To Be Kind to Others, Be Kinder to Yourself

Last updated on: July 20, 2015 at 10:19 am by Annie Mueller

To Be Kind to Others, Be Kinder to Yourself 2015-07-20T10:19:36-05:00 Annie Mueller

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To see the beauty in the world, and in others, you have to start by seeing the beauty in yourself. You have to start by learning to love yourself, even with all the flaws and mistakes and errors.

You learn to love yourself, even as broken as you might be, by realizing that the brokenness is not you.

The errors are not you. The mistakes are not you. The flaws are not you.

They are signs of your struggle to be who you really are, locked in a world that blinds us to truth and reality.

The Jefferson Bible, XI

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
22 The lamp of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be sound, thy whole body shall be full of light.
23 But if thine eye be not sound, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

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How can we expect ourselves to acknowledge the value of others when we cannot acknowledge our own value?

It’s difficult to turn off the messages of failure, shame, guilt, and unworthiness that we’ve heard for so long. But if we don’t, we will continue to believe these messages about ourselves and about others.

Meditations: Book II

Marcus Aurelius

1. Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.

But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me; not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him.

For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.

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Take small first steps.

Be kinder to yourself; listen to the voices in your head, then call them out. Say those words out loud that you are thinking about yourself, and hear how ridiculous they are.

Counter those voices with something true. Something good. For every negative you hear about who you are, state a positive.

There is always a positive.

As you learn to be kinder to yourself, the effects spread outward. If you allow yourself to acknowledge your own efforts and value, despite all the errors, you will begin to acknowledge the same in others.

And from there it becomes another small step to see past the evil, the pain, the suffering in the universe and see another layer underneath: the layer of reality, of beauty, of truth, of love.

The Path on the Rainbow: Calling-One’s-Own

Ojibwa; ed. George W. Cronyn

Awake! flower of the forest, sky-treading bird of the prairie.
Awake! awake! wonderful fawn-eyed One.
When you look upon me I am satisfied; as flowers that drink dew.
The breath of your mouth is the fragrance of flowers in the morning,
Your breath is their fragrance at evening in the moon-of-fading-leaf.
Do not the red streams of my veins run toward you
As forest-streams to the sun in the moon of bright nights?
When you are beside me my heart sings; a branch it is, dancing,
Dancing before the Wind-spirit in the moon of strawberries.
When you frown upon me, beloved, my heart grows dark—
A shining river the shadows of clouds darken,
Then with your smiles comes the sun and makes to look like gold
Furrows the cold wind drew in the water’s face.
Myself! behold me! blood of my beating heart.

Earth smiles—the waters smile—even the sky-of-clouds smiles—but I,
I lose the way of smiling when you are not near,
Awake! awake! my beloved.

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