Virtue 1: Love of Self - The Foundation for Artistic Freedom - The 12 Virtues of the Primordial Artist

This is the first in a series exploring 12 virtues that can liberate artists from cultural enslavement.

ATTEND

  My GOD what can be harder than loving one self? I’ve met a handful of people in my whole life that really easily love themselves and accept themselves automatically. What pleasant, peaceful childhoods they must have had. No wounding, no scarring, no shaming, no unacceptable behavior, no embarrassing events at school, with teachers, with the desired sex. No failures. No regrets.

I grew up in a household where there was no self love. My grandmother had been put up for adoption and spent her life trying to find her parents. My mother was disowned by her father when she was 5 because he found Catholicism and divorced her mom and called them heathens and pagans. My mom spent her whole life looking for her father’s love and turned the quest into some kind of alternation between transactional service and pure shame. My mom handed this down by disowning her first born (my older brother) when he acted out in high school and got into trouble with drugs and bad behavior.

I learned in multiple visceral experiences that love was conditional, love was transactional, self-love did not exist, and familial love was a rare coin. What replaced it was duty, guilt, shame, and transactionalism. Do this for me and I will give you some love. Don’t do this, and I will shun you. You will not be my son.

Love of Self is a virtue because it is not automatic in our culture. In fact, our environment and our culture make it very tough. We are told how to be and shown images that tell us how to look. How to conform. How to perform.

We live in a world of self-hate. Consumerism is based on not having enough, but more importantly, not being enough. Capitalism, consumerism, and indeed, an enslaving culture, depends on creating the message that: “You are not enough, you do not have enough, you do not know enough, you need me, you need this, you need us, you need what I have to sell.”

I’ll leave it to someone else to defend capitalism and its benefits to progress and technology. What I’m interested in counteracting is the tendency for it to promote self-hate.

Why is it that we find it so easy as humans to hate ourselves in dark, strange, extreme ways – ways that if we were to say these things openly or to a friend we would be shocked?

“God, I’m so stupid.”
“What a stupid thought. Jesus I’m fucking dumb”
“God, I’m ugly.”
“God, I’m fat, Jesus, look at that. I’m disgusting!”
“What’s wrong with my feet?”
“What’s wrong with my thinking? Why am I so negative? What’s wrong with me Jesus!”
“I hate myself.”
“I want to die.”

These are things I have said to myself with regularity in my adult life. And more. Chances are you recognize these words and have many of your own that are as familiar as your favorite sweats.

This has a bad effect on us and our art making. This becomes a kind of downward spiral of our creativity and our ability to share. It pushes more and more of ourselves into the Shadow. And it blocks our creativity more and more.

Enslavers also love people with low self-esteem. I’ve joined a few cults in my time and I can tell you that a low self-esteem is essentially a requirement for entrance. The low self esteem makes a loop with which the charismatic leader can hook you. It is the hole that the supplicant seeks to fill in the cult. And it is the hole that the cult leader exploits in order to achieve their own ends of power and domination.

For the actor for example, if they do not embrace themselves, they will be hiding on stage. They will be hiding from the audience, hiding from their scene partner, hiding from the director. Tragically, this will hide nothing. They will be seen concealing, and more than likely, that which they are trying to hide will be seen anyway, but against their will. And worse, they will be living in fear – conscious or unconscious – fear of being discovered. Discovered for the horrible dark creature they fear they are.

Acting can actually add a challenge to Love of Self, because we feel we must present our best selves to the directors, the audience, the casting agents. It can compel us to hide more of ourselves, to try and stuff more of ourselves under the rug. This will not help us. And will harm our ability to transmit art. We must find a way to open the passage – to become softer, to become more transparent. That is the purpose of the virtue of Love of Self. To become more integrated with ourselves, in order to transmit more truth from us and from beyond us. To be not a closed fist, but an open hand.

Love of self also means love of one’s shadow. This is a deep topic and not one I take lightly. The shadow exists in us the moment someone we trust tells us part of us is unacceptable, undesirable. When we as children hear that or feel it, our shadow is born.

Our shadow grows to accommodate all the expressions of our selves that are told to be unacceptable. We learn of our shadow parts from parents, siblings, teachers, friends, culture, tv, the messages are everywhere, the signs overwhelm.

The Shadow becomes a kind of weight, and anvil hidden behind us that drags us back and affects our behavior.

It might even affect our sense of direction. Like a big piece of iron will change the direction on a compass. Our shadow will change our lives, particularly if it is repressed.

