Love Yourself, Forgive Yourself, Be Yourself!

I am a big note taker.  I think this falls somewhere in the same category as my list making.  I used to be hesitant to make marks in books that I read so I took long, time consuming notes.  UVA, my Anthropology major, and the endless amounts of required reading broke me of that, I now LOVE to highlight, asterisk, underline and jot notes in the margin of everything I read.  When it’s crunch time it is so much easier and faster than taking notes and when I reread any of it, it just takes a skim to pull out what to me are the most fascinating parts.

When I went back through my “The Four Agreements”, just in the introduction I marked all of the following…and we haven’t even gotten to the First Agreement yet.

“Human’s punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be.”

“But nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves, and it is the Judge, the Victim and the belief system that make us do it.”

“The way we judge ourselves is the worst judge that ever existed.”

“In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself.  And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else.  If someone abuses you a little more than you abuse yourself, you will probably walk away from that person.  But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in the relationship and tolerate it endlessly.”

“If you abuse yourself very badly you can even tolerate someone who beats you up, humiliates you, and treats you like dirt.”

“The more self-love we have, the less we will experience self-abuse.”

“There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children.  But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself.  In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave.  The result is what you call your personality.  In these agreements you say, “This is what I am.  This is what I believe.  I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do.  This is reality, that is fantasy, this is possible, that is impossible.”

What did I pull out of this to apply to my life? 

1. Love Yourself
2. Forgive Yourself
3. Be Yourself

I think some people spend a lifetime trying to figure this out.  It’s hard, because I think for most of us it is true that we are our own worst critics.  Several months ago I told a friend how beautiful she looked, she got ready to reel off all of the reasons she most certainly did not look beautiful, then she simply stopped herself and humbly said thank you.  This moment has stuck out in my mind, I watched a shift right before my eyes that happened in seconds, someone deciding that they were going to show self-love, self-acceptance by simply graciously accepting a compliment…it was a beautiful thing.  Self-love takes work, but is there anything else more worthy of work?

XOXO,

Megan