesn’t make space for those oft inherited voices in our head, the ones we are all battling, the ones that say we haven’t achieved enough and we aren’t worthy of what we have or better.  We know these voices aren’t helping us, and we’re fighting them, but we don’t need to be made to feel bad or even more unworthy for having them.  The self help is bad when it becomes narrow perfectionism masked in zen.

I offer you this:  I hope you have moments of radical self love on those days when you just absolutely crush life. I also hope you don’t judge yourself too harshly when that radical self love feeling is fleeting and you muck life up a bit.  My fervent wish for you is that you can develop a deep and abiding self tolerance that you carry in your heart day-by-day. This deep and abiding self tolerance will help you surf the waves of both the radical self love, and the wretched self hatred, that life occasionally brings, as a condition of our humanness, without causing an unmooring of your purpose and path.

We are not perfect, nor are we supposed to be. That’s why we’re “here”, having a human experience and not “there” having a divine one. We are here for the joy and the pain. Make room for both, leave the door unlocked and two empty seats at the kitchen table. Sure, maybe welcome joy to the table with a little more encouragement and enthusiasm, but don’t lock out or starve the pain; it has a back door key.

#RadicalSelfLove  #DeepandAbidingSelfCare