How To Start a Self-Love Practice
A crucial step on your journey.
What does it mean to love yourself?
Self-Love is learning to see yourself through the eyes of compassion.
Self-Love is undoing the judgment we learned to speak to ourselves with.
Self-Love is learning how to see yourself as God, or your higher self sees you.
Self-Love is empowering, renewing, and the medicine that delivers us from negativity and hatred toward self and others.
Self-Love is more powerful than any spiritual austerity based on self-denial.
I realized that something was not quite right when I was looking to the romantic partner in my life to make me feel a certain way. I was waiting for him to say those sweet words, or do that romantic thoughtful thing that would make everything perfect and would cause me to feel and know…Love. Sound familiar? Add to this that when others expressed a lot of love toward me it scared me, and caused me to just want to run away. After years of this, I really started to ask myself, what is all my spiritual practice truly for if I’m not able to accept, give, and receive love with ease?
The stone-cold truth is that others cannot love us more than we love ourselves because even if they do, we can only receive the amount of love we feel comfortable with. Hasn’t it happened to you that someone loves you so much it freaks you out? Why? Because it’s not possible to accept more love than we have given ourselves. It’s common that when something does shift inside and our hearts open to receive the love of another we often cry, and that’s simply what happens when we let in more love than we have allowed ourselves to accept.
How much love we can accept from others = How much love we allow ourselves to receive = How much love we ourselves have become = How much love we allow ourselves to feel toward ourselves.
Self-Love is not just another thing to add to your list of self-improvement practices. The improved version of you is one who is whole because they know the love that they are, not because they finished a bunch of self-improvement tasks. Cultivating Self-Love is an art to practice and refine in a world where the opposite is not encouraged. Consciously practicing Self-Love every day will begin to create new spaces in every area of your life where love can flow unobstructed. It will become second nature and the medicine that comes in when life becomes difficult.
WE LEARN HOW TO LOVE THE WHOLE WORLD BY LEARNING TO LOVE OURSELVES. — Matt Khan
Fill your cup first and watch the rest flow.
The key to self-love is to take good care of yourself of course! Care for your physical, mental, and emotional, wellbeing is essential. Definitely fill your cup first, because we all know that we are of no real use to anyone when we’re giving from an empty and eventually resentful cup.
But beyond naps, bubble baths, and reading a good book with a cup of tea, Self-Love becomes truly profound when we examine how it is that we talk to ourselves, and what it is that we are longing for others to tell us.
The sweetness of falling in love with yourself.
Below is an invitation to falling deeper in love with yourself with a simple and daily affirmation practice. Do you think it is by coincidence that you are here? Maybe your heart has been looking for this sweet medicine for a long time.
The 21-Day Practice:
- AWARENESS & TAKING INVENTORY. Sit with yourself and take inventory. Write down what in your life right now is draining, tiring, or you have resistance around. Now write down what you feel excited about, what lights you up, what you love to do, and what makes you happy. For the next 21 days, I want you to focus more on the second list. Trust me. Instead of going into problem-solving mode and focusing on that first list — focus on doing more of the other stuff as much as possible, the stuff that charges and lights you up. It seems counterintuitive, but filling your cup will have you approaching that first list of annoying things with a whole new perspective.
- WORDS OF LOVE. Now write down the words you have most wanted to hear as a child, as a lover, as a wife, as a student, as an employee, as a mother, etc. Write down these words in I AM, or YOU ARE statements. This list can be as long as you want it to be.
- THE PRACTICE. If you have time alone you will look in the mirror and say these affirmations to yourself out loud while looking into your eyes. You can also record yourself saying these affirmations, sit in meditation and listen to them, you can also softly speak them to yourself if you feel shy about someone possibly hearing you. Observe any feelings of shame, embarrassment, or guilt arising as you tell yourself these loving words. Breathe into the emotions and let them be released, they are only the past.
- COMMIT. Make a calendar where you physically tic of your Self Love 21-day practice. You can do 21 days, and then follow it with another 21 days to really drive this new loving habit home.
- SHOW DON’T TELL. Speak to no one about this practice. Trust me here again! Let others wonder what is different about you and let that love silently flow from your heart to theirs.
If you have accepted this invitation, I congratulate you! Your loving and open heart is what the world really needs. Please let me know how it goes!
With Love,
Rocio
