Falling in Love with Yourself

You are powerful, intelligent, and interesting. You are complicated and valuable. You are attractive. You are a good person. You are worthy of love. You are deserving of happiness. My hope is that you can embrace these truths more readily now than when you started this book. Say them to yourself and see if you can embody the essence of this recognition without real or feigned modesty, without self-pity or self-importance.

You have these lovable qualities and more because you are living the gift of a human incarnation and have this rare opportunity to be a conscious manifestation of the universe. Your individuality is a wave on the ocean of universality. Even as each wave expresses its unique qualities and talents, it retains its essential oceanic nature. To use another metaphor, gold can be made into bracelets, charms, and coins, but its elemental goldenness cannot be destroyed. You are the universe playing hide-and-seek with itself. You are the sacred in disguise. You are God in drag. Knowing this, you cannot feel sorry for yourself for very long, because your heart and soul retain the memory of your essential divinity. With this awareness, you have the capacity to create a compelling life story – a story in which you are free to love and in which you love freely.

Your inner being is perpetually seeking to seduce you. Although it faces stiff competition from the sensory enticements of the world, your soul is not a jealous lover. Connect with it regularly and it will gladly share you with the world. Through the clearing of emotional confusion and misunderstandings, you have taken a major step towards embracing your true nature. The more clearly you recognize who you really are, the easier it is to see through all of God’s other disguises. Then, no matter where you are or whom you’re with, you will feel comfortable and open, because you know at your core that you are divinity expressing itself in a living form – as are all the other sentient creatures you encounter in life. Living and loving from the center of your being, you are always at home with yourself.

When you love something, be it a puppy, your garden, or a child, you naturally want to take good care of it. Now that you are committed to choices that support and reinforce your happiness, treat yourself with the same intention and caring you’d give to anything else you love. Minimize toxicity; maximize nourishment. Life-damaging habits, which in the past provided temporary relief from your sense of unlovability, have outlived their usefulness. You no longer need to anesthetize yourself from yourself. Look at your use of love-substituting behaviors and begin trusting your internal pharmacy of well-being, rather than depending upon chemicals that temporarily modulate your emotions. Commit to
a regular practice of meditation, yoga, exercise, and conscious communication, and enjoy the power you have to create balance from within,
reducing your need for outer acts of manipulation.

Look at every aspect of your life and identify experiences that are depleting rather than nourishing. Evaluate your food, water, air, music, TV, internet sites, and job choices and see how you can reduce the ingestion of energy and information that is not serving you, while replacing it with that which does.

David Simon, M.D. is the Co- Founder, CEO and Medical Director of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Dr. Simon is dedicated to catalyzing the evolution of the prevailing health care system into a healing system that encompasses the emotional, spiritual as well as physical health of the individual. His new book Free to Love, Free to Heal: Heal Your Body by Healing Your Emotions comes out on June 25, 2009.

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