The Paradox of Change

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about change and loving yourself and the relationship between those two. So I have a question for you. How much will you need to change before you're able to love yourself? Or is the question, how much will you need to love yourself before you're able to change? So think about that. A lot of times when it comes to developing a relationship with ourselves or a sense of worthiness, we tend to attach some manipulation of our world or manipulation of our experience or becoming some better version of ourselves to when we're going to feel worthy of love, when we're going to be able to care for ourselves, like ourselves, love ourselves.

And that's potentially one path. But the thing about that is that it makes our self-love contingent upon some future moment, contingent upon some arrangement of internal or external variables, which is inherently fragile. And I would even argue that it's not genuine love for yourself. It's conditional love. But let's look at this other framing.

How much will you need to love yourself before you're able to change? Wow. This really flips out on its head. And it was Carl Rogers who said the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. So it's interesting. So many of the things that keep us bound to negative patterns and conditionings and things that we're frustrated in of, inourselves come from a lot of self-hate, not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy.

And so we compensate in all these other ways. But when we do develop a deep well of appreciation for who we are, exactly as we are on the deepest level, many interesting thing starts to happen. It becomes easier to take risks, to try something new, to change in a way without all of the fear that we had beforehand. So we're going to explore this in today's meditation. What it's like to cultivate more of this quality of, of, of love toward yourself.

But as you go about your day, I hope you can keep this inquiry in mind. Notice if your orientation is, I need to change before I'm able to love myself. And what would it be like if you switch that and asked, how much will I need to love myself before I'm actually able to change. Try it out. Thank you for your practice, and let's settle in for today's meditation.