What Makes Us Worthy Of Love?

Meet my teacher, Poppet the bunny

What IS it that makes us worthy of receiving love?

Meet Poppet bunny

I never wanted bunnies in the first place.

A member of our Buddhist group moved into the temple with her two rabbits, Peter & Poppet. I’d never met a bunny before - I was a cat person.

They didn’t seem interested in me at all, but I started to pay attention to them and I became intrigued by their soft bunny-aura. I read that the feeling I got around them might have been because they were prey animals - they certainly didn’t contain my cat’s fierceness. Hanging out with them calmed me.

One sunny day I remember lying on the grass next to their run in the temple garden and gazing into their eyes. Over the previous weeks I had been getting to know their expressions, bringing them tasty tidbits, tracking their behaviour. That day is when it happened: I fell in love.

Peter and Poppet’s owner moved out, and the bunnies stayed. My relationship with Poppet continued for many years - through an accident which led to her back leg being amputated, and through the loss of Peter and the moving in of two new companion bunnies, brothers Smokey and Joe. I gathered her many handfuls of her favourite dandelion leaves on walks, and brought her many sprigs of the weeping pear tree to nibble on. I sat quietly in her aviary enclosure with her. I watched her roll on her back in ecstasy when the sun shone hard. When she finally died, my heart broke a little.

What did Poppet offer me in return for my care and devotion? Well, not very much! She was never hugely keen on human beings. She did enjoy an occasional scratch behind the ears, but I didn’t factor greatly in her Universe except as a bringer-of-treats. Did that mean I loved her any less? It didn’t.

I asked my readers a question a few weeks ago: “Which words of comfort would you most like to carry around with you?” I said that mine would be, You don't have to achieve anything in order to be worthy of love and care.

In response Ruth said: “I struggle with that idea every day. I don’t mean this question in an argumentative way; I ask because it has been on my mind. What *does* make us worthy of love and care? What would make us unworthy?”

It was such an excellent question. I promised that I would write a piece in reply to Ruth’s question. This is it.

In a nutshell, this is my experience: We do not have to do anything to be worthy of love.

Why did I love Poppet? I didn’t love her because she praised me, or achieved anything special, or offered me anything practical or emotional. I loved her because I took the time to get to know her, and I appreciated the essence of who she was - alien as it was to me in some ways. I loved her just because she was her rabbity self.

This is my experience of loving other humans too. When I spend enough time with anyone, even the folk I find tricky to begin with, I find my way towards at least a fondness for them. Their spikiness starts to make sense when I catch a glimpse of the raw vulnerabilities underneath. Their self-centredness is less annoying when I hear about how much they were neglected when they were young. Their meanness speaks to the levels of self-protection that have been necessary for their systems, and my judgements melt into fellow feeling.

In this interview with Emily Bazalgette, Rae Katz asks her who she is (after Emily has dropped various of her identities during a year of transformation). This is her answer:

Emily: So who [am I]? Exactly. I spent a lot of time sitting under a tree in my local park, when I was able to go there, with my journal, just being like, who am I? And actually the answer I came to sounds very trite and basic, but it really did feel like a revelation: I am me. There is something core to me that is not about these external things. There's just a core Emily who is worthy and valuable. And that realization has never left me. It has been a huge source of confidence and strength, no one will ever be able to take that away. 

There is a core Satya who is worthy and valuable. That goes for you too.

You don't have to achieve anything in order to be worthy of love and care. So, if that is really true, then why would I need to carry these words of comfort around with me? Because it is almost impossible for me to fully believe in my inherent acceptability.

It is almost impossible because there are young parts of me¹ that hold beliefs that are counter to this truth. They believe things like, ‘I need to work really hard in order to be worthy of love and attention’ or ‘There is something about me that is broken and I need to find ways of hiding that from other people’.

These strong beliefs were formed inside me during times of great stress when I was very young. They formed as a response to particular behaviours of my caretakers, and these beliefs were mistakenly generalised into what is generally true about me, other people and the world.

When we are repeatedly treated as if we are a burden when we are very young, we will come to believe that there is something burdensome (and wrong) about us. When we are rejected we will believe there is something inside us that merits rejection. When someone is disgusted with us we will believe that we are disgusting. We don’t know that our caretakers are carrying burdens of their own, and that it is their own burdens that shape their behaviour towards us. Nobody tells us this. The belief forms, and it petrifies into something solid.

