Monika's weekly inner voice drawings:
Q: Talking with friends and clients, the issue of "self-love" or the lack of it has come up as a frequent topic lately. How to love yourself if you don't recognize your divine beauty; and how to recognize your divine beauty, if you don't love yourself? A perfect conundrum for an Inner Voice Drawing question, and so I asked:
"How to attain self-love?"
A: "Develop the inner vision and the habit of listening to the inner voice; and you are assured of unshakable peace and infinite joy."
- Atharva Veda
"God makes three requests of his children: Do the best you can, where you are, with what you have, now."
- African-American Proverb
Posts
I just got another insight about the figure in the drawing: Not having any arms or legs, points to the fact that self-love doesn't depend on our "hands" = actions or "feet" = the direction we're going to. It's all within.
ReplyDeleteWhat is self-love? If we notice Monika’s tooth-like figure :) there is a serenity that visually reflects self-love. Self-love is an internalized sense of goodness one feels and conveys to the world. Though the emerging self may experience less than the unconditional love from parents, good enough parenting leads to a self good enough for self-love. Self-love is the fulfillment of self’s purpose: to create joy; and, in its intention, as Gibran says, “Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.” This is very profound because it reveals the paradox of self-love: that it extends infinitely outward to all beings. Not that one is totally free of negative afflictive emotions, such as, anger, envy, fear, etc. But, these emotions no longer inhibit self’s full participation in the two sides of life’s play: interior illumination of mind’s self-inquiry and creative spirit, and interaction with the world.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny, I experience the figure's hands and legs as both in the blue sleeve and behind the brown pew-like structure. He's shokeling and so in a mystical trance. Now, that's a tooth with a bite in it :) The bite of self-love where the only cavity is emptiness :-(=)
ReplyDeleteWhile visiting my dream world last night, i thought about self-love and wanted to share that self-love is not self-identification. In fact, in a way, it's opposite. Though we have and play with many identities (for example, friend, father, sister, Inner Voice Drawing counselor), the self we love realizes that it doesn't exist independently of anything else in existence. What a wonderful thing to realize! What freedom we experience knowing that we are intimately and intricately connected to the semaphoric bird lifting in flight and its song spilling into the blue sky and pure sunlight:
ReplyDeleteUp the road by the field
where the last vestige of light squeezes out day,
a mockingbird sits, waiting.
I move closer to catch the site
where he is perching, alone.
He keeps his stance, then dips slightly as the moon,
the white of his tail pointing downward;
he barely cares that I am here.
He begins singing to the melting field.
I think of Whitman's bird
moaning in the night for his mate.
Perhaps we have both lost love;
I will share with him,
for he knows the hidden language of loss.
His gray head bobs and he repeats a phrase.
Suddenly, for a moment,
I feel love again and become a bird.
LOL - I love the description of a "tooth like" figure "where the only cavity is emptiness". And as it so happens, I did have a three hour visit at the dentist today, not an emergency, just expressing self-love by doing something good for myself :)
ReplyDeleteYes, self-love is not self-identification nor self-indulgence. To me it is accepting/recognizing/realizing that we all have Buddha nature, accepting oneself with all one's flaws, keep walking the good path, and not taking oneself too seriously. In the few moments that I can truly live this, I feel free like a bird. In the other moments I do at least remember :)
Who wrote this lovely poem?
This is an excerpt from my poem, `The Last Song of the Day' :)
ReplyDeleteI love no-self ;)
ReplyDelete