Today is Valentine’s Day, a day inviting us to share gratitude, appreciation, and love with those who delight, love, and support us….and a day to offer ourselves our love, our support, our delight as well. For while we may become masters of tending to others, happiness requires we master tending to ourselves as well.
I am gifted by working with amazing women and men who are not only intelligent, successful and engaged in serving our world, they are committed to living their excellence and elegance as human beings as well. Often my clients will share their amazement at what they are realizing; how with all the education and experiences they have accumulated, how much of what they were taught about relationships and life is just plain wrong! We laugh and then pick up our process of discovering the wisdom, compassion, and strength that lies within them innately, my service of presence being to remind them this is so.
Within us is wisdom and courage which does know our answers to life’s questions, which can bring a healing touch to our anger and pain, and which holds us as our tears fall. And, to learn to hear our soft voice of wisdom through the busy-ness of our days, takes our choice, our commitment, and our compassion for doing so. Insisting we be able to heal generations of patterns of anger and pain in solitude is simply a belief reflecting a lack of compassion and kindness for ourselves, for as humans, we love and evolve with each other.
To love another and to seek love from another, is to invite loving and learning about ourselves. What we seek in an-other…their support, their patience, their strength…we can called to remember lives within ourselves as well. When we learn to love ourselves enough to tend and care for our self as not a luxury but as wisdom and strength, not only do we realize more love in life, we will love more those in our life as well.
In the Orient, the poets of the sacred speak of “The Beloved” as being what our heart longs for and what we search for in our life. When we erroneously insist our Beloved lives only in others, we will find ourselves angered and disappointed by others, believing them lacking. The poetry of Rumi, Tagore, and others reminds us how The Beloved we seek lives within what we call our soul….a soul that needs our tending and conscious relationship for sharing it’s infinite and lovely jewels in our life as humans.