A Beautiful Human Being
I felt my eyes start to tear up as words quickly fell into my unconscious that I was not yet aware of.
I was in the midst of a guided meditation, and after twenty minutes she began introducing “I am” affirmations. Her words found their way straight to my heart as they became my own,
“I am a beautiful human being.”
I was aware of my body’s response and the following emotion before I had fully grasped the phrase. In a relaxed state, my mind and body had immediately reacted for me, of what my conscious mind could not possibly be fully aware of yet.
It was a powerful realization of the lack of self-love I have felt for myself.
Consciously and unconsciously.
A realization of the things I don’t often say to myself, but I should.
I am a beautiful human being. These words felt foreign on my tongue.
It’s weird to say that I am in a relationship with myself, but it’s true. We all are. We have frequent and fluent conversations with ourselves consistently and constantly. We tell ourselves who we think we are and what we are capable of. Stemming from our thoughts, we create beliefs that form into conditioned responses and emotions.
I started analyzing the types of conversations I hold with myself. And to be honest, majority of them were quite negative. In an attempt to fully understand how these thoughts affected my behavior, I began to work my way backwards in my life. I realized how I had manipulated myself, conditioning my mind to believe harmful and self-destructive things. Words I would never deem of saying to another human being, but would freely tell myself. I struggled to love myself, and I wasn’t even aware that it was an important thing to do. I had tricked my mind to believe that I would never be good enough.
Why do we choose to think like this? We break ourselves down thinking that eventually we will become the person we always wanted to be. Always striving for better. But I think we often lose focus on being content and happy with ourselves now.
I can remember the first unhealthy behavior I developed that came out of conversation. I was in 4th grade, and a friend had told me that to be pretty like a model you shouldn’t eat lunch. The school ended up calling my mom after I chose to skip lunch for a couple weeks. This was the first memory I have of understanding the connection between societal views and who I was. How I should be and what I should look like in this world.
I have been through a range of ups and downs of depression, anxiety, anorexia, and bulimia. That is if you chose to categorize me with mental illness labels. I never fully grasped or owned those labels, instead I chose to categorize myself as “not good enough.” Although I have mostly recovered from these issues, they taught me a first-hand lesson to the importance of self-compassion.
I critiqued myself harder than society ever would. I thought it would make me stronger, it would push me to be better. Only now do I realize that this view was holding me back. I never allowed myself to be satisfied with where I was. With where I am today. I was unable to acknowledge my accomplishments, but I could hold a grudge against myself for my disappointments.
A lack of self-compassion was the root cause of most of my issues. My destructive habits formed out of a battle with myself. If I wasn’t everything society ever wanted me to be, I was wrong. A mishap that isn’t worthy of love, or loving myself. At the lowest points, I didn’t believe I deserved to live. I drowned myself in my own suffering, as hope faded from my view.
And I had no one to talk to about it.
Because no one was talking about it.
I felt ashamed. That maybe I wasn’t normal.
Every one of the feelings I had could have been reversed. Retrained within my mind. And that’s where I’m at today. We all have our demons and our downsides. We often just choose to sweep them under the rug, because we’re worried about acceptance. We’re worried about judgment, as if we haven’t already judged ourselves enough. We may never allow ourselves to come to terms with our issues, because it may require opening up an old wound. We fear those feelings. But to relive those feelings with new insight and understanding can be liberating.
I know self-love only because I know self-hate. For one to exist, the other must as well. Duality praises the preciousness of life, and it’s existence only because of death. Without darkness, there can be no light. I no longer feel ashamed about what I did and how I felt. That’s another remarkable piece of duality. Every feeling has an opposite, each allowing you to feel the other. With non-duality, we can understand the interdependence between the relative opposite notions. The believed polarities of life and death, light and dark, are actually complements of one another. As Andrew Solomon has said in his TEDx talk, the opposite of depression is not happiness. It is vitality. Without the darkness of depression, I would not be fully embracing vitality today.
Self-compassion is a continuous journey. Be your best advocate in this life. Learn to trust yourself. Learn to love yourself. This life and these moments are fleeting, the good and the bad. Embrace every moment of them. Feel them for what they are, wholeheartedly.