“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~Rumi
February is the month of love. Being single, however, and not having a valentine to buy a gift for,
I have decided to buy myself a gift. Nice, right? Just wait till you see what I’m buying myself for my birthday!
My divorce was final two years ago. After living with someone for more than 18 years, it took me some time to get to know myself again. For so long I made decisions based on other people’s wants, needs, and preferences.
I took that first year to get to know myself again. I asked myself, “what do I like to eat? What activities am I interested in. What time do I really want to go to bed? What music do I find enjoyable?” And then I took it a step further and learned how to love myself again, or maybe, for the first time in my life.
In her powerful book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown writes, “how much we know and understand ourselves is critically important, but there is something even more essential to living a wholehearted life: loving ourselves.” She goes on to say that “love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.”
