Do You Need to Cherish Yourself?

Last year I was gifted an affirmation bracelet and was asked to select what it said. There were lots of great choices, but the one that struck a chord with me was “I Am Cherished”. I’d like to say right upfront, it was not because I felt that way; it was because I innately felt like this was something I wanted to learn how to feel.

Since I’m a person who doesn’t wear jewellery, I’ll admit it’s been packed away with all my sentimental things and so that affirmation has sat ignored. However, this week I’ve been doing some really interesting work on my life purpose and it’s surfaced again.

The work I was doing was based on the premise that in order for us to fully experience whatever our core intention was for coming into this life we must first experience its opposite. This resonates with me, ever since I was a child I have realised that I can’t really appreciate the good in life without having had bad experiences.

Further, since what we experience in this world is largely through our closest relationships, I was asked to look back on all the significant relationships I’d had in my life and tune into how they felt each time they had turned sour. I didn’t really need a facilitator to point out the commonality, I have long since recognised that the faces, names and circumstances might change, but life keeps presenting the same lessons until we learn them.

What I realised as I sat with each of these scenes in my head, was how abandoned I felt. It wasn’t that people had left me, though that did happen on occasion, it was more that it felt I became too difficult to deal with and they simply didn’t know what to say or how to be with me. I was an old head on young shoulders and, nowhere more so than in those intimate relationships, I would reveal my innermost thoughts about life.

I’ve always felt that no one really understood me. Things that seem so obvious to me – like the premises I’ve outlined above about our core intention and the role of relationships – just can’t be understood by people who are totally identified with the thoughts in their head and the reality around them, they don’t see the innate link between cause and effect.

As is normal in our society, conforming often feels safer than expressing who we truly are. Since I felt my ideas didn’t really conform to the norm, I had grown up expecting that the safest place to express who I truly was would be within my intimate relationships. Consequently, as these relationships broke down, the core feeling that kept repeating was of my needs and my thoughts being rejected and me being abandoned.

Beyond those relationships it was easy to reflect on how common and pervasive these feelings still are in many areas of my life. For example, if I’ve shared an innermost thought with a good friend and they don’t respond, that familiar feeling crops up, or if I express my ideas and expectations to an organisation and get a template response or no response, it all feels like I’m just too hard to deal with, they don’t have the words for things that just seem so obvious to me.

So over the years I had abandoned myself, retreated within, so much so I had no idea who I even was, it just felt that the inside and outside were not a match. I was careful about who I spoke to what about, all the while finding the shallow and irrational (to me) conversations dissatisfying and soul destroying.

Until four years ago that was pretty much my life’s story. Though, since you are now reading my innermost thoughts you can see I did make dramatic changes. I stopped denying myself at that point and decided to just go ahead and publish what I wanted to say into the wider world and see what happened.

Guess what? The walls didn’t fall in, nothing terrible happened, in fact, I’ve had some great feedback and helped quite a few people over that time. There are still those in my life that think I’m nuts, but those that matter haven’t stopped loving me as a result. That, however, doesn’t mean I feel cherished.

Nor can I ever feel that way unless I start to cherish myself. That is the bit that needs work.

It took a while to land on the words to feel cherished as my core intention for this life. For someone who has felt like my needs and thoughts have been rejected, abandoned and stonewalled all my life, getting into a place where I can believe these can be cherished almost seems out of reach.

However, I can quite clearly appreciate the logic. In order to fully experience feeling cherished, and in order to help others feel cherished, I had to firstly have an opposite and fully immersed experience of not feeling that way. So I decided I need to go deeper and do some healing work.

Up until this point in my life, I haven’t really taken many steps in the direction of healing past simply becoming aware of how many of my thoughts and beliefs have affected my life experiences. However, I have noticed that the echoes of their related feelings are still stuck in my body. I can’t change the things I have experienced, but I can change my perspective of them, and thus how I feel about them.

The principle behind this healing is to go back to the time when I first experienced the feelings that have become so familiar, feeling abandoned, and to look at the whole scene through fresh eyes. Honestly this wasn’t an easy exercise. I was thinking I’d land back in the hospital waiting room, alone at age three, while my dad was taken to see my mum and new baby brother; young children were not allowed inside the ward in those days.

Instead, in my self induced meditative state, where I’d set an intention to go back to the first experience of feeling that way, I found myself in the womb experiencing what I assume the fetal version of me experienced many years ago.

My heart kept dropping into my stomach as I was absorbing waves of panic. This was not labour, I got the sense it was likely mum panicking about my survival after a previous loss she’d had. The feeling was suffocating and it made me withdraw inside, and go completely still and quiet.

I just kept getting wave after wave and, by the time I felt it lessening, I was practically in the fetal position on the chair I’d chosen to sit in during my meditation. I got the sense that fetal me felt that if I could just absorb these waves of panic, it would help create calm around me. I had shut off and retreated inwards, feeling alone and just focused on survival.

Of course, as an adult now observing this, there was a compulsion to want to sooth fetal me. I was wondering what would have helped in that situation. I felt myself fending off outside help, instead drawing in light with each heartbeat, filling up from the inside – it pumped me up like a balloon; so much so that adult me was now sitting up in the chair again. The calm and peace was a relief. I was still aware of the waves of panic, but I was no longer absorbing them.

Instead it felt like I was anchored inside, calling on my inner resources to fill me up and deflect (rather than absorb) what was coming at me. As I I felt that sense of calm and peace within I realized that would have radiated out towards mum and eased her panic. It changed the feeling of the whole scene. By absorbing the panic previously, going quiet and still, it would have further perpetuated her panic. However, when what is being reflected back is calm and peace, it would have calmed things down a whole lot quicker.

In my primitive and relatively helpless form all those years ago, I had inadvertently cut myself off from the source of my own power by absorbing someone else’s energy rather than reflecting it back to them. This is something I’ve learned how to do recently, as I wrote about in Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling.

By sensing this scene, in what is not even a conscious memory, and by changing the feeling at the root, it changes the way I feel about the things that have happened in my life that led to me feeling abandoned; they each take on a new light. This means that I am less likely to attract situations in which I feel abandoned, because I now no longer abandon myself.

In fact, as I experienced breathing in light, I felt that I was breathing in the very essence of who I am. In that moment, I remembered just how cherished we all are, and how cherished this experience called life is. I didn’t mentally note any of it, I just felt it.

To cherish is defined as protecting and caring for someone or something lovingly. As I wrote in Embrace Your Sensitivity Rather than Have to Protect Yourself from the World, protection isn’t a word that conjures the right images for me. Instead I see it as operating from a strong centre core, the inner knowing and honouring of my true self rather than defense or armor.

But fundamentally, what I take from my experience is the complete contrast between absorbing someone’s negative energy and then amplifying it back to them, a highly toxic feeling, versus the negative energy instead being deflected in the process of cherishing myself; this allows the possibility for love to reverberate instead.

To feel cherished, you first have to cherish yourself. Your thoughts, your feelings, your creative expression are all important, vital to your life experience and to the broader evolution of life here on Earth. Is it time for you to care for yourself as lovingly as you care for others?

If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog