Authors: David Hamilton
I Heart Me (2 page)
Do the Loving-Kindness Meditation
A Process for Forgiving Others
Your Wants and Needs⦠continued
Self-love is something very close to my own heart. In fact, you could say that self-love saved my life.
I had a Near Death Experience (NDE) in 2006. I had been very sick with cancer â it was stage 4 lymphoma, and had spread throughout my body and had metastasized. I had tumors, many of them the size of lemons, from the base of my skull, all around my neck, under my arms, my breasts, and in my abdomen. My body stopped absorbing nourishment and went into catabolisys. My lungs were perpetually filled with fluid that needed to be drained regularly, and I was connected to piped oxygen.
Then on February 2nd, 2006, I fell into a deep coma. The doctors told my family that my body had gone into organ failure and that I was now in my final hours of life.
But while my body was close to death, I was very much alive. I felt myself as separate from my body, and I felt incredible! My family were gathered all around my weak and dying physical body, and had no idea that I could see them all. At one point I felt myself expand, so much in fact that I felt myself to be the whole universe as a state of consciousness. Among many things
I felt and understood during this experience, one thing was immediately relevant to my life.
I understood that cancer in my body was a manifestation of my own energy that had turned inwards on itself. This is not to say that such a thing is true for anybody else as we are all unique in our own ways. But I had very little self-love. I had lived most of my life on other people's terms. I was not living as my true authentic self.
I understood that if I chose to love myself, uninhibited, unreservedly, to express my authentic self from that moment onwards, then I would recover from cancer. I also understood that self-love was the most important thing that we humans need to learn and that, sadly, most people simply don't know how.
This is one of the reasons why I love this book by David Hamilton. He decided to tackle the subject after a conversation we shared, along with my husband Danny, a few years ago. In this book he is open about his own self-love journey and honest about the many times when he seemed to be lacking in it. He has shared some of his personal struggles and I am certain that many readers will be able to relate to them because all of us are, after all, human and we share in many of the same kinds of difficulties that grow out of a lack of self-love.
David has approached the subject in multiple ways, thereby offering something to just about anyone who struggles with their self-esteem. Being a former scientist, he brings a brand new approach to self-love that breakthroughs in neuroscience have made possible. He shows how self-love can be wired into the
brain and he shares some science in the simplest possible way on how we can actually achieve this for ourselves.
We also learn that we are not born devoid of self-love. In fact, babies and young children exude it. A self-love deficit, as David sometimes refers to the feeling of low self-love, is something we learn through life. And as David points out, learning distils down to the formation of brain connections so this also means that a lack of self-love can actually be unlearned, and a healthy sense of self-love learned in its place and laid down into the brain's neural architecture.
He also discusses the importance of being authentic and letting our guard down, having the courage to show our vulnerabilities, and he even teaches us how we can develop resilience to shame, which many people struggle with. In one chapter, we can even learn how to be more gentle and compassionate towards ourselves.
Towards the end of the book, I like that David describes, scientifically, how we are made of love, that we are all indeed beings of light, and shares the most remarkable personal story that he calls the âDove Miracle' that happened through this insightful blend of science and spirit. As beings of light, he encourages us to step up, be our authentic selves, and own our worth.
What makes this such an authentic book on self-love is that David has lived through a self-love deficit himself for most of his life. As he writes in the Introduction, it took him much longer to write it than he expected and this is because he had to learn how to love himself first.
He speaks from experience and I am sure you will be able to learn from his experience and gain from his insights, wisdom, and encouragement and from many of the exercises within the book.
I hope you come to love and appreciate David's important work as much as I have!
Anita Moorjani
New York Times
bestselling author of
Dying to be Me: My Journey from Cancer to Near Death to True Healing
Writing this book has been a real journey for me. I believe that Oscar, my two-year-old Labrador, arrived in my life to help me with it. Without his love, his example, the daily laughter he produces and the call to be his guardian, I wouldn't have been able to change enough to complete the book. For a significant personal change is what this book has required.
My partner, Elizabeth Caproni, has accompanied me on this journey and I am deeply grateful for her love, her companionship and her patience with me as I stuttered and stammered towards a different way of looking at myself, my life and my place in the world. I am also grateful to Elizabeth for finding important research statistics that add value to the book, and for the many helpful suggestions she made throughout the writing process, including allowing me to use her poem in
Chapter 7
.
I will be eternally grateful to Robert Holden for his friendship and support. Throughout the writing of this book Robert has been a constant source of friendship, support and inspiration. I could fill a book with the notes about life, love and the universe that I scribbled down on random bits of paper, napkins, coffee cups,
the back of my hand or whatever else I could find when Robert called to ask how the book was coming along â and of course to enquire about Elizabeth, and Oscar's antics too.
One of my inspirations for this book has been Alyx Mia Redford. When I saw her kissing her own reflection in our full-length mirror and then giving herself a hug, I knew that this young lady had a lot to teach me about self-love. I've also been inspired by how her parents, my dear friends Bryce and Allyson, have guided her to remember that she is most definitely
enough
.
I am also grateful to Bryce for reading the manuscript of this book and offering me his insights, some of which helped shape the content.
To my dear friend Assad Negyal, thank you for being so thorough and offering such detailed feedback and so many valuable suggestions, many of which have formed some of the key sections of the book. And thank you for sharing some of your own vulnerabilities and for helping me realize how helpful this book could be.
And to Bhavna Patel, Gillian Sneddon and Margaret McCathie, thank you also for taking the time to read the manuscript and offering kind and honest feedback. Without your input, this book would be missing some vital insights.
I am indebted to Michelle Pilley, managing director of Hay House UK, for giving me the time I needed to write this book.
I am also grateful to everyone in the Hay House UK office. Even though we authors don't get to see and learn of all the
contributions you make to our books, please know that I am deeply grateful for all that's done behind the scenes, from giving simple opinions and feedback on content to designing our books, making sure they are available and reach their UK and international audiences, supporting us in sales and marketing, ensuring that we have a presence in the digital world ⦠I could go on.
And to my editor, Lizzie Henry, what can I say to express what a stellar job you've done in helping to shape this book into its final form? To me, you are worth your weight in gold.
Thanks also to Lizzie Prior for first pressing me on the importance of using the solid red heart logo on the cover, and creating a mock-cover for me to see.
I would also like to say some words of thanks to Anita Moorjani and her husband, Danny. It was our conversation after an âI Can Do It' conference that inspired me to write this book and embark on my own self-love project.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to my parents, Robert and Janet Hamilton. You have always supported me, believed in me and encouraged me to be what I wanted to be. Your love, support, insights and parenting, even in my adult years, have helped me reach a space in my life where I can now say âI
am
enough.'