The loveliness was there at the birth of the day
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The loveliness was there at the birth of the day
"Your daily deeds and chores do not add up to your worthiness, for the loveliness was there at the birth of the day."
Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings & Revelations Volume I, ed 1, p 539
When I first read this saying, that “the loveliness was there at the birth of the day”, I was stopped in my tracks. It was as if the world stopped turning, just for a moment, and time stood still and I was still too, for the first time I could remember.
My whole life had been spent doing ‘daily deeds and chores’ in the belief that I had to do things to prove my worth. But all that doing never made me feel better; there was an inherent feeling of worthlessness that no amount of doing could assuage. I thought that if I just did more I might feel better about myself, so I did more and more, but all I felt was tired. There was an underlying sense that there was something wrong with me, and I felt guilty, thinking I could never do enough or do it well enough, and this failure was somehow my fault.
Reading this revelation planted a seed; the seed of a thought that I may in fact be lovely, just as I am, whatever I do or do not do, and that that loveliness has always been there.
What happens to us as young girls that we don’t feel that loveliness, in every moment of every day, and instead learn to think we need to be eternally doing things to prove our worth, to ourselves and to everyone around us?
When we are babies we are loved just for who we are. We are that inherent loveliness and are adored just for that. As we grow and learn to smile, walk and talk, we are celebrated for what we do – that first smile, those first steps, the first words – and we learn to do more, to receive more of that appreciation. And somewhere along the way the innate love of who we are becomes a need for recognition and acceptance of what we do, and if we do not do what we are told or expected to do, we are rejected by others and we reject ourselves.
For some of us, being born a girl is a point of rejection in itself, because we are not the boy that was hoped for, secretly or otherwise. And this can be deeply felt and lead to a lack of self-worth from a very early age, which again leads to more doing in an attempt to prove our worth, our value to others.
These habits, thoughts and feelings can be cemented in from a very early age, so deeply that we think this is who we are. The loveliness that is our birthright becomes buried under layers of doing, of not feeling good enough, feelings of lack of self-worth, even of self-loathing.
And then other behaviours creep in to try and help us not feel these uncomfortable feelings … eating excessively, drinking, self-harming, tolerating abuse, having sex with people who don’t truly love us … all because we don’t truly love and appreciate and honour ourselves.
This was how I lived my life for many years. Despite looking good on the outside – attractive, successful, being a ‘good’ and ‘nice’ person – my inherent sense of self-worth, my feeling of loveliness, was almost non-existent. Any good feelings I had about myself were based on my achievements or my acceptance by other people, not my inherent love and appreciation of myself.
"Your daily deeds and chores do not add up to your worthiness, for the loveliness was there at the birth of the day."
Serge Benhayon Esoteric Teachings & Revelations Volume I, ed 1, p 539
This saying changed the game. I understood that there was a sense of loveliness, in me and in all of us. And from then on I made it my business to uncover and develop it and to bring this innate loveliness into my everyday way of being.
This entailed a whole lot of work, but in a different way. It was an inner journey – an inward exploration into why I was the way I was, looking at the beliefs and ideals I had taken on that had me thinking I was anything less than lovely. I looked at the way I had been raised and educated, at the ideals and beliefs and behaviours of my family. I saw that I had taken on ways of being from my parents and their families, my mother’s inherent lack of self-worth and my father’s not-so-subtle denigration of women.
I looked at my crippling need to be nice and good and how it had stifled my true and natural expression and the strength and power and beauty of me as a woman.
I looked at how I had been educated in a certain way to think I had to be smart and achieve intellectually and professionally to be accepted by my family and by the world. I had been trained in a system that taught me to override the knowing of my own being and the honouring of my own body in order to look after other people, even if it was at my own expense.
I looked at how my movements had been influenced by the way that others moved around me, their reactions to me and my attempts to avoid, deflect or defuse those reactions.
All of this was not just an intellectual exercise but a process of going deeply into my body and feeling what was actually there, buried underneath the layers of nice, good and doing, bringing it to light and seeing if it actually served me or if it was time to let it go. I came to understand that I had willingly taken on these ideals, beliefs and behaviours, thinking they afforded me some sort of security and protection in life. And I had to be willing to be open, raw and vulnerable, and to sometimes (shock! horror!) make mistakes and get things wrong in my journey of discovering who I am and what is true.
And I found that who I am is not who I thought I was at all. In fact, more often than not it was the direct opposite! I had taken on ways of being that were the opposite of who I naturally am to try and get by and be accepted in this world, which I thought would not accept me just the way I am.
After many years of recovering myself in this way I still appear much the same on the outside but my connection to the essence of me, the quality of who I am on the inside, has now been restored. I feel that innate sense of loveliness now when I wake up in the morning, in every breath and in every move.
I move with that loveliness, so that my daily deeds and chores are imbued with that feeling. They are not done because I need recognition and acceptance from others for doing them, but because it feels lovely to do them and I love to be in service to others.
My doing now stems from a quality of being; an innate sense of stillness, of sacredness, the essence of who I am as a woman. This sense knows what is true and informs my every moment and my every movement, so that I live from this knowing, not dictated to by outer ideals and beliefs of how I should be. I now live as a woman in this world who knows her worth is an innate quality – a loveliness that was there at the birth of the day – that lives within each and every one of us.
Filed under
Acceptance, Appreciation, Essence, Sacredness, Self-worth
