Learning to Let Love in.

I have been struggling with loving myself most of my life.  It is as if there is a deep self-loathing that I don’t yet fully understand and I am finding it difficult to work my way through this emotionally.  I received a clue to this recently when I re-listened to the Divine Truth Talk on Emotions and the Mother Taboo (www.divinetruth.com - June 26^th 2010 – also on the Divine Truth YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8VzVIYHpOE&list=PLF04C988375DCDF23&index=47 ). At around 51mins into the talk AJ shared this statement When you suppress anger what finishes up happening is called resentment … if you are a woman suppressing anger towards mother you’re going to end up resenting yourself as a woman as well as resenting your mother.  It is the same if you are a man suppressing your anger towards your father.

I know I have a lot of repressed anger in my soul.  My body has been telling me this for years – acne, thrush, tinea – these are all ‘angry’ conditions in the body characterized by inflammation and I have had them all.  But it is difficult to access or work through anger fully when you have a deep fear of anger.  It is not so much the underlying fear that I am afraid of (although it could be) but more a fear of the anger itself that I need to access in order to get to the deeper cause of the dis-ease in my soul. 

I hate anger! 

I hate receiving it. 

I hate expressing it! 

Anger terrifies me and I have a lot of judgements about it all of which are born from my childhood (as are most of the errors in our souls).  But if I am ever to heal the errors in my soul, and therefore my body, I need to let go of the judgements that I have about anger and allow my soul to express all of the anger which has been pent up for most of my life.  This is a huge challenge for me and is blocking me from accessing the deeper grief within my soul which is preventing my connection with God from growing.  I have been praying about this a lot lately.

Recently when I was working through some emotions I had a bit of a revelation.

God loves me.

God loves me despite my faults and errors. 

God loves ME despite my unloving thoughts, feelings and actions. 

God loves ME despite my imperfection. 

God loves me even though I am fat and often feel stupid and inadequate. 

God has always loved me.

And God does not make mistakes.  Ever.  So if God loves me and I have felt this love and know it is real, and if God does not make mistakes; that means that I must be loveable. This is God’s Truth.  I am supremely loveable as I currently am.  I do not need to be slim, fit, young, smart and beautiful to be loveable.  God loves me as I currently am.  I am one of the greatest of God’s creation, the most wonderful of His handiworks and the object of Her great love and tenderest care.

God loves me as I currently am therefore I must be loveable as I currently am.  I don’t need to be anyone other than myself to be loveable. I have repeated this a lot here because I still don’t get this emotionally – at a soul level.  I understand this intellectually but I struggle to ‘get it’ at the soul level. 

I have spent much of my life modifying myself in order to please others.  Searching for love any way I can.  What I didn’t understand was that God loves me exactly as I am.  God created me as a perfect human being, a perfect half of a soul and I don’t need to be anything other than myself. 

The problem is that for most of my childhood being myself didn’t seem to be acceptable.  I was taught ‘to be a good girl’; ‘to behave myself’; ‘to not do this or that’.  It seemed that I was never good enough, smart enough, pretty enough.  I was moulded to ‘fit’ the accepted norm at the time.  And I didn’t understand this connection that God wants with all of Her children; that God craves from all of His children. The Catholic Church doesn’t teach about a personal relationship with God.  It taught me that I need a priest in order to have a relationship with God.  That I must obey its laws – most of which are not in harmony with God’s Laws and are manipulative, controlling and driven by fear, power and control.  This is what I grew up with.

Now I am learning that I do not need anyone else to have a relationship with God; that my relationship with God is personal and unique. And it feels right. My challenge is now to accept the gift of God’s Love and come to believe what God already knows – that as Her daughter I am supremely loveable.  I am a prefect creation of God’s and She does not make mistakes – EVER!  I AM loveable just as I am in this moment.

While a tiny flicker of a light is going on in my soul as this truth begins to take hold the demon I am really struggling with right now is to learn to love myself, to learn to forgive myself for all of the unloving actions I have taken in the past (and there have been many).  Until I can learn to do that – to forgive myself – it will be very difficult to learn to love myself or others.  I need to remind myself of this truth every day.

God loves me exactly as I am in this moment.  She has never stopped loving me.

I have felt God’s Love and I know it is real.  God loves me therefore I am loveable.

This needs to become my daily mantra.  My daily prayer needs to be “Please God, help me to overcome the barriers that prevent me from accepting Your Truth – that I am loveable exactly as I am.”

I still struggle with this but with God’s help and Grace I will eventually allow this truth to sink deep into my soul and become a knowing, a reality.  When I can do this I will be able to love others more freely and without expectation.  I will be able to give more of myself.

There is a lot of grief that I need to feel still as to why this is not already a truth in my soul.