by Diantha Harris | March 2018
It’s the month of love, hearts and valentines. The colors that come to mind are red, pink, a touch of green, and in some areas, a bit of purple appears. We express our love to our sweethearts, our dearest friends, and our beloved family members. We don colors associated with love and we search for the perfect card or gift for our own Valentines.
But how many of you think of sending love to yourselves? Personally, I am so terribly guilty of being hard on myself and having such high expectations of myself that I often forget to be kind to me, to be thoughtful of ME, to treat myself as I would any other person I love.
When I was in high school I read Erich Fromm’s book, The Art of Loving. He discussed the many aspects of love including the notion of self love but I was being raised in a family in which we were being taught that loving oneself was conceited, selfish, even unGodly. We were to be humble, to think of everyone else as better than we were, to “not be above yourself”.
Indeed, at the tender age of 8, I had discovered Greek and Roman Mythology and loved reading the stories. Imagine how excited I was to discover my name was a variation of the goddess Diana. Now these were the days when you could go into any drug store or tourist stop and find tons of items with individual’s names on them. I never could find my own name anywhere which caused me to despair that my name was so odd, I must be too. Even worse, maybe I did not have the right to exist. But here in the book of myths was the name Diana and I was so excited I jumped up and down on my bed exclaiming that I was actually a goddess! I was THRILLED~until my Grandmother grabbed my arm, pulled me off that bed and told me in no uncertain terms that I was a sinner for sure, talking like that. That was the end of my goddess identification for about 40 years! And it took me about that long to believe in my worth again.
So back to high school: when I read in Fromm’s book that self love was necessary in order to really love others I thought it was a very radical, even sinful, thought. I was scared to believe in this. I tried to push the thought away, even though it stayed with me and in some very real way I knew it to be true. It was such a struggle to try to rectify the teachings of my parents and grandparents with my own inner knowing.
Which is a long winded way of getting to my point: don’t be late in coming to the conclusion that you are worth loving. God does not create anyone who is not worthy of love. There are people who do bad things, and people who go down the wrong paths, but they are misguided and misled. Their being is still of the Light. They just don’t remember that, and have allowed the Darkness to gain a foothold in their souls. But at their core, they too, like the rest of us, not only come from Love and Light, but still have a spark of that inside.
But I am talking to those of you who, like me, put themselves last over and over to their own detriment. I wish that you could see yourselves as the Light and Beauty that others see in you. One of my own challenges is in being so tuned into a person’s true essence that I forget they also have a personality and that personality may not be at that higher level I can see. I’ve been hurt deeply throughout the years by this inability to discern between a person’s true nature and their earthly veneer. But I would certainly rather that than not being able to see a person’s goodness.
The good news is that with a lot of work, and the support of so many wonderful friends and family, I have come to see my own Light. Not in that conceited way my parents feared, but from a state of gratitude to God for creating me from star dust and LIght and the vibration of Love.
So this Valentine’s day honor your loved ones, but take some time to honor your SELF. You are one of a kind, a unique being, who is loved so deeply. Happy Valentine’s Day to you each day of the year!
by Diantha Harris | February 2017
As I write this month’s newsletter, I find I am in the middle of a miracle. We have all experienced miracle in our lives whether or not we have recognized and/or acknowledged it. Perhaps it is the birth of a child, for others it’s passing a class when we know in our hearts it is a gift that we did pass, for others it might be getting to a loved one’s side just before they transition giving us time to say good bye. For me, today, it is the miracle of accepting, truly accepting, my earthly body just as it is, which is the missing piece for me with the idea of self-love. Self-love, in the midst of this month of love, is finally becoming a reality.
What has shifted? This is not an overnight wonder believe me. I’ve spent at least 65 years searching for a form of self-acceptance, especially acceptance of the body I have been gifted with. My body is sturdy (a nice way of describing a short, stocky physique!), strong, healthy and has taken me all over the globe. It has given us three amazing children, allowed me to enjoy great cuisine, laugh, swim, play with grandchildren, talk and share with friends. It is this wonderful, amazing body that has allowed me to experience this life with you, and that has carried me many a mile along the path of life.
I have just taken an amazing course with Pippa Merivale (www.metatronic-life.com) who works with the energies of Metatron. In this course, Physical Vitality, I became keenly aware of the miracle of the body. Each system is so precise, so wonderfully perfect in its functioning. Yes, we each have our physical challenges. Maybe our ears don’t hear well enough, or our eyes don’t see well, and for some of us we have great challenges such as auto-immune diseases, mental challenges, and other debilitating issues.
But the body, as it is designed to be when all is working as it should, is brilliant in its design and function. Wow. Think of it. Think of all the things our bodies do for us: our hearts beat without our thinking of it. Our livers and kidneys, pancreas and reproductive systems, nervous and digestive systems, endocrine system and brain, …all go about their business 24/7 without a vacation, a break, or a rest.
In the class I took with Pippa, (Physical Vitality) she examined our body’s systems and created a meditation of sorts that explained how complex and miraculous each system is. I particularly loved her description of the digestive system when she explained that light is absorbed by our foods and then we eat the foods, effectively ingesting the light! Imagine, then, the light flowing from our foods into our cells and blood, into our organs, the brain, and throughout the entire physical container that we are. Isn’t that just a miracle? We eat light and it then spreads throughout us. It takes my breath away to imagine that.
This Valentine’s Day I will be celebrating a new love: my body. I have ignored it, abused it, hated it, yelled at it, despaired of it, cried over it, said hateful things to it and hidden from it. And it has been nothing but loyal to me. It has served me for 70 years. It has never asked anything more than that I consider treating it as well as I can.
So now when I exercise and when I eat consciously, both of which I have been doing for a long, long time, I will do them with more love, more awareness, more prayerful thought. I will tune into my body more, honor it more, and listen to its needs. My head will not be separate anymore from the rest of me. I will be incorporated into one, into one amazing miracle.
How about you? Are you loving your self, your body, you as much as you can? This is what I wish for you on this day of love: that you look in the mirror and say truthfully, “I love you.”
“The Universe is not outside of you. Look inside of yourself, everything that you want you already are.” Rumi
“It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.” Voltaire
“I think the most important thing in life is self-love, because if you don’t have respect for everything about your own body, your own soul, your own capsule, then how can you have an authentic relationship with anyone else?” Shailene Woodley