The beliefs of these young parts of me clash with the truth of my loveability, and they skew the way I see the world. They result in further beliefs that attempt to keep me safe (e.g. ‘that person will only stay friends with me if I offer them more than they offer me’, or ‘I will only make enough money to survive if I work at 150% of the level of most people’). They also change my experience of being in relationship (e.g. ‘my friend isn’t listening properly because they’re bored of me’, rather than the real reason which is that they just had a really tough day).

It is the mistaken beliefs of these young parts that form a barrier between us and the love that is constantly available to us - streaming in from loved ones, acquaintances and strangers. Of course the love that arrives via other people is often wonky, because they have their own shit to deal with 😉 - but if we look with the right eyes we can see that it’s there, regardless of what we do or don’t do. When humans fail us there is always the love that lives inside us, the animal kingdom, landscape, the sun and the sky. Behind all of that, in my experience, is the unlimited, unconditional and totally ungraspable love of the divine.

How can we open ourselves up to more of this love?

This is what helps me…

⭐ Get to know your parts. Get curious. What beliefs do your young parts hold about you? Where might these beliefs have come from? Where do they show up in your life? How do other parts of you try to protect you from feeling the painful or shameful ‘truth’ of these beliefs? All of our protective parts have good intentions for us even when they cause chaos - it’s just a matter of uncovering them.

⭐ Care for your all your parts (even the tricky ones). We can offer a lot of healing to our parts if we offer them attention and care. Our parts, like people, really love being listened to without judgement, understood, and appreciated for their hard work.

⭐ Know that unskilful behaviour doesn’t cancel our our acceptability. We all do unskilful things from time to time as a way of trying to protect ourselves - jealousy, impatience, having harsh judgements, hurting others intentionally or unintentionally, being self-destructive… This may necessitate others to set appropriate boundaries around us, and for us to do what we can to mitigate the worst of our behaviour. It doesn’t mean that we’re not worthy of love. As Rilke said, “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

⭐ Do the things that support you to support yourself. This includes the basics (sleep, food, rest), seeking out people who make you feel good about yourself, moving towards healthier work if possible, walking in nature, reading books that are supportive, spending time with your bunny… Top tip - I have found therapy with an Internal Family Systems therapist an invaluable way of healing and transforming my parts, so do try this if you can.

⭐ Do a regular ritual or spiritual practice that reminds you of your inherent loveability. For me this is chanting the nembutsu². For you it might be thanking the sun for shining on you every morning, or spending time with photos of your family and friends, or taking ten minutes of silence, or walking slowly around the garden, or anything that connects you in to something bigger and wiser than you.

⭐ Forgive yourself. Life is full of what Buddhists call ‘dukkha’ (dissatisfaction) and we also all carry a load of karma (conditions from our own past and from our ancestors with positives alongside a load of… well, stuff we’re not particularly delighted to have inherited). In short, life is really hard for most of us sometimes - so go easy on yourself.

A final tip - try not to make ‘working on’ any of the above a condition for your loveability. You are that already, remember?

Do I have any solid proof for anything I’ve said? Well, apart from highly subjective experience, no. Maybe, in the end, it comes down to a choice. What kind of world would you like to believe in? What kind of love?

“Either I believe that love is something shallow and narrow, something that only really responds to perfection or beauty, that requires you to be special, or I believe love is something bigger than that. And if I believe it is something bigger, and oh god, I do, then I’m going to have to start giving people the chance to see me as I really am, and how I really was, too.” ~ Josie George from Still Life

Like Josie, I believe that love is bigger than we can ever imagine.

Isn’t it wonderful?

Go gently,
Satya <3

Tell me: What helps you to remember your inherent loveability? What gets in the way? What messages were you given that have solidified into unhelpful beliefs? What might you do today or this week to offer yourself some care and attention?

I’ll leave you with Poppet, Smokey & Joe doing what they did best! I loved those bunnies 😍 🐰🐰🐰

1. Read more about parts in my piece on the magic of Internal Family Systems.

2. A chant which calls out to the Buddha of Infinite Light.