Honesty with Self is a Loving Act

From our Sanctuary Forest Garden

The willingness to look at self honestly is a life-long process.
It first begins with taking the first step, the courage to look within and turn inward.

The choice we make from the place of loving self creates a ripple effect on our life
 
Not many people I know or meet in professional fields, social life or even strangers I chanced upon are genuinely authentic, graced with honesty and humility, are congruence inside out. It is often I observe that they have the courage to look within themselves and in the process, grow and transform where the layers of conditioned belief systems are no longer the wall or shield hindering their lives and truly shine the true self inside out. Very few are also consciously aware of his or her own projections onto others.

Our friend, I call him A here, whom I wrote about before has muscles disease. Over the years, we witness him deteriorating year by year. However, this visit actually takes us my surprise. He looks so much better than the last time he came for the burial ceremony of Jeroen's dad, my father-in-law.

Every visit we always exchange, receive and give mutually and return home full of insightful wisdom for each other.

This is what I want to share with you through witnessing his life. He is someone whom I see the act of loving self actually help him especially his health condition.
 
A, J and I love our work. We have great passion for what we do.
And we always give our all in what we do including our professional work. A new insight dawns on me right away as I conversed with J in the morning about our friend, A and the visit.
 
Here it is.
 
Yes, we may love our work very much but we cannot deny the fact that there are deadlines, pressure, stress, conflicts… we have to deal with in the work culture. Many times we are serving others whether it is freelance or contract or permanent position. A lives a very rich life and often very busy too with social and so forth.
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It is very different when we do what we love for self – own Me time outside of work and social life – resting, real Me time for self.

As A’s health is growing worse and his energy drops, he re-evaluates his life and decided to work less, have more time for himself to rest and doing things that he loves and enjoys. That commitment to self and giving more space to self, alters his life. He feels so much better and he looks really good.

In this case, he learns to strike a balance between work, social life and self. That impacts his overall health too. Other than that, I also witnessed that he is very honest towards himself. I never hear him complain, wallowing in self-pity, making excuse, being defensive,  justifying himself  or denying over the years I have known him. He has a very great sense of humour, able to laugh at and about life, lessons he learnt from life and very honest about himself.

Through this visit, I also witness the natural healing in him – the choice of reducing work and having more time for self, an act of loving self – naturally also led him to declutter and able to let go of things that he loves.  It just flows and comes naturally for him ever since the day he made a choice and commitment to be more loving to himself. What I wrote here is from my witnessing of him through his sharing about himself.  Jeroen also sees it too.

We talked a lot about other areas too. About education, nature, life, philosophy, history, books and more…

Personally, those who have known me and read about my journey will relate to what I am writing. This time I wrote from another person’s life. What I went through I also see it in him. He is our personal friend, not my client. We talked about Jung, and the archetype. We did not go into details but we get it. I am so delighted always to witness someone I personally know grow and transform in his or her life. Thus, I can share it with you. It does not come from my personal journey nor is of my clients, but of a personal friend whom I have known for 13 years, walk his own journey through deep search of meaning about his own life and the natural healing just flows when his heart is always open to see the truth in himself. There are many lessons in his life teaching about life per se and always the courage to look at himself honestly from a loving place.

* Our friend pens his thoughts on a blog - https://scouter.nl/author/almer-regter/ *