When I was in my 20s, I remember always hearing the expression “love yourself”, “self love”, or “self love is so important”. I never truly understood what that exactly meant. I attempted to love myself through gifts, acts of service, and quality time. For those of you who know the book “The 5 Love Languages” you understand these terms (and for those who haven’t read this book, i highly recommend it). I would take myself to a spa, or I’d go out to eat and order my favorite food, buy myself a cushy pillow, or do something I love like going to the park to visit the horses. When I lived in Washington DC in my early 20s, I would go to Rock Creek Park to visit the stables where the mounted police officers kept their horses. It was a special place in the middle of a city where I could experience time in nature, time with animals, and kind people who appreciated me doting on their horses. But those were the ways that I understood how to show love to myself. I didn’t understand that it encompasses something much deeper. I’ll try to explain it in my own way so that maybe I can offer you support in finding new ways to love yourself and gain a deeper understanding of what this means.
Please don’t misunderstand or mistake my sharing of this information as any indication that I don’t think you know how to love yourself. It is only because it was such a struggle for me, that I want to share on this subject. I hope that for those of you who are feeling disconnected from being able to love yourself, that this might help you to gain a greater understanding and incorporate more love for you into your life. Of course, for the month of February, I wanted to talk about something that has to do with the concept of love because of Valentine’s Day. It can be a lonely holiday for many people, reminding us of loved ones from our past. For many others, it’s just an annoying marketing gimmick to sell people more stuff, and for others it’s a day to have an excuse to spend time with their loved ones.
Although these things that I was doing for myself were definitely expressions of love, and were all very important in caring for me, there were gaps that kept me from truly being able to hold myself and love myself in the way that I deserved. In relevance to health, this is incredibly important because love is not just about a feeling of love, and I think that’s where I struggled. I thought whenever I was in love and what that felt like, how do I love myself like that? Because that feeling was so deep, I would do anything for that person. When you think about love and what it encompasses, it includes respect, honor, selflessness, and when it comes to self-love, sometimes it has to include selfishness. I don’t mean selfishness in a bad way, I mean putting yourself first. I mean upholding your boundaries, sticking up for yourself, being compassionate with yourself, nurturing yourself when you are hurt or sad or lonely. For those of us who grew up in families or homes where these things were not practiced or modeled, it can be difficult to naturally do these things. We develop patterns that don’t exhibit love for ourselves, or honoring and respecting ourselves. This can affect the mind and the body. One particular example is with nutrition! We can choose to love ourselves through the foods we ingest. We can choose to love ourselves by having healthy boundaries when it comes to work schedules and bedtimes. We can honor ourselves by nourishing our soul and tending to our needs, including drinking water, scheduling mealtimes, and showing gratitude for our bodies rather than judging and criticizing our bodies. I do believe that self-loathing is one of the emotional causes of the development of dis-ease in the body, particularly cancer. This is just my theory, and for what it’s worth I’ve developed it for many years having watched close friends die at a young age from cancer. And from witnessing many others’ experiences with cancer. Now, I don’t feel it’s the only component that leads to it, but I do believe it’s a strong contributing factor. Individuals with patterns of self-destructive behaviors are practicing disrespect of their body, mind, and soul on a regular basis. There are other layers, but I truly believe putting energy towards mastering self-love could be a wonderful practice as a part of overall preventative care for the health of body, mind, and soul.
You’ve heard the expression “your body is a temple”, right? When we think of a temple it’s a building or a structure where we worship whatever it is we’re honoring and showing appreciation and gratitude to. We remove our shoes, we don’t leave garbage around, and we’re quiet when we’re in a temple. We aren’t creating raucous noise and disturbing the sacredness of the temple. We honor it by keeping it clean and maintained. We create altars and offer gifts, we pray to that which we’re worshipping.
With self-love, we can adopt a practice and philosophy of honoring ourselves and honoring the temple that our soul resides in, which is our body. Our emotions are connected to stress, sadness, grief, anger, hurt, shame, and guilt. These are emotions that lower our frequency when we are experiencing them. This is not to say that we shouldn’t experience them! It is healthy to experience and express emotions as they come up. However, it is not healthy to dwell on them, nor to dwell in the past, or live in the future. It is only the present moment where we can exist completely free from the burden of depression and anxiety.
The first thing that I would recommend you start your self-love practice doing is to establish a space in your home where you can honor yourself. This will be a place where you can meditate, do exercise, or read a good book. If cooking is nourishing for you, you can set up a space in your kitchen. Just a place in your home dedicated to honoring yourself and your self-care. Clear out any clutter. You can create an altar with just a small shelf or a small table. You can put some favorite items here including a favorite book, or journal with your favorite pen, a candle, incense, essential oils. You may have a deck of oracle cards, a yoga mat, meditation pillow, some blankets, a cozy chair with a lamp. Whatever it is that honors you in your practice of self-care and self-love.
