Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life (5 page)

We all have scars, inside and out. We have freckles from sun exposure, emotional trigger points, broken bones, and broken hearts. However our scars manifest, we need not feel ashamed, but beautiful. It is beautiful to have lived, really lived, and to have the marks to prove it. It's a testament of our inner strength. To wear a snazzy outfit takes nothing; but to wear our scars like diamonds? Now that's beautiful.

Fifteen years ago, I would have laughed at this assertion. “Are you crazy?” I'd say, while applying lipstick before bed. I was that insecure. Lips stained, hair fried by a straightening iron, pores clogged by residue foundation, all in an attempt to be different from how I naturally was, to be beautiful for someone else. I hid my face because it hurt to look at myself in the mirror. I was afraid my unbeautiful truth would show somehow through my skin—that people would know I had been abused, and that in an effort to cope I was starving myself, harming myself. I was afraid people would see that I was clinging to life by a shredding thread.

Now? I see scars and I see stories. I see a being who has lived, who has depth, who is a survivor. Living is beautiful. Being a part of this world is beautiful, smile-worthy, despite the tears. Beauty isn't a hidden folder full of Kate Moss images for a kid who's dying to forget and fit in. And it isn't a fat-injected smile, or six-pack abs. It's the smile we are born with, the smile that sources from the divine inside, the smile that can endure, even if we've been through a lot.

My healing started with a birthday gift. It was a photograph my friend had taken of a forest, the word “forgive” painted in pink on a stone. I didn't understand why that word meant something until I really started to think about what forgiveness could mean. I'd blamed myself for so long for things that weren't my fault. Life stopped being beautiful to me, I stopped feeling beautiful inside, and my smile stopped shining beauty out into the world.

I think in order for us to make life beautiful we need to feel our smiles as we feel our frowns. For so long, I only honored my pain and my sorrow. I lost my smile, less because of the trauma and more because I spent so much time lamenting my scars. When I decided they were beautiful, I became beautiful. When I took power away from the negative emotions, my unchangeable traumatic past, I was better able to find joy in the present.

How did I do this? First, I made a soul collage, a board for the life of my dreams. I pasted onto the poster magazine images that depicted things I see as myself and want for myself. It became a beautiful visual guide for what matters to me beyond the superficial. This board reminds me to honor who I am in essence, who I was before anything bad happened to me, before I believed anything was wrong with me. This board provides me with a path of beauty through the scars.

Secondly, I found the book
The Why Café
by John P. Strelecky. In it, Strelecky encourages readers to pinpoint their PFE (purpose for existence). While reading, I realized beauty is my PFE. My purpose is to make whatever I can beautiful. Not beautiful in the superficial sense, but beautiful in the smile of the heart and soul sense. So far it's working.

Sometimes all it takes for your life to change is a shift in perspective. One solitary action, one solitary word, and everything is different. Take a moment now to smile. Do you feel it in your muscles? In your skin? In your toes? Where do you feel happiness?

When bad things happen we don't instinctively feel happy and beautiful, but we don't need to despair because life gets ugly sometimes. Joy and beauty are everywhere, in everything, in every one of us—no matter how we look, and no matter how we may hurt temporarily. Grace is beauty in motion, and we can create it by choosing to smile—to recognize that we're strong, despite our insecurities, and that the world is an amazing place, despite its tragedies.

We may hurt, but we will heal—and there is beauty in our scars.

1. Tell empowering stories of healing in the present instead of sad stories of hurting from the past
.

When you live in the story of how you were hurt, you define yourself by your pain, and you essentially pick up where others left off in mistreating you. It's hurtful and crippling to rehash these events over and over again (though it can be helpful in a therapeutic setting). When you find yourself dwelling on an old story, tell yourself that you're creating a new one—a story of forgiving and loving yourself in action. Try to understand whoever hurt you, and recognize that their actions were probably caused by their own pain. Then proactively choose to do something to take care of yourself in the way you wanted to be taken care of years ago.

2. Challenge the limiting beliefs that make you feel bad about yourself
.

You may be holding on to all kinds of limiting, inaccurate beliefs about your worth, your potential, and what you deserve. Realize these are not facts—you formed these beliefs based on difficult experiences and years of misguided thinking, and you can change your life by challenging these beliefs and forming
healthier ones. When you start thinking the old belief, look for evidence to support the opposite one. It's there—proof of your intrinsic value is in your choices, your actions, and your daily life. You just have to start recognizing all the good you do.

3. Shine a spotlight on your shame and douse it with empathy
.

When people abuse us, disrespect us, silence us, or disregard our feelings or needs, we often internalize that and feel shame, as if we deserved to be hurt because we were unworthy, bad, or flawed. We then feel the need to hide ourselves to avoid the pain of being seen, but hiding just creates more pain. It's not your fault that you feel shame—it's a natural response to the way you were treated—but it is your responsibility to heal it. Researcher Brené Brown wrote that shame requires secrecy, silence, and judgment to grow exponentially, and that it can't survive when doused with empathy. Offer yourself that empathy by choosing not to judge yourself for what other people did to you or what you did in response; and let someone else into that process, whether it's a friend or a professional.

