Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life by Lori Deschene Read Free Book Online Page A

your life, the light within you? This concept was never more evident for me than when I had my son. Whenever my old, familiar, fearful thoughts creep up to tell me that I'm not good enough, that I don't have enough, or that everything is going to fall apart, then I think about him.
    When I look at my son I'm able to clearly see the beauty and the purity of the human soul. He doesn't have to do anything to prove or earn his lovability; I certainly don't look at him and think, “Gee, if he lost a little weight, I'd love him more,” or “When he meets thatfinancial goal, that's when I'll love him.” These thoughts don't even cross my mind when I think of him, so why would it seem logical to say them to myself?
    We all started out in the same place, with a full capacity for love and loving. We weren't born into this world with fears of failure or being emotionally walled off. Children know no limitations until we point them out to them.
    There was once a time in your life when your dreams knew no limitations, when you were free to take risks, and even if you fell down, you were able to get back up. That light is still in you. It doesn't ever go away; fear just overshadows it. Fortunately, fear is a learned response that has built up over time, which means that we can unlearn it!
    When we allow ourselves to realize that the fear isn't real, we get to make a different choice. We can choose to find the love instead—to feed the loving wolf. I know that when I look at my son and I see that loving energy, it is my loving energy reflecting back at me.
    Take a look around. Where do you see your loving reflection shining back at you? What inspires you? Where can you look for a reminder to stay connected to your belief that you deserve a life of love, and that the love and all possibilities are already inside of you? How can you stay present and aware of which wolf you are feeding?
ACCEPTING YOUR BATTLES: WHEN STRUGGLES BRING GIFTS
    by Alison Hummel
    It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens .
    —P EMA C H Ö DR Ö N
    I love acceptance. Acts of surrender create forward momentum. If we all pause for a moment and observe what we are fighting, right here and right now—maybe depression, anxiety, weight gain, low self-image, or financial stress—we have an opportunity to accept. But that's just the start.
    Recently I accepted something I never thought I would, and reframing the way I thought about it changed my life. I have moderate to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Having OCD is basically like believing everything that goes through your mind. Scary, right? Obsessive-compulsive people have intrusive and extremely terrifying thoughts—for example, that he may have been contaminated by something, which might lead him to spend hours washing. I have a base underlying all of my obsessions: that I will hurt people. It is my greatest fear.
    I used to worry that I'd left the oven or iron on and that, in doing so, I may have burned the house down, which would ruin myhusband's life and kill our cat. So I'd return home multiple times per day to check these appliances and also send my husband home to check. I also had massive rituals around shutting appliances off.
    Obsessive-compulsives create rituals to lower the anxiety, which makes OCD a real time suck. I'd check to make sure I didn't leave the iron on, do everything evenly on both sides of my body so I felt “balanced,” retrace events that happened in my life to make absolutely certain I hadn't harmed anyone accidentally, and search the Internet excessively for answers. These rituals literally took up hours of my day.
    I discovered that I had OCD one afternoon when I was trying to figure out how you know something for certain. Try googling that. The first thing that popped up for my search query was about obsessive-compulsive disorder. I felt immediate relief. I leveraged my OCD to my advantage and feverishly