You know "love your neighbour" has a second part to it which is a gauntlet for us today in our society that tells us we are not good enough or deserving enough.
"Love your neighbour as you love yourself".
How are you at loving yourself? It's not something I am very good at. I am getting better at it though. Over the last few years I have spent more time meditating and journaling and I have noticed that my inner monologue is very negative. The way I see it, if I don't learn to love and accept myself how can I really love and accept anyone else?
So I have been working hard for a while now to listen to the stories I am telling myself and to change them if they are negative. I shared a story I heard myself saying over and over recently on a Facebook live session I did.
I'm stuck.
I don't deserve good things.
I'm fat and lazy.
It's too hard.
I can't do it.
I'm rubbish.
It was stopping me from serving others. I've been given a huge gift of a slim, healthy body and vibrant energy. I'm so excited to share the strategy I used to get there with the world so that other busy Mum's can feed their bodies top quality nutrition easily too but that story was stopping me.
Telling myself that negative story was stopping me from loving myself AND stopping me from loving my neighbour because I was hiding. I can't serve other people if I keep myself small and hidden.
So I wrote a new story.
I deserve happiness and success.
I'm slim, healthy and proactive.
I have all the time I need.
I can tap into my intuition to say what needs to be said.
I can handle it.
I'm good at this.
I can do it.
Because that story is true. I can handle it. I can choose to be proactive. Every moment we have a choice of how we react to the situation in front of us. We can choose how we show up in the world. I have that story up in my bathroom to read when ever I go to the toilet and in the kitchen to read while I am making a cup of tea. Repetition is key here. I have probably told myself the negative stuff a thousand times so it is important to hear the positive story repeatedly to help me think differently.
Tony Robbins says to have a breakthrough we need 3 things:
3. A strategy
2. A new story
1. Change our state
The strategy is important but if we don't change our story we will just come up with reasons the strategy didn't work for us. I will talk about changing our state in another blog post as it is a beyond the scope of this blog post.
So the challenge is to 'love your neighbour as you love yourself'. Are you ready to change your story so you can love yourself and others more deeply? Peace begins with each one of us being at peace with ourselves. I'm a work in progress and I have a long way to go but each step is progress.