Let’s Talk About Self-Love
So, what is the definition of self-love? We talk to our girlfriends about it. There are workshops you can buy for it. Books line the shelves with it. Podcasts podcast about it. For a concept that was pretty much unheard of a decade ago, you can’t seem to walk 5 steps without tripping over it.
To me, self-love is believing you deserve to love and be loved simply because you exist. It is trusting in your divine right to believe in yourself, love yourself, and seek and experience happiness, regardless of what others believe about you. It transcends physical beauty and is in alignment with your truest and most authentic self.
Only you can determine if you’ll allow yourself to open up to this kind of love, absorb it, and begin living as a person that believes it.
We struggle with self-love for a variety of different reasons, including our own and others’ expectations, the collective definitions of what “beauty” is, and also as a part of our own human experience. Everyone has their own individual reasons and experiences for why they feel the way they feel and this creates their own reality.
Understanding your own reality is important, but even more important is gaining the knowledge and insight to change your perspective on yourself. Learning to live as a person that believes in this divine right kind of looks like this:
You say no when saying no serves your best and highest good.
You say yes when saying yes serves your best and highest good.
You start engaging in behaviors that make the necessary changes in your daily life that support your best and highest good.
You stop apologizing for making decisions that serve your best and highest good.
You stop feeling bad for removing people from your life to serve your best and highest good.
You start speaking honestly, openly, and transparently about, well…everything (notice I didn’t say you should do this with no filter. Respect is still a necessity, and radical honesty can be achieved very easily while still being kind).
If you read the list above and snorted so loud that your coffee came out of your nose, answer the following questions for me
What would your life look like if you achieved even half of the list above?
Who in your life would champion those achievements for you? How does that make you feel?
Who in your life would your achievement aggravate? Why? Does the benefit they provide in your life outweigh the benefit of not having them in your life? Or, perhaps just keeping them on the outward fringes of your life, rather than completely out?
What is a list of the absolute worst that can happen if you began making decisions in alignment with the list above? On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the least awful and 10 being the most awful, what would you rate the level of fallout for each?
The thing is, you can’t really embody love of the self to its fullest if you can’t engage in complete honesty. Honesty is what informs everyone around you of what your intentions, boundaries, limits, and limitations encompass. When these things are made crystal clear, you are educating folks upfront regarding what works and what doesn’t work for you, which allows their expectations to form in alignment with your needs and desires. Do this on the front end of a relationship when you can. If you have to do it in the middle or on the back end, it’s much harder but certainly not impossible. It just takes more chutzpah, which I’ll bet you have in droves if you just dip into those reserves sitting in the depths of your belly.
Trust yourself. Believe in yourself. Love yourself.
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If you’re ready to begin your own journey of self-love, reach out. I can help with that.
