My Accidental Learning About What Self-Love Really Is

It is 6 am and I’m already having a miserable experience of a day.

Usually at 6 am I am lost in the flow of a workout, not even thinking about the day ahead. But on this day I am thinking about it.

The coach of my morning high intensity class is shuffling around music and playing “love songs” in honor of Valentine’s Day.

Do I want to hear Whitney Houston belying out And I Will Always Love You?

No, I do not. Especially not the slow version.

Do we really need hearts on the white board?

I want no part of Valentine’s Day today.

I’m not feeling the love.

The never-ending war with my body, which I’ve been trying to end, seems to have resumed. My ankles are stiff. I can’t sit into my hips. My shoulders feel like they’re going to be ripped off my torso.

I accidentally grated my pinky finger with a cheese grater and it’s throbbing.

I just started Invisalign and woke up with a migraine. The new occupants of my mouth are making me nauseous.

A slow love song is not what I need right now.

I am frustrated. Angry. And in no mood for Whitney Houston, love songs, or Valentine’s Day.

A part of me knows that the anger is making my body tighter, restricting my limited mobility even more.

The one possible bright spot is that my right big toe, which has been healing from an infection, seems to be getting better. As I head to the podiatrist for a check-in, I decide I can forego a bandage on my big toe for the first time in four months.

My glimmer of optimism is quickly laid to rest.

Within an hour, I hobble out of the doctor’s office with band-aids around the big toes of both feet and two throbbing big toes.

I sink into my miserable experience.

Over the course of the day, I listen to multiple meditations on self-love. Each one exhorts me to be kind to myself, to love myself, to have self-compassion.

I want no part of this.

I stay away from social media, from the hearts and love and calls for self-love.

I am having a miserable experience and I kind of want to stay in it. I don’t want to talk to people.

I don’t want to pretend to be all love right now. I don’t want to tell myself how I should be. I don’t want to fight my experience.

I want to stay in my miserable experience. A part of me even wants to spread my misery to everyone. I want others to know what it’s like to feel this physical and emotional pain.

These are not my finest thoughts, I am aware.

I don’t care.

The wise part of me decides to keep my misery mostly to myself as I go about my day. I stay offline. I do my thing.

Somewhere within me, I know that this experience is here to teach me something. I don’t want to brush it away with a pretense of “love and light” and fake spirituality.

I want to listen to it. I want to learn from it.

The migraine rages. Nobody warned me that Invisalign would hurt so much, although I realize I should have expected it.

The sensory experience of a foreign object over my teeth is disruptive.

I can’t focus on my work. I am hungry and nauseous at the same time. My body hurts.

Of course it does, with all this anger coursing through it.

Despite the pain, I’m not placating myself with soothing words of care.

I am just being in my miserable experience of a day. I’m letting it have its moment.

And as I drive to the supermarket, it suddenly hits me:

This is true self-compassion.

Compassion literally means to suffer with.

I am suffering with myself.

I also realized that this is the purest form of self-love:

To truly love someone is to allow them to be as they are, without trying to change them.

This is what I’ve been doing for myself. Being in my experience as it is. Not making it wrong.

It is dusk as I pull the car into the driveway. I see two bright lights in the northern sky.

One is Jupiter. The other is Venus and Neptune. Approaching their conjunction, they appear as one bright evening star.

I pause to take in the planetary spectacle before me, an astrology chart brought to life in the clear evening sky.

I marvel at the beauty of the sky and the irony of finding the real self-love practice on this day.

My stomach growls. My teeth throb. My body hurts.

But something has lifted.

I am no longer in the depths of my miserable experience.