Do this meditation consistently. You will notice the magic that occurs.
One question
It's easy to say "I love myself" while locked inside my apartment, recovering from being sick. Tougher when I'm back to the land of the living, interacting with people who have their own issues and mental loops.
That is where the question came from. In dealing with others and reacting to their negative emotions with my own, I found myself asking this question:
If I loved myself truly and deeply, would I let myself experience this?
The answer, always, was a no.
It worked beautifully. Because I'd been working on the mental loop, the step after "no" was clear. Rather than solving the emotion or trying not to feel it, I would just return to the one true thing in my head, "I love myself, I love myself, I love myself."
This question is deceptively simple in its power. It gently shifts your focus from wherever you are - whether it's anger or pain or fear, any form of darkness - to where you want to be. And that is love. You mind and life have no choice but to follow.
I'm in love
"You're so pretty," I say.
She walks alongside my friend, Gabe, holding his hand. Her dark hair freshly cut, layers. Cool February night in the mission district in San Francisco. We're heading for tacos.
Her smile doesn't change. She doesn't say thank you, the way a woman would to a genuine compliment. Instead, she says, "I'm in love."
We pause to cross the street.
"It's true," she says, "that's why. I'm in love."
She's pretty regardless, but I get what she's talking about. She glows. Non-stop smile. Full of life.
When I get home, before I go inside, I pause and realize something. The love, it doesn't have to necessarily be for another, does it? Love is an emotion, love is a feeling, love is a way of being. That spring in the step, that smile, that openness, can't it simply come from loving ourselves?
That stops me. Of course. Here we are, thinking that one needs to be in love with another to shine, to feel free and shout from the rooftops, but the most important person, the most important relationship we'll ever have is waiting, is craving to be loved truly and deeply.
And here's the interesting part. When we love ourselves, we naturally shine, we are naturally beautiful. And that draws others to us. Before we know it, they're loving us and it's up to us to choose who to share our love with.
Beautiful irony. Fall in love with yourself. Let your love express itself and the world will beat a path to your door to fall in love with you.
Another meditation
This one, I'm a little scared to share. People will think I've lost it. But it is powerful.
Step 1: Set a timer for 5 minutes.
Step 2: Stand in front of a mirror, nose a few inches away. Relax. Breathe.
Step 3: Look into your eyes. Helps if you focus on one. Your left eye. Don't panic, it's only you. Relax. Breathe slowly, naturally, until you develop a rhythm.
Step 4: Looking into your left eye, say, "I love myself." Whether you believe it that moment or not isn't important. What's important is you saying it to yourself, looking into your eyes, where there is no escape from the truth. And ultimately, the truth is loving yourself.
Step 5: Repeat "I love myself" gently, pausing occasionally to watch your eyes.
When the five minutes are up, smile. You've just communicated the truth to yourself in a deep, visceral way. In a way the mind cannot escape.
If anyone ever looked in your eyes, knowing that you loved them, this is what they saw. Give yourself the same gift.
Love and memory
Memory is not set in stone. Any neuroscientist will tell you that. The more you remember something, especially if it's emotionally charged, the more you will reinforce the pathways connecting the neurons. Simply put, the more you think about it, the more you feel it, the stronger the memory.
Here's the interesting part. It's not just the act of recall that strengthens a memory, another factor shapes and even changes it - the state of mind you are in when remembering something.
The implications of this are transformative.
Take a random experience, a relationship that ended years ago. Consciously recall it when you're miserable. You'll naturally find yourself focusing on the negative parts, and those will grow stronger in memory.
Conversely, same exact experience, but recall when you're happy. Notice the change?
It's still the same experience, it's still your mind. But the filter is different. And the filter shifts the focus, which subtly changes the memory. More importantly, it changes how the memory makes you feel, the power it has over you.
There's a solution here, a powerful one.
If a painful memory arises, don't fight it or try to push it away - you're in quicksand. Struggle reinforces pain. Instead, go to love. Love for yourself. Feel it. If you have to fake it, fine. It'll become real eventually. Feel the love for yourself as the memory ebbs and flows. That will take the power away.
And, even more importantly, it will shift the wiring of the memory. Do it again and again. Love. Re-wire. Love. Re-wire. It's your mind. You can do whatever you want.
Change
"It's happening,"
"Yes."
"Really happening."
I nod slowly, grin.
"Unbelievable," she says. "Unbelievable."
Through the window, the Sierras below, mountains of earthy brown. Daybreak ahead. A clear morning. This high up, no human could survive, yet we hurtle forward at hundreds of knots in an aluminum tube, comfy in our chairs, sipping our sodas.
"Are you sca-" She rests her hand gently on my arm. "Nervous?"
I look out for a moment, the land below already flattening, then to her. "Nope."
"I don't know how you can do that. Me, I'm a bucket of nerves."
"But this is magic," I say. "Why be nervous, that's not doing any good."
"I know that," she says. "I do, really. But tell that to my nerves."
"I think," I say, "I think that I'm starting to accept the magic, that life can be this way, that fantastic experiences, things I couldn't imagine within my reach are possible, are happening, will happen. That's what it is."
She smiles, squeezes my arm, then leans into my shoulder. She closes her eyes. I reach down and kiss her head softly, smelling her hair, then return to the window.
Patchwork of browns and greens below. How fast the land's changed. How fast everything changes.
Light switches
Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP, got known early in his career as someone who could cure schizophrenics within hours. He started getting called by doctors and patients' families to go to mental institutions, work with the worst cases, the ones everyone had given up on.
One of his favorite stories is about an executive who started hallucinating snakes. No one could convince him otherwise. He was committed, received treatment, no luck. So, he was strapped to his bed - not very empowering when you believe snakes are crawling all over you - in the mental hospital and chalked off as one of the incurable ones.
By the time Bandler met him, he was in bad shape. To figure out what to do, Bandler went for a walk in town. He needed to snap this guy back to reality. He passed a pet store and noticed a barrel full of rubber snakes on the curb. He went inside, asked the man behind the counter if he could rent the entire barrel for a few hours.