The Puzzling Duality of Self-Love

We are perfect as we are, and we need to grow.

This sentence came to me a few years ago, and it has since been a tremendous teacher of self-love.

I am perfect as I am, and so are you. Still, that is not the whole truth. If we accept our perfection, we find an excuse to stay just as we are, in our comfort zone.

We are here to grow, to expand, to love more, to create more, to heal our wounds so get to live better, to shape our reality, and transform this world into a much more joyful, beautiful, connected kingdom. Yet, if that is all we tell ourselves, it is easy to get caught up in constant busyness, to never be satisfied, to feel we are not enough, and to keep chasing more and more without appreciating life.

Self-love is not all-accepting, bowing our heads to everything, and endlessly cutting ourselves slack. To keep ourselves small is not in self-love’s best interest. Love is not ok with being stepped on. Love wants to nourish us, so we expand. Love wants to grow, for that is the nature of life: forever creating more life. 

The universe is a living organism and it is always expanding. Life feeds on life, life creates more life, life grows — and so does love. 

We are perfect as we are, and we need to grow. Only one of these is a half-truth. The truth requires both sides of the equation.

Our reality is duality, and duality is to be integrated, not polarized. Life is not black or white. It is black and white, and all shades of gray in between.

The human mind in need of control, in need of grasping what is much bigger than itself, does what it can to reduce it. To simplify it. The human inside of us wants to waste as little energy as possible — and so we don’t want the trouble of growing. 

“Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.” Alan Watts

To say we did our best and leave it at that is not enough, although it is half true. We are to do better, and to accept what we have done, to move forward continuously expanding. 

Without beating ourselves up, without judgment. That’s love, and this is the key. Love does not judge, love does not create negative self-talk. That said, love is also honest. It looks at what we can do (or could have done) better with compassion, as an assessment for a better future. Love likes constructive feedback for a better now. Love is wide awake.

We are weak and strong at the same time. Big changes excite us and scare us. How many love-hate relationships do we have?

To accept this greatness of being everything at once is to merge with life and the wholeness of our being in our hearts. It invites us to dance in the spectrum, to know when we are more on that side than on this side, and when it is time to take a spin. 

Now, it is tricky to be all those facets at once. The core virtue to develop is discernment. Life is always changing, nothing is stagnant. Meaning each situation is a new situation, asking of us a new way of seeing, a new way of being. So we have a new lesson to learn and keep growing. 

What this duality requires is discernment. 

Instead of simplifying duality with our controlling mind, full of “but’s” we can activate our ability to discern. To see all the “and’s” with our hearts. Discernment requires us to be present, in the here and now, connected to the situation we are living in.

This way we can define where in the spectrum we are to move towards in each situation. When to push more, when accepting is reducing us, limiting our potential of being. To harmonize self-acceptance with growth and expansion.

We are perfect as we are, and we need to grow.

Are you stuck somewhere in the spectrum, or how smooth is your dance?