Self-love in God's Arms

If you’ve ever been asked to love yourself in the middle of fear, uncertainty, or loss, you may recognize pieces of yourself here.

༄ This is my story of self-love and trust in the Divine, born in the space between my will to live and my surrender to a higher power.

It is about what self-love becomes when it is no longer a concept, but a lifeline, strengthened by our devotion to Life itself.

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Self-love is our era’s healing salve. It’s Grace. It is not self-centeredness. Self-love is the act of loving yourself as a parent loves their child, and loving yourself as the amazing creation you are. It’s self-acceptance. And in that loving, honoring, and reverence for the Life you are, you become one with the all-omniscient, self-organizing life force you grow from, many call God, or simply Life.

It is about you, yourself, accepting the whole of you, the whole of who you are. In doing so, you are accepting the Universe. You are accepting that you are part of a greater, grander whole. And that therefore your life matters. It is a truly courageous act, as you are not placing the responsibility of your Beingness on anybody else’s shoulders, be those the shoulders of a person or a higher power. You are accepting the responsibility of being a human spirit. Your life is in your hands, and in the hands of the Universe. United.

Perhaps you too know this intimately — this experience of having to love yourself into Oneness with Life. We all have our own Self-love path to walk. The stories and details differ, but the longing to meet ourselves with reverence is universal.

For me it was acute leukemia. Experiencing a life-threatening illness is a deeply humbling experience. To deep down worry for your life, day after day after day, for months, breaks you somehow. You can’t help it. No matter how deeply you feel you’ve surrendered your fate to the will of God, to your soul’s path or dharma, or how determined you are as a person to survive, you can’t help but worry for your life. Deep down. You worry for your life and you worry about your family and how they will do without you. You worry about how your premature death may scar them for life — inflict a wound that may take forever to heal, or never heal. That your death may become a terrible burden they will carry for the rest of their days. Always. Impacting their lives forever. That’s just the way it is. At least it was in my case.

“My will is to live!” I shouted from the mountaintop, naked in the storm, rain hammering down, thunder shaking the air, lightning striking all around me. “My sincere will is to live! Yet my life is, as always, in Your hands!” I was determined to voice my human will to a higher force, no matter how vulnerable and weak I felt — to show that I meant it. To show I was willing to do my human part: LOVING MYSELF. LOVING MY FORM WITH ALL MY HEART — with the same tenderly fierce, unwavering love a mother holds for her newborn. Loving myself, sheltered in God’s arms.

Grappling with a deadly disease is like playing a game of ‘Spin the wheel.’ You use your human strength to manipulate the wheel, to manually turn it with your hands, using your muscles. Your will. Then you have to let it go and trust. Trust the spinning, the turning of the great wheel, the spiraling force. Trust the evolutionary order of things. Trust the divine. The design of the divine. A Higher Power. “I do wholeheartedly want to live!” you say with your innermost vigor, radiating the strength of your human spirit, and then you spin that wheel with all your inner might, though weak as you are in the flesh.

Deep down you know you can only do so much. You know it is a dance between two, yet uniting forces: your will, and Life’s will. So, you dance. You dance to the tune of your innermost resolve, and then you slow down into a cheek-to-cheek with Life, and you surrender into the sweet arms of the Divine, in total trust. As you and Life are, essentially, One. This is what surrender and self-love can feel like in the hardest of times.

Now, cancer-free and healing after my acute leukemia chemotherapies, and after the long fatigue of rehabilitation, one aspect of this deeply softening journey feels like Life has handed me a “talking stick,” kindly asking me to share. It says, “Your experience was deep and humbling. Please now, share, my beloved. Share your story so others may benefit. It will take both courage and vulnerability. But you can do it. We know you can.”

So that’s what I’m doing.

Sharing.

Sharing about Grace, Suffering, and Self-love ~ about the sacred art of Healing.

Wherever you are in your own journey, may you find the courage to love yourself as the divine creation you are, and to trust the dance between your will and the will of the greater whole ~ united by the law and love of Oneness, united in eternity.

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༄ Sóley White

August 2025 Iceland

Image credit: Unknown