awakening begins when you stop abandoning yourself

we hear “love yourself” so often that is can start to sound like another cliche.

set better boundaries. say affirmations. stop caring what people think.

all useful things but none of them mean you actually feel at home with yourself.

perhaps falling in love with yourself is much simpler.

it’s the moment you stop treating yourself like a problem that needs fixing. you notice you are tired? you rest. you make a mistake? you learn from it. you realize someone doesn’t understand you, you stop exhausting yourself trying to explain.

you listen to you.

that, to me is where awakening becomes practical.

it isn’t necessarily some huge spiritual experience where the light comes on and you understand the universe.

awakening looks like not abandoning yourself anymore.

it looks like choosing the relationship you have with yourself over the approval of everyone else.

when you aren’t constantly wondering, am I enough? am i doing this right? what do they think of me? you have more room to actually experience life.

and this doesn’t mean everything suddenly feels wonderful.

you still have bad days.

you still get triggered.

you still get angry, afraid and confused.

but you don’t turn against yourself when those thing happen.

you stay.

you become the person who doesn’t leave yourself in difficult moments.

not becoming someone new. not becoming more spiritual.

just coming home to the person that you are.

it’s discovering that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone.

you can simply live life as you are.