“Love yourself as you are.”

Do you ever wonder how far radical self-acceptance can open your heart?

I do.

What if we loved ourselves so unconditionally that we tenderly, gently, embraced ourselves into our deepest soul-mate self?

I want to love myself that deeply.

Then to watch the boundaries of self and body and house and earth dissolve until you know in your deepest fibers–your very deepest fibers–that it’s all One in its diverse infinite expression, as far as you can see, as wide as you can hear, as intricately as touch strokes the softest feather.

When you look across the horizon and greet yourself coming and going, finches singing sweetly on the branches of yourself, your wings taking flight.

Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest spoke these words just before he unexpectedly died: 

 Don’t change.  Change is impossible, and even if it were possible, it is undesirable.  Stay as you are.  Love yourself as you are.  And change, if it is at all possible, will take place by itself when and if it wants.  Leave yourselves alone.  The only growth-promoting change is that which comes from self-acceptance.

I sit before Anthony’s words this morning and watch a chickadee take flight.  My heart soars as it relaxes deeper into its own rich red beating, its own fluttering arrival.