Learning to Receive the Love That Was Already There

There's a practice in mindfulness called loving-kindness meditation.

In the practice, we send wishes of love and kindness to different people. Someone we love. Someone we may not know very well. Sometimes even someone we find difficult.

And then, at some point, we're asked to send those same wishes to ourselves.

You'd think that would be the easy part.

For me, it often isn't.

I'm so used to giving love outwards. To my family. My friends. The people I care about. Being there for someone else has always come quite naturally to me.

But turning that same love towards myself?

That's been much harder.

When I first started doing loving-kindness practice, there were days when the words I was saying to myself didn't feel particularly true.

I could say them.

But I couldn't necessarily feel them.

So I stopped trying to force myself to.

On the days when I couldn't feel love towards myself, I simply set the intention.

Sometimes I treated the words almost like a blessing I was sending myself.

I didn't need to believe them completely.

I just needed to be willing to say them.

And something has slowly started changing.

I haven't suddenly woken up one morning completely in love with myself, accepting every single thing about who I am.

Far from it.

But I sometimes think of it as slowly thawing ice.

Little by little, something has softened.

I've started thinking, maybe I'm not as unworthy as I've sometimes believed myself to be.

Maybe I am enough.

I may not have the skills somebody else has.

I may not enjoy the things other people enjoy.

There are things I'm not particularly good at.

There are ways in which I'm different.

But that doesn't mean I don't bring something of my own.

And somewhere along the way, self-love has also started becoming something much more useful to me than simply liking myself.

It's becoming self-acceptance.

I'm getting better at seeing the parts of myself that I like.

I know I can be kind.

I know I show love.

I know I can be there for the people I care about.

I'm disciplined.

I'm organised.

But I'm also starting to look at the parts of myself that I've spent years wishing were different.

I can be short-tempered.

I get frustrated quickly.

I like things done a certain way.

I can take my need for perfection too far.

And there are plenty of other things I could add to that list.

Earlier, I think I saw these parts almost as evidence against myself.

If I could be impatient or angry or difficult, perhaps I wasn't as good a person as I wanted to believe I was.

I'm beginning to see it differently now.

They're all me.

The kindness doesn't cancel out the anger.

And the anger doesn't cancel out the kindness.

I don't have to divide myself into the parts that are worthy of love and the parts that aren't.

That has probably been one of the biggest shifts for me.

Because something else happened when I started accepting myself a little more.

I became better at receiving love too.

That surprised me.

I don't think there was ever a shortage of love around me.

People loved me before I started meditating.

My family didn't suddenly become more caring because I started practising loving-kindness.

My friends didn't suddenly start valuing me more.

“The love was already there. I just don't know how much of it I was actually allowing myself to receive.”

When you don't really believe you're worthy of love, it's surprisingly easy to block it.

Someone tells you something lovely about yourself and you dismiss it.

Someone does something kind for you and you feel uncomfortable.

Someone appreciates you and a part of you thinks, "If only they really knew me."

So you keep giving.

And giving.

And giving.

And after a while, it can become exhausting.

I know there were times when I felt that way.

I felt like I was constantly giving to the people I loved, and eventually I would feel drained.

Looking back now, I wonder whether the problem wasn't only that I was giving too much.

Maybe I wasn't receiving enough.

Not because people weren't giving to me.

But because somewhere inside, I wasn't letting it in.

As I've started coming into a better relationship with myself, that has changed.

When someone loves me, I'm getting better at believing them.

When someone appreciates me, I'm trying not to immediately explain away the compliment.

When someone wants to do something for me, I'm getting better at letting them.

And the strange thing is that the more I'm able to receive, the more I feel I have to give.

Not because I should.

Not because being loving makes me a "good person."

But because I'm no longer constantly giving from one side of the equation.

Nothing outside me really changed.

The love was there.

The people were there.

The good intentions were there.

What changed was the way I saw myself.

I'm learning to accept that I have qualities I'm proud of and qualities I'm not.

That I will get things right and I will get things very wrong.

That I can be kind and impatient.

Loving and angry.

Generous and difficult.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

And perhaps loving myself isn't about finally becoming the version of myself that I think deserves love.

Maybe it's learning that I don't have to become someone else to deserve it.