Put On Your Baby Face

“The basic truth about you is ‘I am loveable.’

Everybody’s basic truth is ‘I am loveable.”

Robert Holden, Loveability

For many codependents the very basic truth of “I am loveable” is extremely hard to swallow. Seems odd doesn’t it? We all want love, we all want to be loved and yet we don’t want to believe or to admit that we are indeed loveable. It’s self-sabotage beyond comprehension. So how do we end our denial about our personal Loveability and come to accept it?

We return to our baby face. Babies are natural. They don’t do anything to be loveable. In fact they do a lot of things that we don’t find loveable—like spitting up, pooping on themselves and screaming at 3:00 AM—and yet we still think they are adorable. Why is that? Well, it has to do with how deep-down inside of ourselves we truly define loveable.

Babies are loveable, despite their behavior, because deep-down inside of ourselves we define loveable in terms of being and not doing. Real love looks beyond behavior and sees only the beauty of a being. In this case, that being we define as a baby. This “being” is pure. It has no hidden agendas, no need to manipulate or coerce and no need to please us into loving it. Inside it naturally knows that it is loveable and that being loveable is effortless.

Robert Holden, in his book Loveability, goes on to say “Babies haven’t put anything on themselves yet. They have no masks, no personas, no armor, and no dark glasses. They are still wearing what Zen Buddhist call the Original Face. They aren’t putting on a face for the world to see. What you are witnessing is their true nature. They aren’t trying to be someone, to be nice, to look good or to be interesting. There are no pretenses. There is no deceit. There is no attempt to create a pleasing image. They aren’t trying to be loveable; they just are.”

No one should have to try to be loveable because the truth is that we all “just are.” Unfortunately, as we grow from being babies into being small children, we learn otherwise from adults. We learn that being loveable isn’t about “being,” it’s about “doing.” In the process, we are stripped of our Original Face and we are led to believe that our essence, our very being who we are, isn’t good enough to qualify as loveable.

So we need to turn the clock back. If our very being was good enough to qualify as loveable when we were first born, then it is still good enough to qualify as loveable to this very day. It’s never too late for us to return to our Original Faces. We can stop putting on masks and we can stop pretending to be anything other than our most natural selves.

In the process, we can learn to stop caretaking or pleasing people in order to win their “You are loveable as long as you please me” seal of approval. We didn’t have to caretake or people-please anyone to be loveable as babies and we don’t have to do it now, either. We don’t have to try to look good or to be interesting. We already do look good and we are naturally interesting—with no effort. The only effort we need to put into being loveable is letting go of our misconceptions and then simply being ourselves.

So take off the masks, throw away the armor, trade-in your false persona and remove the dark glasses. Allow the real, naturally loveable you to shine through. It won’t take long before you start loving yourself without all of your make-up, props and manipulative gimmicks; and it won’t take long before other people start loving the natural you, too. Everyone who counts loves us when we are wearing our Original "Baby" Faces!