Me, myself, and I – Can I treat myself with kindness?

A contemplation on being happy in my own company.

Do you enjoy being alone? I have spent A LOT of time alone. It´s still hit and miss, and I would like to tell you why. Sometimes, solitude is absolute bliss - an antidote to social overload, but there are times when being alone is hard. It´s straining to be alone when I beat myself up; shaming myself for my mistakes and short comings. The monkey mind takes its toll, and just as it is hard to enjoy being with anyone who is habitually unkind to me, that includes… Me.

It is something I am working on, so I am sharing this contemplation as a fellow student of the physio-spiritual boxing ring we call the human experience.

I often avoid sitting quietly still, with only my thoughts and feelings, because it is hard to hold it. Rejection, grief, fear, regret, and bottomless self criticism wait for me a couple of meters under the surface of my day-to-day flow. If I stop treading on the surface of my brackish waters, I touch these these feelings like a foot touches the colder layers of a lake - unheated by the solar rays of productivity or other distractions. I am made nervous by the approaching company of my own thoughts and feelings, so I push them away in favour of a dream-like constant: eat, work, sleep, repeat, and the water keeps getting colder down there. Liken to how it becomes harder to break the ice of a long neglected friendship, as do I find this pattern within. Self love begins with self acceptance, and self acceptance begins in the absence of self criticism. The question becomes, can I honour the truce? Can I tolerate myself? Can I go that far to make a start?

Tomorrow has its challenges, today has its too. If I triumph over the challenges in front of me, even in a grueling, struggling way, I earned the right to lay my head at the end of the day and to pat myself on the back. “Day 8,134… It wasn´t perfect, but I survived another one.” I deserve to be alive. “You´re doing well. Keep going.”

Where are you on this journey?

However many steps you have taken along your path, can you love yourself? If not, can you accept yourself? If not, can you tolerate yourself? If you cannot tolerate yourself, what compells you to be intolerant?

Some words of gratitude

Every day we have the opportunity to be born again. Every meal is a blessing, and we would reminisce of these days of abundance in times of scarcity. Every cup of water is a blessing, and we´d be desperate for another if our lips ever cracked with thirst. Every breath is a blessing, and we wouldd miss the air very, very, quickly…

Things could be worse, but I am glad that they are not. Gratitude and happiness, love and acceptance, are abundant and within reach. I have come to believe it is a choice, because I have been humbled to meet people with so little who are so happy with what they do have. What else creates their abundance of joy? What else brings them satisfaction?