***STILL NOT SURE ABOUT THE 'SELF~ LOVE' THING? Where feeling sorry for yourself is the lower octave of self love, and with a big inner push, it can grow into SELF LOVE.

A few days ago, I saw a magpie land in the bird bath with a round white thing in its beak. I thought it was a stone. Using its beak, the magpie, gently placed the white stone into the water and washed it. Then picked it back up in its beak and flew off with it.

This morning as I was sitting in the garden something fell from the skies and landed close to my feet. It was a small white egg. Then I recalled the magpie washing the white stone and realised it hadn't been a stone but a small white egg, stolen from another bird. I felt great sympathy and sadness for the egg, the chick inside, and the birds who have their eggs stolen...but most people say that's nature.

Thinking back a few years to when our old cat was younger and more feisty, she was determined to get at a blackbirds nest. She was lucky on one day, in that she succeeded and and she got a small baby hatchling. Much to her disgust we rescued it from her, but it was too late, the hatchling survived a day or two and we watched its little heart beating and tried to feed it. This whole business of the cat trying to get up to the blackbirds nest continued each year for a few years as the birds continued to build a nest in the same spot.

Seeing the egg dropped to floor by a bigger bird thief, smashed by my feet this morning, brought me back to baby hatchling we rescued from our big cat all those years ago. My children were much younger then and they were intrigued and spellbound by the tiny beating heart of the hatchling.
There was something so immense about the time that baby bird stayed alive. When it died we all felt sad. Well that's nature giving her gifts of teaching us what we need to know.

It came to me then that feeling sorry for others and having empathy, or sympathy for others is the way you begin to have that for yourself.

If all you have for yourself is self pity and feeling sorry for yourself then don't despair, because with time, and intention to uncover it,  and with a big inner push it can blow up or blossom into the self love, you wish to uncover in yourself.

Remember that sometimes one needs to learn 'love for self' and 'love for others', and that they are the same thing... and that can be hard. So we can start with pity, and feeling 'sorry for self' or 'for others'.... this becomes empathy.

Then we see that we can only do that if we have the beginnings of those feelings inside for our selves....

Empathy for others means that we can envisage the sadness of the situation that we see others experiencing, and because we 'know' what it is to feel sorry for our 'self', even if we do not recognise that it is the feeling we are feeling, it is feeling sorry for others...and so it is the first step to loving others.

Over time this blossoms and matures into unmistakable 'Love for others, and then finally we recognise we have stepped into "loving ourselves"

Michaela.