Who Benefits?

One of my best tools for self-love is this simple question: who benefits?

I get political with my self-love. I think about everyone who benefits from my self-hatred – all the CEO’s getting rich off our collective insecurities, the systems of oppression fueled and bolstered by the lies we internalize, abusive people who manipulate our self-doubt for their own ends.

This is the way I see it: if I’m not enjoying and spending and reveling in and claiming my own aliveness, someone else is using that life-force energy for their own agenda.

And remembering this gets me back on track real quick.

Think about it: when you’re busy calling yourself a failure, criticizing your body, or telling yourself you’re not enough – where is that energy going? Not into your deep passions or desires, not into your creativity, not into your voice (which the world definitely needs, by the way).

And no shame or blame around this - it makes sense that lots of us struggle with self-love, body image, and positive self-regard. We live in toxic systems that tell us lies about ourselves and the world and do all sorts of things to turn us against ourselves and each other.

But self-love is our work. And I believe that work is one of the most important journeys we walk in this lifetime.

I don’t believe any of us are here to objectify, judge, or criticize ourselves. I believe we’re here to step into our bodies and into the current of our aliveness. We’re here to claim and enjoy and spend our life-force. We’re here to choose ourselves.

I know we’re all on this journey together, and I send all my love, support, and encouragement to my fellow travelers, along with my own commitment to never give up on this self-love quest. I hope all of you join me on that journey. 

The World Needs Your Art

Six months ago, I was not painting. In fact, I had not picked up a paintbrush in more than a decade.

Five months ago, I brought home some watercolor supplies and started dabbling.

Three months ago, I started painting a lot and sharing my work.

Art has been the lightning-bolt epiphany of my 2018.

I am so happy to be making art, and although I can appreciate and understand the timing of it all, I am also sad there was a decade of my life that I wasn’t.

I had two primary objections to creating art of my own: I believed it didn’t really matter (or at the least the kind of art I would make wouldn’t really matter), and I believed I was not artistically gifted enough.

The shift started when I heard Fabeku Fatunmise talk about art and how/why it matters - that art is a transmission of energy and talisman of magic. I began to see for myself how art is a portal into a language, experience, and world beyond words, how art creates a bridge into what we can access no other way.

I began to notice how art was transforming me. And then I began to imagine how I might take the energy inside of me and make it into shapes, forms, and images on paper too.

Suddenly, it didn’t really matter how much talent I had. I wasn’t trying to paint a picture that could be mistaken for a photograph; I was trying to take an energy inside of me and make a thing that transmitted that same power and frequency.

Art has created so much magic and connection in my life this year – as I’ve taken in others’ art and shared my own.

If you have your own objections to making whatever art calls to you, I hope you recognize those as the lies they are - and see that the world needs your art and will be a more magical and alive place if you create it.

Creativity, Aliveness, and Hope

This is what I’ve come to believe about creativity:

1) We do not create creativity. Our creative power just is. We support it, free it, nourish it, and channel it, but we do not make it because it already and always exists.

2) Creativity and aliveness are the same thing. Creativity is simply the energy of our life-force reaching beyond the boundaries of our selves to find expression in some tangible form – words, images, colors, objects, ideas, connections, etc.

3) Our aliveness is always pulling us forward into vision and creation. Creativity then is simply a matter of uncorking what is already alive within us.

I find this perspective incredibly hopeful. Because it means that all our visions and dreams, all we hope to create in and for the world, begins with what we already have within us. It also means that we actualize the changes and visions we want for the world with the same energy and power that animates our existence and being. And to get started, we don’t have to look any further than our own heartbeat.

Self-Love and Life-Force

I’ve come to understand that one of my primary life tasks is to figure out this self-love thing – to come into right relationship with my real self, find peace and okayness in that realness, and revel in the experience of having this life and being this self.

I believe we all come in with and are in possession of a dazzlingly gorgeous life-force, an animating energy that is the magic that lives within each of us, transcending any measurement or definition.

To me, self-love means enjoying this life-force, this core aliveness, connecting to it with intention and not making our experience of it conditional on anything else.

My sense is that so many of our troubles with self-love are a result of being asked by the dominant culture to spend our life-force (in currencies of energy, attention, creativity, time, money, etc.) in ways that deplete rather than nourish us and separate us from our life energy rather than deepen our connection to it, often in service to arbitrary, culturally-defined standards of goodness and enoughness.

I’ve found that self-love is not found in convincing myself that I’m “good enough.” More often I’ve found it in stepping into spaces and connecting with energies that render the idea I could be anything other than good, enough, and okay nonsensical and absurd.

So when I’m struggling to love or care for myself in the ways I want (because that happens in a culture like this one), I don’t try to convince myself of my worthiness. Instead I ask: how can I step back into the current of my life-force? Where is aliveness in this moment? (remembering that because I’m an organic, cyclical creature, aliveness might mean rest). What is there to enjoy right now in my life and self? What would it take to remember that my life and self belong to me and are for my joy?

But mostly, I just try to stand in who I am – who we all are – incarnations of consciousness, energy, imagination, miracle, and mystery. And really, what other than love could meet us here?