Self-love.

I think it's both an exquisite miracle and a profound difficulty to consciously relate to the predicament we're all in together:  eternal spirits dwelling within living bodies.  There are so many ongoing paradoxes inside of that experience, and it can get really uncomfortable sometimes.  Recently I have been forced to deal with the particularly uncomfortable paradox of recognizing my own body's limits.

I spent several days in a hospital bed hooked up to bags of IV fluids and other contraptions to monitor things like blood pressure, oxygen level, and heart rate.  Dozens of medical personnel drew my blood, took my temperature, gave me shots to keep my blood from clotting, told me what to eat, helped me use the bathroom, and reminded me that I couldn't change my circumstances by being angry about them.

So, I wound up with a stark set of choices (literally only two!) about how to respond:  be with what was happening or not.  At first, I tried the latter b/c it was both excruciating and so frustrating.  And then I remembered that I did actually want to find a way to be with my experience no matter how excruciating because I'm aware that I've got this ongoing moment-to-moment privilege in which I can CHOOSE not to abandon myself.

That moment of recognition and/or remembering felt like a whole mind+body+spirit sigh.  I stopped resisting my own immediate experience, and came home to it.  It felt humbling and healing at once. And I also gained a lot of information about what my body was trying to help me remember.  For example, I could see how my human limits were not a liability, but instead this perfect place in which my spirit could wake up to this this wildly healing and humbling human capacity we call 'love'.  In this case, self-love.

Self-love gets a lot of lip service in most of the circles I run in, but I'm not always convinced that any of us really want to surrender to it totally.  I think one of the reasons we struggle with this so much is that we can't really practice self-love without really getting intimate with our immediate experience of ourselves.  That's an intimidating prerequisite for self-love because being a human being means that we are going to encounter all kinds of suffering and shame and fear and pain and anxiety and loss and chaos.  It's no wonder we would want to avoid ourselves sometimes.

Yet my recent attempt at rejecting my own painful experience (this time it was physical pain, but I tend to try to reject pain in all of its forms!) reminded me again that the only real opportunity we've got to experience self-love is in the way we choose to be with the immediacy of whatever it is that we're experiencing right now.