When we have a shadow (and we all do) and we do not attend it and embrace it, it will become a block for us. It will block our access to that which is transcendent, that would like to speak through us. It will block our creativity. The artist must come to terms with the shadow, get to know it, and employ it in the creation of art. By embracing it, we will begin to open up our power.

With love, we can soften, saturate, and transmute the shadow from a Golem that haunts us to an Iron John that can develop us – a primordial force outside the customs of the court, but elemental and powerful and great and natural – related to the wilds, to the woods, to the deeps, to the profound.

Somehow we must learn to attend our shadow. Attend ourselves. Attend like attending a river flowing by. Attend and love. In order to begin to integrate ourselves. And allow our shadows to be part of our gift.

So we have a culture that promotes self-hate and self lack, and we have a rearing model that develops a shadow that grows and grows like a black hole, invisible, high in gravity and power, that blocks us from expressing ourselves authentically. What do we do?

ENVISION

Love of self means looking in the mirror and saying “I love myself one hundred percent.” Every day. For years. Despite doubts about it. Despite discomfort. Despite more failures and more disappointments that will happen along the way. Endless endless disappointments and proofs of incompetence. To love oneself even then, that is the virtue. To say, despite this, I will love myself.

My first experience of self love happened in my twenties. I joined a Korean Qi Gong cult (I was looking to understand the chakras better) and got sucked in to a very interesting framework that revolved around love and the energetic body. They believed and demonstrated that by unblocking the body’s energy pathways (energy lines connected with the chakras) you could start to really heal yourself and become a conduit of universal love and universal energy (chun ji ki un).

We had a weekend workshop not long into my indoctrination. It involved prolonged exercises, exhaustion, prayer, and song after song of Celine Dion. I will tell you, I never understood the appeal of Celine Dion until that weekend. What the cultists showed me was that love songs to “the other” can be transmuted to yourself, your true self.

In the darkened yoga rooms of various strip malls across the Bay Area, I experienced love, love of self, love flowing through me in a way I had never felt – at least not since i was a very young child.

Opening up the heart is the critical task of one finding self love, and the rest of the love virtues. The heart is the door. Celine knows this.

For me this was the beginning of relating to myself in a loving way. And in fact the self love I felt growing in my chest gave me the sense of abundance to leave the Qi Gong cult when it started getting more and more controlling. Ironically for them, but true for Celine, the love set me free.

If there was a way to embrace the self, including the shadow, and help it to feel accepted and seen, there might be a change in how we relate to our impulses. It might also change the way we react to outside forces like advertising and powerful coercion.

I’d like to see a world where an artist has a sense of self-love and self-value that is not egotistical per se, not grandiose, but sustaining, sufficient, loving.

Love is an important word because it is a transcendent word. It has mystery to it. What is love? Where does it come from? We know it is affirmative, we know it feels good, we know that a happy child feels love, we know that there is love between us when we are at our best.

So what if there were self-love?

DIRECT

Solo

The Attend Yourself Exercise

Sit in a comfortable place. Become calm, observe your breathing for a minute. Attend your current state. Observe how you are, how you feel, what you’re thinking. Attend like an audience member at a play – a good play, good author, you stood in line. Attend like a hunter in the forest.

I love myself 100%
I accept myself 100%

Sit with that. See how you feel, how you react to those statements. Attend yourself.

I love myself 100%
I accept myself 100%
I love myself 100%

Let the love include the friction you might feel. Let it include the discomfort. Let it include the invasive thoughts. Let it include anything that is going on for you. Let it include all of it.

Integration:
How does it feel to accept yourself? How does your body feel? How does this feeling relate to your work?

The Attending Movement

Stand – or move to an active position – and center yourself.

Breathe calmly, attend yourself. See if there’s an impulse to move.

I accept myself 100%
I love myself 100%

See if the impulse wants to grow. Let it develop. Accept it. Love it. Let the movement reach a finale, and conclude.

Integration:
How does it feel to let movement come out like that? What blocks were there? What permissions? How does this relate to action in the world, in your work?

The Mirror Attend

Stand in front of a mirror. Breathe calmly, attend yourself.

“I accept you completely as you are right now.”

Sustain this for 1 minute. Progress to 2, 3, 4, 5.

Integration:
How does it feel to sustain this acceptance toward yourself? What resistances come up? How does this relate to your self image? How does this relate to how you see yourself as an artist?

Advanced progressions:

When angry: “Accept your anger”
When sad: “I accept your sadness”
When jealous: “I accept your jealousy”
Etc.
Your shadow aspects need your acceptance as well.

