Excerpt from a recent article by Sharon Salzberg.
What if we replaced this notion of our essential damage with a sense of our essential capacity to love, and the need to nurture that capacity, including cultivating greater love towards ourselves? This might mean different things to different people, but the common theme of greater love for ourselves is acceptance, forgiveness, and a deliberate investment in our inherent right to be happy.
A student of mine, a freelance writer named Georgia, recently told me about her journey to self-love. As is the case for many freelancers, Georgia’s workload ebbed and flowed, and flowed particularly high when she felt the fear of financial pressure. A few years ago, Georgia explained to me, she took on too much work as a way to pay her bills and fend off acute future anxiety about money troubles. As soon as the work piled up, Georgia’s life became much less healthy — and it took her some time to notice the cycle she was caught in.
She started eating only junk food, mostly during her work hours, mindlessly sitting at the computer. She rarely saw beyond the four walls of her New York loft, where she spent most (if not all) of her time. Self-discipline for exercise, cleaning, and engaging in other regular self-care practices like getting enough sleep and meditating fell to the wayside.
Georgia continued to “cope” with her anxiety and burnout by avoiding it, and treating herself and her body poorly. When she first noticed how badly she was feeling, her awareness made her feel worse: she didn’t see a way out of the cycle she’d created. She felt malnourished in both literal and metaphorical ways, and with greater awareness, her inner critic’s voice became louder and more self-punishing.
Georgia’s eventual “a-ha” moment weeks later is a great model for self-love: “I wasn’t taking a stand on my right to be happy,” she explained to me. Taking that stand for herself as an act of resistance against her bad habits became a simple but very concrete principle for her to start practicing self-love.
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