When I first
heard that Whitney Houston died, the song “Greatest Love of All” immediately
came to mind. I decided to listen to it, and it was haunting, and
uncomfortable. Listening to the words, after her death, felt like something
terribly exposing, painfully vulnerable and, somewhat damning.
“The greatest love of all is happening to me, I found
the greatest love of all inside of me, the greatest love of all is easy to
achieve, learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.” So here we
are, reviewing the headline, the last line of her story- “Whitney Houston's
life of glorious song and unnerving self-destruction apparently ended in a
bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel…” reads the first line of the story in
Huffington Post that announces her death. It continues, “There were no
indications of foul play and no obvious signs of trauma on Houston's body, but
officials were not ruling out any causes of death until they have toxicology
results.” And as I read, pieces of her song play in my head, in between
the sentences, in between the phrases:
I read, “unnerving self-destruction”
And I hear, “I found the greatest love of all inside of me”
I read, “toxicology results”
And I hear, “learning to love yourself- it is the greatest
love of all.”
And I am struggling to make sense of this. I am struggling
to consider these phrases side by side. I am struggling to understand how the
woman who belted out hymns to her own awakening to self love seems to have died
for lack of it.
Without self love, we cannot survive. And as it turns
out, this “greatest love of all,” isn’t “easy to achieve” at all. It wasn’t easy for her, and it’s not for me
either.
This is not a sermon mapping out an effortless route to self
love, and it is certainly not a written celebration of my coming into this
“greatest love of all.” This is a conversation between my self-love and my
self-hate.
Many of you know about my recent commitment to weight loss
which involved a kind of emotional excavation of my associations with food and
a real confrontation with my feelings about my own self worth. The conversation
between my self love and self hate has been on-going in my mind. And lately,
(and I hope you will honor my vulnerability), self hate is winning. But I am
lucky enough to be able to witness this, and have compassion for it. I listen
in to my inner conversation and I hear the arguments against my worth that my
self-hatred makes, and the arguments are compelling.
And no matter who you are, I truly believe we all carry a
somehow sacred kernel of self hate. Why or from where, I do not know, but I
firmly believe no one was born without it. It is the closest thing I can
imagine to our being born with “original sin,” the original sin, or ingrained
missed mark, is that we are born with a little itch to hate the unquestionable
beauty of what we are. And somehow, this little endless, subtle irritation
needs to live, side by side, without disturbing it’s equal and opposite part of
self love, which (I pray) is equally ingrained.
A seed for everything lies beneath the fertile soil of our
spirit. There are little roots everywhere and things coming to the surface
every day; new things, old things, new old things, every day. Today, self
hate. And somehow, I need to make space for it, somehow it has a place in the
sacred earth of my body; it must, because it’s there.
For me, my relationship to food represents my yearning to
connect to life in a way that feels safe. Eating feels safe. It
feels like a safe way of receiving love, and offering food feels like a safe
way of giving love. When food is involved I feel alive, and supported, and
nurtured and unchallenged. I eat to feel full, full of life energy, full
of love. And I eat to not feel empty. I don’t want to experience
the feeling of emptiness, or “not-enough-ness,” which feels like disconnection,
or aloneness. And sometimes I eat so much to ensure that I don’t come
anywhere close to those latter feelings. Sometimes, I binge, or, to be
optimistic, in the past, I have binged, even to the point of feeling pain, and
becoming ill.
The cruelly paradoxical thing about it is that, the
avoidance of the feelings actually makes you feel them, worse. So my active
avoidance of feeling empty and alone, ultimately leaves me feeling overfull,
physically uncomfortable, sometimes ill, and, you guessed it, spiritually empty
and alone. And so it goes. In an effort to not feel certain feelings, I
repeat the same pattern and end up feeling the feelings, on and on, without
ever just facing and allowing the full feelings to come and resolve themselves.
I’ve spent years fighting feelings and feeling them painfully and endlessly as
a result.
I stand and witness. Sometimes you have to play out a
pattern for years before you are ready to be done with it. I witness myself
making the same choices, and I wait and hope I am getting closer to making a different
choice. I hope that each time I make the old choice and feel the same resulting
negative experience that I am moving a step closer to being done with it. A
step closer to feeling willing to feel and really face every emotional seed
that grows, even and especially the less pleasant seeds; the feelings of
connection, along with the feelings of disconnection, the feelings of fullness
along with the feelings of emptiness, the feelings of abundance and of lack,
and the feelings of self love and the impulses to nurture, along with the
feeling of self hate and the impulses to self punish.
The experience of life isn’t just about the bright side of
things, we can’t reasonably expect to live feeling wholly connected and perfect
all of the time. But that seems to be my commitment. I have found that as I
constrain and try to block out so called negative feelings that I become numb
to all feelings. I become numb to the experience of living, I become numb to
life itself.
I want to believe that I don’t have to hold my breath and
brace myself against the experiences of life that might make me feel something
unpleasant. I want to believe I will survive the unpleasant feeling. I want to
trust that feelings are just feelings that will come and go and I will still be
here, to watch them going. I want the courage to feel more, because I want to
feel more alive. The experience of life is the movement of feelings. To live is
to feel.