The Body Acceptance Scan

Lay down and attend your body and your breathing.
Begin a slow scan from the top of your head to your toes, accepting each part of your body.
“Accept the top of my head. I accept my temples. I accept my brain. I accept my ears”
Include parts of your body you typically judge.
“I accept my belly. I accept my knees”
When you encounter a resistance, accept this as well.
“This resistance, I accept.”
End with a whole body acceptance energy embrace.

Integration:
How does it feel to attend and accept your body in this way? In what ways does your physical self affect your art, you actions in the world?

The Failure museum

Create a list of past failures.
For each one, practice accepting them “I accept that I did this. I accept that this happened.”
Reflect on what you learned from it. “Because of this I learned…”
Create a ritual for honoring these experience as teachers rather than as shames.

Integration:
How does this reframing affect your past projects, particularly the ones that “failed?”

The Emotional Weather Report

Morning and evening, check in with your emotional weather without judging or changing. Simply attending and naming.
“I’m feeling restless with some irritation and anxiety.”
“I accept this emotional state completely. I accept where I am right now.”

Integration: How is it to observe your emotions like weather? How does this weather affect the art you make, the art you feel called to make?

Pairs

Note: As you do pairs and group exercises, discuss consent and boundaries beforehand. Always be sure either party can “time out” or “skip” the exercise.

The Attend The Other

Sit across from a partner. Get centered, attend yourselves for a minute.
Partner A attends partner B.
B knows they are being attended. Allows themselves to react to this, to move, to express, or to stay still. B practices being attended, and attending to themselves.

Reverse.

Integration:
What is it like to attend another person in this way?
What is it like to be attended? Is there a transition from self consciousness to self expression? If so where is it? How does this attendance relate to art making? To collaboration?

The Attend Self, Together

Sit across from your partner. Attend yourself, breathe, center.
Knowing that you are sharing space, attend to yourself primarily. Be responsive to the other, do not ignore them, but focus on attending to yourself and loving yourself. Accepting yourself 100%, that is your focus. Yet continue to allow them to be present with you.

Integration:
Is it difficult to attend to yourself with someone with you? What does it feel like to attend you’re self and Accept yourself with another person there? Does the shared self-attending help the situation? How does this relate to your art work?

Group

Note: Consent is important here. Talk through the exercise ahead of time and let anyone opt out or request adjustments. Be sure there is an easy function for “time out” or “tap out”.

The Acceptance Sculpture Garden

Half the group assumes an individual form – self hate, transition, or self love. Their choice.
The other half of the group walks through the sculpture garden, practicing acceptance of what they see.
Reverse.

Variation – the sculptures move and can make sound.

You can repeat many times if the group wishes, trying different sculptures, different versions, etc.

Integration: What is it like to see others’s sculptures? What is it like to be seen in the garden as a sculpture?
How does it connect you to the group to reveal in this way?
How does this garden relate to your art? What facets are fuel?

The Acceptance Circle

Group stands facing in. One person declares: “I accept my ______ ” The group responds: “We accept your ________”
Progress to the next person.
Go around an many times as is needed, desired.

Integration: What is the affect of a community accepting itself? How might this affect your art making?

CURTAIN

Crucially, without self-love, all the virtues that follow become performances for approval (enslavement) rather than service to something greater, be that named as the muse, truth, beauty, the great mysterious, god, and thus authentic expression (freedom).

Self-love is a keystone practice. It is something that must be chosen and returned to again and again. The exercises above can help, and you can find others that will be best for you. Ultimately, they all revolve around accepting our selves, our bodies, our essences as they are as a foundation for growth. By doing this, we can be centered in love and act from there, rather then centered on lack and acting to fill approval.

We must approve of ourselves, we must ratify ourselves, with the knowledge that we will continue to grow. We are not settling or resting in indolent mediocrity. Nor are we condoning bad behaviors or vices or meanness. We are creating a foundation of spiritual abundance. And from there we can plant new seeds, and be receptive to divine insight/the muse, and grow to heights we don’t even know of yet. We can transcend the pursuit of approval from other humans and live on a plain of creation, of gifting. Of spiritual wealth.

Love is transformative. It’s a transcendent quality – it defies rationality or explanation. It is beyond anything we can write about it. It’s transformative quality is exactly why it is crucial to include early as a foundation. It can transform our blocks into fuel, into power, into grace, into energy, into light.

Next week we’ll explore how Love of Self becomes the foundation for loving others.