The second thing I recommend doing is loving yourself through meditation. I remember the first time I had really felt the separation of my body and soul was during a meditation, and I could hear my heartbeat. It’s amazing – in Pennsylvania in a hermetically sealed home, it is so quiet you could hear a pin drop anywhere. So meditating there is a really interesting experience, because I can usually hear my heart beating when I meditate indoors in the states. In Costa Rica, I do not because you can’t hear your heart beating over all the sounds of nature! If you’re by the ocean, it’s the waves crashing on the beach, if you’re in the mountains it is all the insects and the birds chirping and vibrating. But anyways! Find yourself a quiet space and you can seek your heartbeat out. If you can’t hear it at all, you can put your fingers over your carotid artery on your neck. Or you can put your two fingers on your wrist over a main pulse point, and when you feel it, then you can start to listen for it. When you hear the heart beating, and you can go inside your body through visualization, seeing this muscle that’s pumping blood through your body is actually just a motor for the vessel that you’re existing in. The heart and the body are a part of the temple that we live in, but it’s not “me”. That was a very powerful moment, and I encourage you to connect with this practice of meditating, connecting with your body, listening to your heartbeat, acknowledging your mortality, acknowledging the limitations of your body, the limitlessness of the soul. This is a beautiful practice of self-love. Meditation is a way to connect to your subconscious mind, to your higher self, and to God, whatever God may be for you. We can call it universal life force energy, we can call it The Divine, we can call it just plain old energy. Whatever it is, meditation is a portal to tapping into this frequency and this energy that exists everywhere. It’s really important to meditate because it’s a time to commune with yourself. This is quality time with you! It is where you can open up conversations with your higher self and your subconscious mind, and God. You can ask questions, you can allow space for answers to come, allow yourself to feel feelings, allow yourself to have awareness come to you, that without that stillness and silence would never be heard over the noise.
The next thing that you can do to love yourself is honor your body through healthy food choices, and not partaking and ingesting poisons. I don’t mean cleaning products! I mean excessive white sugar, alcohol, nicotine, and foods that cause discomfort and inflammation after you consume them. It also includes drinking enough pure water and hydrating yourself and honoring yourself by going to bed at a reasonable hour, which ensures you wake up feeling refreshed for the next day.
You can love yourself through boundaries and speaking up for yourself. If you grew up in a home where boundaries were not respected, then you yourself most likely struggle with upholding your own boundaries and respecting others boundaries. The practice of not upholding boundaries that are important to you, compromises you. It may feel like you are doing something good by going out of your way. I’m not saying don’t go out of your way to help people or be of service, but not at the detriment of your own needs and your own self-care. I read in a book called “The Boundary Boss”, which I highly recommend, that upholding boundaries is an expression of love. It’s not only an expression of love for yourself, but towards the other individual. It is healthy to have boundaries. It is healthy to have a structure and a container of guidelines that represent the highest good for all. When you break boundaries, when you override your boundaries, this is where we become depleted and out of balance. Upholding boundaries is a part of sticking up for yourself, and you don’t have to be mean to enforce them. You can uphold boundaries with grace, love, kindness, compassion, and confidence and steadfastness.
Lastly, simply being there for yourself. Being there for you to comfort you, to nurture you in moments when our frequencies are low. When we are in deep sadness, when we are in doubt, when we are in fear, sometimes the voices aren’t nice. When we are angry, when we’re hurt, when we’re ashamed. Sometimes we don’t even take our own side. We’re never taught how to show up to ourselves in the same way we sought our parents to show up for us when we were children. Someone to come and hug us and tell us everything is going to be okay, someone to speak good words into our ears, to tell us how wonderful we are and how beautiful we are, how loveable we are, to remind us that we are worthy, that we are going to be okay, to ask us “what do we need?” in this moment, and then to give it to us! “Do you need a hug? Do you need some water? Do you need to scream and punch a pillow? Do you need to just cry? Do you need someone to just listen to you?” This is also known as inner child work, when we tend to ourselves during times of emotional distress. It would show up as a representation as our older selves, coming to support and nurture the child within us. This is usually a representation between the ages of 3 and 9 that we hold in our minds of ourselves as a child. If you were to think of yourself as a child, what photos, images, or experiences pop into your mind? It’s suggested that when you comfort that little child within, that you imagine them sitting there with you in that very moment. There are incredible books you can read, programs to participate in, and therapists who can support you on this journey. This is not my forte, however when I work with clients I am often referring to various practitioners as I support individuals on their healing journey. So please, if this article touched your heart in any way or called to you that you would like support in this realm, let me know and I will be happy to refer my resources on these subjects. I’m going to be adding a section on our resources tab on the website, so stay tuned for this information!
Remember that self-love is an expression of respect and honor, and that you must love yourself first before you can truly love anyone else. Happy Valentine’s Day! Go get yourself some Lily’s Chocolate and know that as long as you love yourself, you will always be loved, and you will never feel alone again.