Just(Keep)You
Posted: November 1, 2013 Filed under: Random Workout, Yoga | Tags: Bikram Yoga, Blah, blogging, compassion, cycling, fitness, free range, freshly pressed, friends, happiness, health, hipster, hope, Intimate relationship, kindness, life, love, lululemon, marathon, meditation, motivation, musings, natural, nature, Omaha, paleo, passion, perspective, pilates, relationships, Religion and Spirituality, Romance, running, trail running, Vinyāsa, walking, writing, yoga, Yoga-nidra 16 CommentsThere is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable-
Blah – Blah – Blah: We need to love ourselves before we can love anyone or anything else. Where have you read these words before …
As much as we want to control our own destiny, the humbling truth is that sometimes the only way to learn self-love is by being loved-precisely in the places where we feel most tender. When this happens, we feel freedom, we are granted permission to love in a deeper sense.
There is no amount of positive self-talk that can replicate this experience. Too many times I witness caring people using will power as an excuse to fight through a yoga class. Intimacy and love will not be found here …
If our vulnerability is met with struggle or disinterest, feeling pressured into attending practice. Something brilliantly tender shrivels up and retracts within us, we often lament about ever sharing this part of ourselves again. When our authentic self fails to “work” on a yoga mat (or whatever), we create a false self which lets us feel safe and accepted, although at a significant cost.
Every time we face the choice to share our deeper self, we stand at a precipice. Often, it’s just too scary to take the first step forward …
Notes:
How do we free ourselves from the thrall of shame thrown on us, the ever pressing need to succumb to societal norms? The fear of being our true selves?
I wish I could tell you, I sincerely do. I do know that for whatever reason, you are here reading this drab post, and this means everything to me. Be well this weekend and please take care!
CultFit 
AMEN Brother.
Tough time of the year, getting the bikes ready to be brought indoors from the garage. Setting up the trainer … Squeezing as many carefree miles in as I can before the snow arrives. This winter though I’m going to try to get a few commutes in if the weather cooperates! Take care!
It sure is. Sadly, I don’t have room in my house so I have to take them to my warehouse at my office… It’ll be tough to bring them back if the weather does cooperate. Enjoy!
With faith. it takes faith to offer again to the world and others our tender bits.
I couldn’t agree more 🙂
Yeah, where have we read those words before…?
Blah, blah…
Blah. xp
You’ll be the first person I share with when I find out! 🙂
I don’t doubt that at all! 🙂
“Blah – Blah – Blah: We need to love ourselves before we can love anyone or anything else. Where have you read these words before …”
–I heard this a lot growing up, as a young teenager with self esteem issues (who doesn’t have those in their teens). There is another backstory here I can tell you in person, but let’s just say the above, to me then and now, is (of course) bullshit. Telling someone to love themselves before they can love someone else devalues someone who struggles *even more*, causing the one thing they knew they could do–love someone else–to fall into question. The one love they were capable of, snatched away by a pithy saying. And down the spiral they go. I wonder how many kids committed suicide after hearing these words. How hopeless a world where the one love they held was unrecognized by others because of outside judgements . . .
“As much as we want to control our own destiny, the humbling truth is that sometimes the only way to learn self-love is by being loved-precisely in the places where we feel most tender. When this happens, we feel freedom, we are granted permission to love in a deeper sense.”
–THIS is the key, and I have never heard it put so well before in my life. It struck me the day I read it and has not left my mind nor heart ever since. Had someone told me this in my teens, my psyche could have been spared so much agony, pain, suffering, sorrow, self-defeating thoughts, and so much more.
I never really experienced this until I met my current husband. I let him love me in the “places” that had been most abused by me mentally, psychologically, physically. He caresses a part of me and adores it, a part I have always loathed. Confusion. Fear–did he really like *THAT*?? And then acceptance. I am such a different person for allowing him to love those parts of me that I could never accept myself.
Yes, THIS is the key to self-love. Allowing and accepting the love of others in places where we feel the most tender.
Thank you. This is a keeper.
And, I adore the kindness in you. Just remember, you are your own harshest critic. Stop it. Just. Stop. It. 😉 You just understand that you have the capacity to be even more kind–but we see kindness from the outside. And we all adore it.
So, be well, smile, and hit the Keystone. It is gorgeous today!
Where do I begin, trying to explain how moved I am by your words, your kindness?
🙂
How do I follow Sandra. Lovely thoughts, thank you for sharing,
Sandra is an amazing and inspiring woman, I can openly say that her spirit and beauty resonate within me … Here is a link to her blog, I implore you to get lost in her inspiration!
http://promisetodad.wordpress.com/
*on the right hand margin there is a link to follow her blog*
I love the photograph.
I’m so glad you like it and thank you for stopping over, always a pleasure. 🙂
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