Your Relationship with Yourself

Dawna Markova said "Befriending myself seems to be about opening my heart as a homeless shelter for all the destitute and prostituted aspects of my being that I have been running from for years without even knowing that that's what I have been doing."

Perhaps what requires the greatest courage is the courage to choose to believe that you are loved--loved as you are... loved despite your feeling unlovable... loved by and through the basic goodness of life which is a reflection of a higher power whose grace you can't begin to comprehend. The experience of recognizing that you are truly loved as you are is comparable to the excitement a man feels in Christ's parable about the kingdom of God. In the parable, a man finds a buried treasure in a field and is ready to sell all that he has in order to buy the field because he knows he has found something so much more valuable.

Dawna Markova, in her book about her struggle with breast cancer that came out of her remarkable poem "I will not die and unlived life", said that she will not be afraid to live. She quoted Brother David Steindl-Rast as saying" The antidote to exhaustion may not be rest. It may be wholeheartedness." This is described sometimes in therapy as having drive activity freed up. It is as though the energy you spent trying not to know something is now available for doing something else-for being alive.