Healing Emotional Numbness With Self-Love
Day 17/31: Blog Your Own Book Challenge
This is my seventeenth post for the Blog Your Own Book Challenge. In the previous post, I wrote about the causes of emotional numbness. In this post, I write about how I am healing my emotional numbness with self-love.
From my personal experience, I feel that there is a correlation between emotional numbness and dissociation with the self. It’s like watching myself from the outside but not being able to connect with myself. The mistake I made was to consider this state of being as a spiritual experience of observation and neutrality but fortunately, at one point, I realized that I was not having a spiritual experience. I was experiencing dissociation and emotional numbness.
Through personal inquire supported by synchronicities that brought certain books to me, I realized that I completely lacked self-love. I was so focussed on giving and doing that I had lost the ability to be with myself, love myself, and care for myself.
I don’t know how I got into this strangely pathological way of living. I’m sure it happened through small decisions, experiences, impressions, maybe even the projections of society where self-giving is put on a pedestal. Maybe I lacked self-worth and tried to feel worthy by giving too much of myself.
As important as it was to know the reason, I felt that it was more important to heal myself and get out of the pit that I found myself in.
Fortunately, I was supported by certain synchronicities that brought the right books to me at the right time. One particular book, a rather small one, resonated strongly with me. It was called, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It — By Kamal Ravikant. The book that’s available now is the second edition. I still haven’t read that. I read the first edition which was much smaller. Here’s a summary by James Clear.
I did not follow all the practices from the book but I did follow the practice of affirming “I love myself.” It was a simple affirmation and I did it several times a day. It changed my perception of myself slowly but surely. However, at one point, I hit a roadblock and I couldn’t proceed further. Repeating more affirmations did not help me anymore.
After a few frustrating days, I thought that, maybe, I needed to do something else. Some other kind of practice. But those did not help me either. Then one day, out of pure exasperation, I sat with myself and repeated in my mind, “I love myself”… “I love myself”… “I love myself”. Slowly my attention turned to my inner energy. I realized that my inner energy was largely unchanged. It still lacked self-love. In fact, my inner energy felt like a confused cloudy mass. That’s the reason why doing more affirmations wasn’t helping me anymore. They were only changing my outer energy because that’s where my attention was.
I needed to transform the inner energy. So this time, I put my attention on my inner energy and repeated, “I love myself”… “I love myself…” and I could feel a shift. But keeping my attention inwards was a huge challenge because I kept on getting distracted with thoughts. Mostly these were thoughts related to productivity. I felt like I was wasting my time.
Unfortunately, we are conditioned to measure productivity in terms of the tasks that we accomplish. Working out in the gym feels productive, but sitting with myself and accomplishing an inner transformation feels like a waste of time. This is very unfortunate because the inner energy is the true driving force behind what we do and accomplish in the outside world.
Working out in the gym feels productive, but sitting with myself and accomplishing an inner transformation feels like a waste of time.
I tried pushing against this false belief. I sat down on my chair, closed my eyes, focussed on my inner energy, and repeated, “I love myself.” This time, I was able to do it longer but it required a lot of will-power. That’s when I thought that I needed to change my strategy.
Instead of exhausting my will-power, I decided to utilize this energy of outer productivity and use it for the inner transformation. I picked up a piece of paper and wrote on it “I love myself.” After writing it about 3 to 4 times, I again went inwards and repeated the affirmation. This time I was able to keep my attention focussed longer. The moment my attention wavered, I went back to my paper and wrote the affirmation a few times, made a couple of doodles, and went back to the inner energy.
Just the act of doing something with my hands satisfied my brain’s productivity center. Using a journal or a piece of paper to support the inner transformation is helping me to use the energy of outward productivity and turn it inwards. I know that I have to transform this false belief outer productivity also, but right now that’s not my priority. My priority is to cultivate the energy of self-love and overcome emotional numbness. So I would rather use these misoriented patterns rather than fight them. My battle with those patterns is for another day.
