How To Puppy Love Yourself

How to Puppy Love Yourself.

Close you eyes. Just for a moment. Forget the real worries and ferret out a little revolution, hardly noticed but, as big as anything on the fringe of that original English Revolution.

What revolution? Cromwell's lot. And the fringe? The levellers the non conformist, the push for free speech.

And the fringe of now? Once again, free speech, like we've never had it before.

If you have a computer, food in your stomach and a roof over your head then Zoom to all those wonderful and some not so wonderful conferences that were once the prerogative of the monied. We might even be looking forward, to Stavros on jitsu.

Its a rare chance to view in their natural habitat all those varieties of bullies, ideologues, deluded and the various people of counter trends that would normally be hidden from sight behind a close membership organisation, a selective mailing list and a word of mouth spider of contacts of like hiving off like in the self securing belonging of small cliques, professional organisations and class divided enclaves.

For a while, a short while, like the levellers ascendency in the disorganisation of the the English civil war, the world turns upside-down in popularised access.

Of course, for the levellers it only lasted a few short years before a more confident reorganised Cromwell cut off a few heads and murder most of the rest.

By contrast today in civilised countries your head will not be bloodily severed from your body, rather it will be separated from your body in much more modern form

Once the ruling elites and their table crumb catching adorers reorganise, access will disappear once more and each of our bodies will be singing once again to the decisions and understandings we have no access to. It is a different type of beheading, but it will take place none the less in just as an efficient manner as the brutality of Cromwell.

So make hay, zoom, google and jitsi whilst the sun temporarily does not shine on our masters and betters. For very soon selective access will return and price will separate the worthy from those who must follow. After all its perfectly understandable that the conference geeks must make a living and to do so will sing to their masters banking credentials.

So in this time I attend action for happiness. A counter trend. Normally a peer pressure suggested fiver a meeting but right now free. And to be fair I also attend small cliques of Neo Classical economists with all the catch phrases of their cannon of conditioning.

So here I am zooming into a chat room with a few people I've never met before, and in my relatively economically simple life, unlikely to meet in my everyday business of emptying bins, keeping to the cheapest supermarket mostly walking with the occasional bus ride.

And the beauty of it all. I am actually invited into their homes, people who would not normally even notice me from their relativistic level or speed and 'don't stop unless you have something to offer me' worlds. Hey guys its like being a kid on trick or treat. That is until they learn the background button.

But for now I'm sitting in someone else's front room having a polite chat about happiness and I carefully adjust my background to give no hint of my lower class.

And we discuss care for others as a way to happiness. Number 5? on a list that is by and large quite sensible if you are middle-class and above and have anything like the free time and resource to implement.

And I'm offered this catch phrase. "Well to love others you have to love yourself first." And I get this strange feeling that I'm under attack. Serves me right for reminding this comfortable south Englander of the misery and poverty that screams its name outside her little economically gated residence in front of which is her isolating car to transport her to her socially protected work place.

'Why shouldn't she defend herself?

But for me, two days later, and its always two days later, I creep up from under the weight of social disapproval, I realise that this love thyself first is a massive pup that's been on sale since my childhood. Thank goodness in my naivety I never really understood the concept.

Love thyself. How strange, First love thyself, even stranger.

Then as this don't love myself, sometimes seemingly simpleton, peeps an eye above the clearing mist of attempted social annihilation, my body loves me enough to send me a message.

And in those dry academic distillations of unhappy dreams, it fills beneath my head and pulls my consciousness to inner worlds. Its a message from my god of body. My soul is so much more intelligent than my mind. And in a language it has trained me to understand, or did I do the training on its behest, I gently put the idea of first love thyself in the basket of self deceit.

Of course you cant love yourself first. You can look after your body but if you then step beyond to water mirrored narcissism and tie your mind to body beautiful: If you stand there and distract your attention away from the world that surrounds what is it you become less attentive to.

My soul speaks. It offers me a picture of a world bustling with scurrying little 'self importants', all walking with a mirror held at favourable angle in front to catch their gaze. And they pass the beggar unnoticed, and around the next corner their ears don't reach out to the cries of a woman caught between the struggle of large shopping bags and a rather overactive (if over is the right accusation) toddler on a journey of total self absorbed discovery. Don't worry time will come when he will be a problem no more: Time will come when his discovery of secret paths in pavement cracks will mature into lifting his head to the hand held mirror of narcissus.

And I realised, after long training, that my body was telling me to look at self love as just an excuse to avoid facing the trails of others.

My body laughs, 'you cant love yourself. you can only look after yourself. My body, in its regal glory, pronounces at me," I your body body, gives the feeling of love. I give it to you".

" I give it to you each time you use me to bring kindness into the world. Each time you allow me to be the kind I am, I glow ".

And as the mist of social admonition clears, as my body shifts it away for my mind to think, It's clear.

Self love is a fantasy whose effect is to blind one to others needs. It was a selfish social hit, 'How dare you remind me, pull me out from my self concerned mirrored space'.

I learned.

I learned that if you don't want to be hit, stick to the groups that truly reflect your own understandings.

Or is that just another mirror to be erected against the painful compassion of seeing others.