LOVING WHAT IS

To love something is to see and accept it exactly as it is, and to set aside our need for it to be any different.

The opposite energy of loving something is to reject it.

You could call this energy hate, or rejection, or something else.

The important thing is that we try to use this energy of rejection to get ourselves to a state of love.

We witness where we are, and we hate ourselves for where we’re stuck.

We see ourselves judging other people, and we make ourselves wrong for it.

The reason we do that is because we don’t trust that we’ll shift if we bring love to this thing we’re doing.

“If I just love myself as I judge other people, I’ll keep doing it forever.”

Maybe. But you’re doing it anyhow. Hating on yourself as you do it isn’t changing that. It’s just making it harder to come to terms with how you are as a human.

When we bring love to bear on whatever is in front of us, we can start to soften. We can begin to breathe a little more easily.

From our softness we can start to look at the underlying issue.

What has me showing up this way? We can start to get curious about how we arrived here, and we can start to bring love to that root cause.

Life becomes so much simpler down this path, but it requires much more courage.

It requires courage to practise loving the parts of yourself you were taught or learned were wrong.

It demands a practise in trusting yourself. Trusting that if you let yourself off the hook, if you stop hitting yourself with the stick, you’ll eventually let go of this tendency.

And if you can start doing that for yourself, you’re able to start doing it for others.

This is how you lead in a way that is transformative. First with yourself. Then, with your people.

This is how the world transforms: not by hating ourselves into something new, but by loving ourselves exactly as we are.