4. Recognize the beauty in your journey
.

You may not feel that all parts of you are beautiful, but there's beauty in the strength and courage that have helped you get where you are. Whatever you did in the past, you were doing
the best you could, based on what you learned and experienced. Shift your focus and take some time to acknowledge how amazing your journey has been thus far. How have you displayed grace and bravery? How have all the chaotic dots of your past shaped up to create something unique and inspiring? If your life were a movie, what positive message would viewers take away?

W
E
'
VE ALL FELT IT IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
—
THE FEAR THAT
there's something lacking in us. It might translate into a sense of worthlessness, as if we're frauds, flawed, or somehow damaged. It might be a less pervasive feeling, marked by the occasional suspicion we're not as good as people think we are. Or it might be an insecurity bubbling below the surface that we've yet to consciously acknowledge. Whether it's intense, slight, or even subconscious, we all experience this fear of being unworthy to some degree. If you do a Google search for the phrase “I'm not good enough,” you'll find more than 69 million results.

Oftentimes, it's not just about self-judgment; it's about the foundational belief that we are somehow broken. It may seem like a natural conclusion when we struggle in ways we don't fully understand.
Why am I still single? There's something wrong with me. Why do I take things personally? There's something wrong with me. Why do I keep making the same mistakes, or getting into the same unhealthy relationships, or doing the same things over and over and expecting different results? It's insanity, as Einstein said—or otherwise stated, there's something wrong with me.

We
are the constant in all of our troubles, so we can easily blame ourselves every time we deal with something painful (which is not the same as taking responsibility). Or, we can convince ourselves that we wouldn't feel so bad if we could only fix ourselves. But the reality is we often suffer because we fight so hard against everything that hurts. We cause ourselves pain by telling ourselves we shouldn't be feeling it. And we become our own biggest problems by searching so desperately for solutions. We're not unhappy because we can't figure out how to change; it's because we sometimes tell ourselves that we can't be happy unless we do.

Perhaps the biggest challenge isn't learning how to repair ourselves, but rather learning to accept that we all deal with uncomfortable situations and emotions in life. We all have challenges. We all go through difficult times. We all deal with constantly changing and sometimes confusing feelings. And we all struggle to treat ourselves kindly every now and then. This doesn't make us damaged; it makes us human. At some point we need to decide that we're okay just as we are, even if we have room to grow.

How can we stop feeling unworthy? How can we challenge the beliefs that tell us there's something wrong with us? How can we stop trying to “fix” ourselves and instead embrace who we are in this moment? Countless Tiny Buddha contributors have addressed these questions on the site, sharing their experiences and insights. Some of those include . . .

by Amyra Mah

No matter where you go, there you are
.

—C
ONFUCIUS

I am accustomed to not moving. To move was to feel pain—the pain of seeing how worthless I believed myself to be. Sometimes I would sit in the same place for hours, sometimes not leaving the house for days. By isolating myself, I avoided finding evidence in the outside world that proved how I saw myself was the absolute truth.

My worst nightmare was that others would show me (through what they said or didn't say, or what they did or didn't do) that they too found me as rotten as I knew myself to be. And so I was often left in the privacy of my own dreaded company. My best friends were the little pills I could rely on to knock me unconscious. I had neither the tolerance nor the strength to face myself, and I often chose the easy way out. Sedatives, tranquilizers, hypnotics—I lived for them. They provided me respite from the constant agony of my internal voice that asked, “What's wrong with me? Why am I so damaged? Why do I hate myself? What have I done to deserve this?”

Sleeping was my only escape. And I did more and more of it.

Sometimes I pushed the boundary too far—like the time when I swallowed enough hypnotics to probably kill a few buffalos. When I simply woke up a few hours later asking for coffee, I lost interest in testing myself that way again. But when I started realizing I was losing chunks of my memory, I knew I had reached my limit. I bumped into people on the street who talked about a party I had been at, and I had no memory of ever being there, nor the few days surrounding the event.

After that, I decided to go from one extreme to another, giving up sedatives in favor of stimulants—various amphetamine-based pills that would kick my body and mind into action so I could move, talk, and think at lightning speed. I figured if I kept moving, I wouldn't have to face myself. I was running away from the same problem, but I thought I'd found a better way of doing it. Stimulants helped me manage my social phobia. Whenever I went to a social event, I felt tremendous pressure to appear perfect. Every meeting, every interaction I had with people, was a performance. Drugs helped me feel more comfortable in my skin than I really was, but I felt false, and I hated myself for it.

I tried to exude confidence and charm. Many times, I succeeded. But always, I would spend the ensuing days beating myself up for every little incident I imagined had exposed the “rotten” me to the world. I began to feel the rage that had been suppressed for a long time. Somehow it didn't frighten me the way my other emotions did, so I took refuge in it. After suppressing my emotions for so long, I found it quite empowering to act out my aggression.