How many unfinished journals do you have lying around?
How many meditation practices have you started and slowly trailed off from?
And how much guilt does just reading these sentences bring up in you?
If it was ok, to disregard yourself like this, you wouldn’t feel so bad.
So let’s talk about when you are going to stop letting yourself down, stop putting yourself last, and stop making excuses.
You are freaking amazing! Plain and simple. The truth is you are pure energy love. Spiritual substance (pure love) made manifest.
So maybe you have forgotten this. Maybe you think you are just human and life is happening to you. Maybe you think that you have to look, act, be a certain way to really be spiritual and receive all the blessings there are for you. Well, I’m here to tell you, that you are perfect the way you are. Faults and all.
So what does this have to do with letting yourself down? Well… everything. When we don’t value ourselves, we don’t show up for ourselves. When we don’t value ourselves, we put everyone else first. When we don’t value ourselves, we don’t claim what is ours. When we don’t value ourselves, we make excuses.
When we value ourselves, everything is different. Our mindset is different, our energy is different, our lives are different. When we value ourselves we show up as the incarnations of the Source that we are. When we value ourselves, we value others. This means we value their unique connection to Source as well as their choices for themselves. This also means we stop taking responsibility for them, their lives, their actions. And shift that sense of responsibility back to ourselves.
When we value ourselves, we no longer feel that we are taking anything away from anyone else. We start to see that time devoted to ourselves is how we give back to others. Your biggest value to yourself and others is your ability to be in alignment with yourself and your Source. When you are in alignment you radiate out pure love energy that invites others to raise their own vibration.
Now, why haven’t you stuck with all of those self-nurturing activities you’ve started? Simple, you don’t value yourself enough to commit to yourself. If you are like me, that stung when I realized it. And I resisted it hardcore. But it was true.
My biggest block? I was afraid to show up for myself and see how unworthy I was. You see, I always chose myself from a place of fighting for myself. But never from a place of loving myself. And those are two totally different perspectives. I would finally let myself have something I felt I deserved, only after I had fought for it, whether it be with myself or someone else. So the transition into choosing to love myself was not, and still isn’t always, easy.
I was afraid to slip into that bubble bath and just be with myself. At least with meditation, I could detach from myself. But in the tub… it was just me. And what if I wasn’t or was something I did or didn’t want to be? It was uncomfortable in the beginning to be present with just me. I had let so many people take up real estate in my head, telling me what was wrong with me. And even worse I had created an inner dialogue that said I was never doing enough or being enough. Like most people, I set the stage in my mind and just allowed everyone else to fill in the blanks. Like most people, I was my biggest critic. And people started reacting to that energy.
It didn’t matter what I said. Everything is energy first. How I felt inside and how I emitted that energy to the world was how people responded to me. You’ve experienced that. Someone is telling you one thing, but you get that vibe that something else is going on. And we often translate that energy into “they are lying”. And they are lying, to themselves. Just like we are at times when we are giving our love to others from an empty place.
People can feel the difference between what we are saying and the energy we are emitting. That’s what’s going on when we feel unappreciated, unloved, unseen, etc. People are reacting to the place of internal emptiness we are maintaining.
We are born lovers. We seek to love others, as a reflection of our own self-love. This is not what we are taught though. We seek to love others because it makes us feel good. But if we are not loving ourselves, we never really feel good when we give that empty love to others. Maybe for a brief moment, but then it is gone. Because it is not sustainable.
So how do you start loving yourself?
Well first, let yourself be aware of it. So often I work with women who don’t realize that’s their core issue, they’ve gotten really good at “putting lipstick on a pig” so to speak. In essence, they’ve become masters of going through the motions.
- Always have an audiobook playing when they go in the tub
- Chatting with someone at their pedi
- Going to yoga class but skipping the mediation part
There is nothing wrong with these things, if you are doing it from a place of true enjoyment. But often we do it from a place of distraction.
Second, start small. Commit to 3 or 5 small acts of self-love every day.
- Look in the mirror and say I love you every time you brush your teeth
- Put cuticle oil on every time you brush your teeth
- Keep a nice smelling lotion or salt scrub on your bathroom counter, and use it every time you wash your hands
- Stop and take 5 deep breaths
- Drink enough water
- Say no to one thing that you don’t need to do because someone else can
- Listen to your intuition, even if it’s just for traffic directions
- Let someone do something for you
- Massage your feet
- Listen to your favorite music
- Listen to your favorite guided meditation
- Write in your journal for 5 minutes and drink a cup of tea or a glass of wine
There are endless ways to practice self-love. It may be uncomfortable at first, but over time, you will become used to the frequency of love. And soon you will be in alignment with your Source energy, emitting a high vibration frequency and inviting (energetically) others to join you. And this my friends, is the greatest gift you have to offer.