Until I have the
courage to trust in life, and the harmlessness of feelings, I eat, to feel
positive feelings, and not to feel negative feelings, I eat to control what I
feel, and some days I eat A LOT.
I have watched myself make self punishing choices, like the
choice to overeat to pain and illness, then I hear myself judging myself for
it. I keep hearing myself tell myself that my expanded belly makes me
unlovable, that my lifelong fatness is incurable and that this skinny stint
won’t last because at my very core, I am broken and wrong. So I eat until everything is gone, I eat to
make it all go away, the feelings that lead to the overeating, the food and my
shame at having eaten it, but the feelings aren’t gone, and there I am, alone,
and so full of shame I wish I could just disappear.
Watching myself eat and eat, and listening to that
self-hating voice say its unloving things, feels so scary. It feels so dramatic and overwhelming like
the place that holds all of my self destructive impulses has been opened and
the impulses have been awakened and unleashed, and my soft, gentle sacred spirit
is being threatened and there is no where to hide because it all lives within
the same skin. The reality is less dramatic. I, Carolyn DeVito, am
actually just eating a rather large pile of baked goods and experiencing and
trying not to experience emotions that I am uncomfortable with, and I am
scared, but there is no real danger, I sit here, safely, face covered in
powdered sugar, and feel aware of feelings. I am safe, it is just feelings.
But am I really safe? Is it really safe to allow feelings of
unworthiness, not good enough-ness, self hate, all the things I am eating to
avoid. Is it really safe for them to be there, to be a part of me, and can I
actually stop fighting against them? I don’t know and I am afraid, I am afraid
that feelings of self hate, or self doubt, or worthlessness ultimately led one
to be found unresponsive in a tepid bathtub in a Beverly Hills Hotel, as others
recall your songs about self love which evidently eluded you, despite it’s
being “so easy to achieve.” These feelings are scary ones, ones at the
root of self destruction. But I truly believe it is not feeling them, but
the avoidance of feeling them, that leads to these kinds of tragedy.
If some substance was taken, as has been suggested, I
speculate that the substance, like the food I administer to myself, is taken in
an effort to not feel certain feelings and to amplify other feelings. And
the more we do to not feel, the more substance we take to numb out, the more
cut off from life we get. Life is feeling. Life is experiencing.
Life is not about clamping down and controlling what seeds grow and which must
be actively and violently uprooted from one’s own spirit. It is about
letting everything grow, witnessing, watching, feeling, letting it all be, not being
in control, but being in charge of what shows up and meeting it, the way the
sun meets us every morning. The way it beams down on the dark earth. And the way the rain moistens the earth and
nourishes whatever grows. Life speaks growing. Life speaks changing
and movement. Our feelings are us, changing, and moving in the moment. To
try to stop the flow of life through us, to stop it from changing or moving us,
would mean that we block life out, we cut off, we numb out. And numbing out,
blocking life out, is the beginning of death.
We connect to life and feel and experience living to the
degree that we trust in life, to the degree that we trust that we will be safe
through the feelings, through the experience. Feelings are just feelings,
feeling them won’t hurt you. Not feeling them, actively distancing
yourself from them is actively distancing yourself from life itself. Life is
feeling. Life is experiencing. To feel is to live. To actively not feel is to
be in some state of not living. So it seems we are called to ultimately be open
to whatever grows, whatever arises, and to feel firm in the knowledge that it
is safe, you are not in danger.
So here we are, little precious bundles of feelings like
self hate, aloneness, disconnection, lack, and emptiness. And somehow, letting
ourselves feel all of this is living and allowing ourselves to live is, of
course, self loving. Somehow, letting myself feel self hate connects me
more to life and is a form of self love.
Acceptance, even and especially, of the parts and feelings
we don’t like, is self-love. Self-love
is us letting us be us. Broken or whole, ugly or beautiful, skinny or fat,
enough or not enough, capable or incapable, we need to be loved, as we are;
whatever we are, in this moment, with whatever impulses and feelings we hold,
in this moment.
And having compassion when we are unable to feel self-love,
is also self loving. I can have compassion when my soft spirit needs to fill my
aching body with still more food, because I am still afraid of feeling, still
distrusting of life. I can love myself, even as I hurt myself, even as I hate
myself. I can make a safe loving place in my heart for me to feel self hate,
and have compassion for my self-hatred.
And sometimes, I can’t.
Sometimes, it is just self-hate and shame piled high and that is ok too.
There is no requirement to get “there.” There is no requirement to meet
the “ideal” and be wells of self love and compassion right now, and feel
everything, now, and open to life completely, right now. No. It is about
being where you are. No matter where you are, it is ok. No matter what you are
feeling, it is ok. You are safe to feel it, and it is ok if you are too afraid
to feel it.
Self love is allowing. Self love is about giving yourself
slack, and just letting you be you, however you are in this moment. Self
love is the trust that no matter what grows in you, it is sacred, it is good,
it is lovable.
You are perfectly lovable exactly as you are.
I just wanted you to know.
