How to feel Unconditional Self Love
A lot of healing and shadow work begins with an invitation to approach the process and the parts of ourselves we've rejected with unconditional love.
But what if you can't?
What if you don't even like yourself right now, much less feel some epic, divine, unconditional love for yourself and all of your many parts?
First: the expectation that you should be able to do that can become your inner perfectionist's next playing field.
I'm not doing the healing right.
I can't even look at myself in the mirror straight.
I'm not good enough at healing.
This is the way our culture that expects us to be perfect can invade our healing. It can invade this safe space.
So what if, instead of perfect unconditional love, we begin with good enough love?
A little more comfort. A little more softness.
Where in your body feels a little more pleasurable, warm, tingly, luscious or delicious than somewhere else? What happens when you bring your awareness there? Where can you turn the volume up on sensory joy?
You don't need perfect self-love in order to move forward with integration.
And there's another possibility I find fascinating: for some of us, unconditional love itself may be in the shadow.
We don't only bury the parts we've been taught are bad—the mean girl, the selfish part. We can bury joy. We can bury our pure, innocent, vivacious energy. We can bury our connection with unconditional love because at some point it wasn't safe to embody it.
And then there are the shadow parts themselves.
The perfectionist. The people pleaser. The protector we've practiced for decades.
When we suddenly show up and tell these parts to retire, change jobs, explain themselves and do everything differently, it's almost laughable to them.
Those pieces of us know a hell of a lot.
They are crafty.
And they are actually, in their own way, deeply and unconditionally loving us.
Those shadow parts have that unconditional love bound up in them.
They have been waking up every day, working through the night at all hours to make sure that we're okay. They carry a total devotion to our well-being and survival.
What happens when, instead of demanding that we already love those parts unconditionally, we begin to recognize the unconditional love they have been expressing toward us?
Maybe that's one of the doorways in.
And if unconditional love for yourself still feels too obscure, you can begin somewhere else. Remember how you've loved a person, an animal, a cause, a story that stirred something deeply inside you. Feel the visceral experience of that love in your body.
Warmth. Expansion. Your heart or belly. Your face. Your arms.
That embodied feeling can become another doorway.
And none of this means unconditional approval.
We can love a part while not approving of its behavior. We can recognize that a part has an intelligence we don't quite understand yet while working to build a relationship with it—becoming wise to how it has served us and asking how we might collaborate together on a future that works for everyone.
Maybe you don't need to perfect unconditional self-love before you begin shadow work.
Maybe shadow work is one of the places you discover where that love has been hiding.
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