What a powerful statement within a really powerful piece. I think and teach about this ratio a whole lot. Sometimes it seems to me to be an interesting way to gauge how I’m doing when I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what I’m experiencing emotionally (that happens more often than I wish it did). And at times, I use the ratio of Happiness:Self-Love to gauge where I am not paying attention to what or how I am Be-ing.
For most of my life I have followed this way of looking at it- though recently I turned it on it’s head and took a long hard look at how beneficial regret can also be- when we invite it in thoughtfully.
It scared me to invite regret to this extent. All my life the “common knowledge” was not to dwell on the past and certainly having many regrets didn’t bode well for a happy life…. And I found it that was 100% wrong thinking!
Allowing myself permission to feel (and thus process) all the regrets I’ve built up over 54 years of living was freeing. Surprisingly so. I got to a place where regret was replaced by truly experienced grief and that led to grief passing through me like the water that runs down a stream and out into the ocean. The ocean is hope.
All of this to say that this week, for only a few narrowly apparent reasons, depression has played hide and seek with me. Reading your post on Happiness:Self-Love reminded me to get back to what I know about loving my Self.
The basics that work for me to increase Happiness incrementally each day, and for me incrementally is the only way I succeed, are things like sitting for at least 10-min meditating each morning. Some days I sip tea while I follow my breath, other days I cry my heart and pain out and then have to laugh at the gigantic pile of tissues at the end of my practice. I walk my dog, sometimes near…… other times far.
I try to go somewhere different everyday so that I literally change my perspective. Recently I found a group of people who gather to sing. It’s ad hoc and messy and fun and easy and it always leaves me feeling more connected no matter how disconnectedly I started out that day.
What you say also about “owning the label”- Yes! Yes! Yes! And that’s a whole other topic but to be brief in responding here… when we own the “labels” other lay on us, we allow a certain vulnerability to increase. We allow ourselves to be seen both as the truth of who we know we are and who others may see us as, and THAT, is where we expand our understanding and compassion of how we also see all those other people.
There’s a quote someone told me once… “Your idea of me is none of my business”. I love this statement because it’s really about someone not owning whomsoever they might be. I’ve noticed that when someone tells me, “you are so…”, or “Hey Amy, you are being…” What they are really telling me is to notice that same thing about them. It has become a useful tool for opening up all the scared and vulnerable places that allow connection for us to others while we are desperate trying to hide those same softer areas from the bigger world.
