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Today's
Meditation:
I didn't used to be a very good friend to myself at
all. Any shortcomings that I had, anything that I
did wrong, any challenges that I didn't live up to, would
be fodder for me to attack me--to get angry at myself and
be rather merciless with myself. I was living in a
perpetual Catch-22 situation, in which things weren't
happening in my life because of the ways that I thought
about myself, and I thought about myself in those ways
because things weren't happening in my life.
Helen Reddy wrote a nice little song in which she sang, "I make myself as happy as a best friend would
/
I'm as nice to me as anyone I know." It's a song that
resonates with me because it reminds me of the importance
of valuing myself and treating myself well. There
are times when it's difficult, for people sometimes put
pressures on us that make it difficult for us to treat
ourselves well without risking something else--such as a
job or a friendship--but sometimes it's important to make
sure that we're willing to make sacrifices in order to
treat ourselves as a friend, just as we would make
sacrifices for our friends.
My friendship with myself opens the doors to other
friendships. When I treat myself well, I know what
it means to be treated well and I can thus treat others in
a similar way, as they deserve to be treated. Jesus
of Nazareth put it quite simply: Love others as you
love yourself. Eleanor says you can't be friends
with others if you can't be friends with yourself, and
Jesus implied that you can't love others unless you love
yourself. And it really boils down to common sense,
and something that we witness time and again--people are
unable to give to others something they don't know
themselves.
If you're going to be a good friend to yourself, how are
you going to start? What can you do for
yourself? How can you be kinder to yourself, more
sympathetic, more compassionate? This sort of thing
does take practice and effort, and the sooner we begin to
make an active effort to be friends with ourselves, the
sooner we'll be able to begin to give our friends the best
of ourselves, with nothing held back.
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