As I am able to feel the heavy blankets of depression begin to lift away from me, I realized (again) when I came across a passage in Jack Kornfield's A PATH WITH HEART that it is difficult for me to love myself. Even writing that I don't hurts me because I know and believe the truism that one cannot truly love others without self-love.
How I keep coming back to this confused state is circuitous and (perhaps) began in a childhood of mixed messages from well-meaning Baptists who taught we are born in sin, along with teenage Romantic literary notions of the tortured and suicidal artist, and, lately, heart-felt but excessive focus on all the suffering in the world, all of which can spin my mind down dark, dead-end alleyways (who am I to deserve the blessings I enjoy?). . . As if logic has the answers.
And so, these days I repeat the mantra from Kornfield and use it to bless myself so that I may once again bless others:
How I keep coming back to this confused state is circuitous and (perhaps) began in a childhood of mixed messages from well-meaning Baptists who taught we are born in sin, along with teenage Romantic literary notions of the tortured and suicidal artist, and, lately, heart-felt but excessive focus on all the suffering in the world, all of which can spin my mind down dark, dead-end alleyways (who am I to deserve the blessings I enjoy?). . . As if logic has the answers.
And so, these days I repeat the mantra from Kornfield and use it to bless myself so that I may once again bless others:
May I be filled with loving-kindess.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.
May you love yourselves also.
