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Thank you so much for joining me every day here for the 14 Days of Self-Love! We’re going to bring this series to a close with a post by the wonderful Rachel Cole! This feels like the perfect piece to end the series with and I hope it resonates with you as much as it does for me and that it inspires you to find your place in the ‘family of things’ too. If you’d like to peek back at the previous posts in the series, you can find them all on this page!
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Photo credit: Andrea Scher
Finding my way home to a place of self-love has largely been about finding my place in, as poet Mary Oliver says, “the family of things.”
I used to believe that I was unlovable. I used to think that I was not only broken, but more broken than most everyone else. I used to believe that my hungers were to not to be trusted. I used to be in a long-distance relationship with my own flesh.
In the pit of despair, grasping for anything that might be a salve for my pain, I began to awaken.
With the help of a truly excellent therapist, my own fierce dedication, the courage to surrender, and lots and lots of reading…I came to see and feel myself differently.
I came to see and feel that all of life is sacred and that this must include me and every cell in my being. If I am sacred, it stands to reason that I am worthy of love.
I came to believe that all of life is one, big divine ocean with each of us as a distinctive wave. We are made up of the same divine energy and matter but are each as unique as a snowflake. I believe we are tasked with becoming the fullest expression of our “wave” as possible.
For me to be the fullest expression of my wave, I have to be tended to, nurtured, loved, and
most importantly fed. Anything else pulls me out of engagement with life.
The Buddha says, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more
deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.”
Believing this and embodying it sounds simple, perhaps overly simple as I write this. It’s not and you know that.
Self-love at this level, self-love of the awakening kind, came for me when my heart was exhausted from being told the greatest lie there is: that I was separate from it all.
Instead it turns out, it was about finding the truth of my place in “the family of things.”
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Rachel Cole is a certified life coach, celebrated retreat host, instigator of ease, and hunger-satisfier. Based in the San Francisco Bay area, she spent years steeped in the vibrant Bay Area food community while earning her MA in Holistic Health Education. Rachel is on a mission to help women identify, understand and feed their true hungers. Through her varied endeavors, Rachel continues to be an inimitable inspiration for each of us to feast on our lives.