I don’t happen to believe that you can’t love anyone else until you love yourself. I believe that you can’t love yourself if you haven’t been loved by someone else.
Of course, I also believe that we are all Gaia, and Gaia is loving us all every minute of our lives. We are always being loved. We just have to figure out how to open the door to the knowing of it. That we are love, really.
So to start opening the door, we have to get on our own side.
Which brings me to Internal Family Systems, developed by Dick Schwartz.
IFS has, at its premise, the idea that healing is about welcoming all parts of yourself unconditionally into the light and love of your big S self, otherwise known as the divine within.
Wide, wild, welcome. Maybe other people don’t sit in a room alone and crack themselves up like I do. It’s a possibility. I just find the parts of myself so…fascinating. Cool. Broken. Joyful. Young. Old. So I’m all about, Well, hello! What do you have to say today?
Listening. To all parts. The parts that are needy, whiney and perpetually young. The parts that are cold, disconnected and angry. The parts that some people might call my shadow. The ambitious, the confident, the skeptical, the critical, the self-castigating. The petty, the judgy, the wildly joyful, the impetuous. Unconditional welcome, extended unconditionally, from my spiritual center, which is being.