Cultivating Self-Love

I want to say that a Wrathful Deity Practice is a more advanced practice. We did another series on Dancing with the Dakini, which is a wonderful practice of cultivating love, cultivating a sense of opening your heart, and resonance and feeling good, feeling whole.

There’s a lot of positivity in that series of practices and that’s a very important thing, to understand that you do that first. You begin to have a good feeling about life, about yourself. You begin to have a sense of Wholeness, a sense of Communion in Love with Life, with God.

As you do this, things are going to happen because you’re going to start changingso that’s going to change things, and people you’re really close to will come up to you and say, “You’ve changed. I don’t know whether I like you anymore.” And it’s strange, because I’m feeling better about myself, and yet that person who I thought liked me for who I was, when I changed certain qualities, they didn’t find me as appealing anymore, and you know what, I didn’t find them as appealing anymore, either.

But that’s part of this thing, of cultivating a sense of self-love before you start doing this work with the sense of self-love, you actually have this willingness to say, “You know what?”

“I’m worth more.” I don’t have to go down that path that I’ve been going down with you for the last 15 years. I can do something else.” And that’s why we did Dancing with the Dakini and The Everyday Sanyasin book. I really recommend that someone go through those before they begin to try to tackle dealing with the Wrathful Deity.

Then we go to something like the Wrathful Deity practice, and you don’t have to go there. I mean, if you’re working really well with the other practices, and you don’t have the thought, “Well, I really want to do a Maha Kala practice” or something like that, then for goodness sake, don’t do it just to do it; do what you have a resonance with, a connection with.

Now Do It!

“Now do it!” (2 Samuel 3:18); “Do not leave any of it till morning …” (Exodus 12:10).

Putting off duties is a shortcoming that brings us up short of the perfection God wants of us. Emerson wrote in his Journals (1834), “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.” Perhaps we can amend that to, “We are always getting ready to work, but seldom getting to work.” “Eventually” never becomes “actually” and the sweet by-and-by becomes the bitter never. Procrastination is not only a thief of time but finally a thief of self-respect and a robber of the good we can do for others, as well.

At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;

Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;

At fifty chides his infamous delay;

Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;

In all magnanimity of thought

Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.
Edward Young.

Procrastination is a killer of time and motivation. It borrows on tomorrow’s time. Today is yesterday’s tomorrow, and we are not guaranteed tomorrow. When we are inspired to do what we need to do, then we can’t waste a minute of irreplaceable time in getting on with what we need to do, while we have time and health to do it. We have many unwarranted reasons to put off what God wants of us, too. Felix told Paul, “Go away for the present, and when I find time, I will summon you” (Acts 24:25). There is no record of Felix ever finding the time to summon Paul!

John Ruskin is said to have taken for his great life-motto the simple word, “Today.” In his library he had before him the text, “Work, while it is yet called today.” There is a time for everything and it is indeed today, while we have the Light. “The wise heart will know the proper time and procedure, for there is a proper time and procedure for every matter…” Ecclesiastes 8:5,6. We are to redeem God’s irredeemable time: “Be very careful, then, how you live — not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 4:15,16)