By Starting to Love Within

I was heartened to find an article on this site promoting emotional literacy in today’s young people.  Emotional literacy begins when we own the experience of our feelings by allowing them without judgment.   To be alive and Internet savvy right now suggests that physical needs—water, shelter, food—are met and likely well-surpassed.  Beyond these basic needs, beyond health and education and security, regardless of our economic standing, what calls us now is a push towards emotional evolution.  Towards living a daily experience of loving compassion.

Emotional Literacy

It makes me roll my eyes, just to write it.  A  daily living experience of compassion?  Well if that doesn’t smack of righteousness.  I’ve found it’s far from sainthood or perfection though.  Compassion, in my life, is actually related to my human imperfections.  It is my angst, my trouble in personal relationships, my tendency to isolate or pick melancholy if something doesn’t go my way-  that teaches me the most about love.  Emotional literacy is owning my power because it means owning my inner life without shame.  This is where true compassion is born, in the softening gained towards ourselves when we stop battling the experience of how we feel in this moment.  This is precisely what I have learned when it comes to the popular suggestion of learning to love myself.  Real self-love is the opposite of selfish (which is what my first defense tries to tell me) and in fact, is an active, gentle approach to empowerment.  Maybe most important, it has become my first step of finding love for others, be they friends, family, coworkers or the guy in front of me taking so long to check out at that store.

Loving Acceptance of Others

Rather than some abstract application, emotional literacy is the basic tenant of loving acceptance of ourselves exactly as we are right now.  It is fundamental to the act of owning our inner life.  This is how I own the power to become proactive in a lasting way.  Maybe I’m at ease today except for that coworker always driving me nuts.  Judging or resisting my reaction of feeling nuts gets me nowhere but running the wheel in my head.   Spastic acting out that I try to ignore as soon as it’s over does nothing but make me feel bad about myself.   But surrendering to my feelings and reaction opens up the experience for me, which helps me understand myself more, and this understanding intuitively translates when I am out in the world.  It might not alleviate my reaction right away, but continued loving awareness of my emotional life always lightens my experience if I commit, however imperfectly, to the practice.  From there I can slowly change, and also meet you for who and how you are today, too.

There is no such thing as not having feelings, there’s only the outdated belief that they are a sign of weakness or ought to be denied.  We can gently change this, though, by starting to love within.

Photo courtesy of Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/51282757@N05/4924261093/sizes/z/in/photostream/