Learning to Love Myself. My Inner Being.

Learning to love ME.

Not so easy when you grow up in a culture that persuades you to forget/deny yourself and give everything you’ve got to “the Lord” and the church. I’ve written many times about my experiences in growing up in the Christian church and dogma. I can’t help but write today with a twist on that large part of my life that now is my past, but still haunts me.  I’m not saying it’s a negative haunting. It’s an old perspective that I am weeding through to find my inner truth.

What I have gradually discovered over the past 9 years after leaving the church, is that TRUTH lies within myself. I don’t need to look outside myself for truth. For all you Christians reading this, this will sound like blasphemy and maybe that Jill has gone off the deep end, but honestly, I’m not writing for you. I’m writing for those that understand what I am talking about.

Since I was 5 years old I learned how to not pay attention to my inner being, my spirit. It was taught that I was being selfish if I actually paid attention to my intuition and the still small voice talking within me. I was continually pointed to trust in Jesus.  Which is weird in some way…now at 43 years old, I’m like “I have this whole inner being and spirit inside me, why would I always be deferring to a man who walked the earth and people claimed to be the Son of God?”

Anyway, I could write for days about the dogma in the church that I learned and am still trying to unravel and question, but surely you will see it interwoven in my blog posts. Because it’s my journey.

What I really want to say is that for the first time in my 43 years alive as a physical form, I am going in and pursuing knowing this person that I am. I want to love and express this person fully. Not for others, but for me. Not for others approval, but for the satisfaction of my soul. Because I know that if I can spend the time and energy on knowing this person, Jill, then I will be able to authentically BE the person I chose to come to be in this physical form on this earth.  Yes, I believe we all chose to come here from non-physical to physical form for a reason.

Learning to love me is a daily practice. It’s getting up early and spending time meditating. Breathing. Paying attention. All of us has an inner being. That voice that is always talking. But do we resist or do we pay attention and follow?

Loving me means, spending time journaling about the negative self-talk that I have grown accustomed to. A meditation that I was listening to this morning noted, “Once a thought is repeated enough times, it gets moved into the subconscious mind where we then don’t even see it, but it’s driving our experience.” Denying myself was repeated so often growing up in the church that I realized it was driving my life.

Well, no longer.

I am in the driver’s seat now of loving me. I’m ready. I’m up for that task.  I am loving who I came here to BE. I want to know ME.