Today I’d like to share this poem with you; for me it captures the difficulty of loving another before you learn to love yourself.

lean into the loving

my primary landscape
needs healing
crevasses and couloirs
reaching into spring
an initiation
way before this took root in me
the past unfreezing
echoing inside my present

theft continues but i gave it away
keep walking
and cleanse
watch for what needs to grow

i come from the canyon
left in the loss of the past
this primal concept
of giving and receivingis ancestral
i took on his loss
by osmosis thru them
and the chasm was born right there
family legacy
picked up and carried forward

primary heartbreak is no longer
my marriage ending
it is only the breakthrough
to what i have been longing for

what we can’t deal with
consciously
we deal with
unconsciously 

you need a downstroke to ground
she said
if i was as powerful as you
i’d pay someone to stand on my chest too
this is the way that he loved me
containing me
restraining me
until i felt my own force

i brought myself here
i placed him there
had you ever believed you were enough
you would have left
i let him hold me until i knew freedom

my turn around is to know
i no longer need an empty well
to fill
reality is a rushing waterfall
a surge of relief invoking the truth
i can only know what i know
when i know it
i am the other half of this chaos
but still
you didn’t break his heart
it was already broken 

restrain relax surrender release
relieving myself from restriction
i now lean into the loving

Loving another begins with loving yourself. If you are living in reaction to someone else, abandoning yourself for the sake of another, it’s time to disarm your self-sabotage, find the keys to your own non-negotiables and priorities, and know that only you can give yourself the love you most desire.

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