On my path to find self-love, I came across this book called Living, Loving, and Learning by Leo Buscaglia. I found this at the thrift store at the perfect time. I was open to anything at that point in my life to make a change. But before I physically or emotionally invested time in trying to do anything, I first needed to believe that I was worth trying for. The most wonderful thing about this book was that every time I read it, I felt like I was worth trying for! I felt like I was receiving a huge hug and overwhelming feeling of love. He says it in a way that is plain and simple to understand. I learned that each of us has within us- at any given day- enough. So without writing out the whole book, I will try to share the key points for me that helped to love myself more.
Leo Buscaglia was a professor with a Ph.D., who taught a University a course called “Love”. It was a course that taught you to love yourself! How awesome is that! The first chapter of his book is called Love as a Behavior modifier. I dog-eared many pages and quotes and this is one of my favorites; Buscaglia quotes Thoreau when he says “Birds never sing in caves.” Buscaglia continues in his own words; “And neither do we. In order to learn, you’ve got to be free. You’ve got to be free to EXPERIMENT, to try, free to make MISTAKES. That’s the way you learn.” I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this! I was always so afraid of making mistakes. I wasn’t allowing myself to be human. I didn’t even really realize I was doing this to myself. I thought when I made mistakes, I had to punish myself. I had the distorted idea that to punish myself for mistakes I made, would make me stronger. In fact it was severely doing the complete opposite.
I did not let myself make mistakes, and I was extremely affected by others and what they said to me. Even if it was not meant to tear me down, I would take it as so. This was some kind of awful self-sabotage process I put myself through. Consciously, I had no idea I was doing this to myself. I did not see myself as someone who had an opinion. The next section in his book is called On BecomingYou.
Buscaglia quotes Saint Exupery’s book called Wind, sand & Stars where he says, “Perhaps love is the process of leading you gently back to yourself.” I love this quote because for people like me, I wanted to love myself, but did not how to do that unconditionally, flaws and all. I was searching for love everywhere else but through me. If you don’t love yourself, you most certainly will not be able to love others. If you are like I was, I did not have one clue where to start to learn to love myself. My problem was that I was searching out side myself.
This book was a huge part in teaching me how to look within. So if you find yourself unhappy with yourself or anything about your life, Buscaglia suggests this: “If you don’t like the scene you’re in, if you’re unhappy, if you’re lonely, if you don’t feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop. Surround yourself with new actors. Write a new play-and if it’s not a good play, get the hell off the stage and write another one. There are millions of plays-as many as there are people.”
I love the part where he says to ‘paint a new backdrop. Surround yourself with new actors.’ I think many of us are scared of change. But you are worth taking a chance to find something that works better for you. This can be a hard step, but if you aren’t happy-keep searching for the real things that make the real you happy! And how do you know if you are the real you? This next quote tells you how to start that journey of becoming you.
“You’ve got to be real. Don’t be a phony. Come on as yourself. The hardest thing in the world is to be something you’re not. As you get closer and closer and closer to what you are, be that, and come on all the time that way. You’ll find it’s an easy way to live. The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position. Find “you,” who you are, come on as you are. Then you can live simply.”
I absolutely love this whole quote. All of it rings so true to me. Why? Because I was being a phony, without even knowing it. I was just trying to fit in and find out who I was. If you feel conflicted about what to say to people, how to act, and what to decide, you are definitely trying to be something you are not. As Leo says, “The hardest thing in the world is to be something you’re not.” Unless you have been on both sides of trying to be someone else, and then trying to be yourself, you will not understand how difficult it is to be yourself. For me, I did not even know who I was. I had gone through the cycle of being what I thought others wanted me to be, that I lost myself somewhere in all that. When I started uncovering who I was; what I believed, what I liked, what I thought, it really was a million times easier to be me.
It was so indescribably revitalizing to get closer to find out what made up me, and to accept and embrace it.
Ignorance prejudices, and judgments played a big part in holding me back to loving and accepting myself; and obviously others. It was a viscous cycle. Because I judged myself so harshly, I also judged others. I was afraid to accept my own individuality, and therefore I had a hard time accepting others. This very issue held me back immensely from finding true love for myself and others. This next quote was also a huge eye opener for me. “You, if you are a loving person, will rule words and not allow words to rule you. You will tell yourself what this world means only after you find out by experience what it means; not by believing what people have told you it means.”
Rule words. Have confidence in what words you say. To read my post about accepting others and being open to diversity, its called, Born to be...ME!. And if you say something, make sure it is something you believe to the core, because you have found out by experience what it means. And if you say something that is wrong or offends someone, don’t be afraid to apologize if you see it was hurtful. As part of not letting myself be human I was terrified, to say the least, of saying something wrong, or stupid. So I never really said anything I really thought, because I was so afraid of being ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’. I needed a lesson in doing and believing through my own experience.
0 comments:
Post a Comment