Some of you are going to love this challenge and some of you are going to hate it, or just think I’m perfectly crazy, but in the newsletter I like to talk about themes or things that I’m seeing come up in clinic quite often. Because if I’m seeing it lots in clinic, you’ll be experiencing it, or know somebody that’s experiencing it.
What I’ve found with both female and males (so it’s not gender-specific) is that we actually struggle to tell ourselves that we love ourselves.
When I walk down Lambton Quay and get told to F*** off when I’m minding my own business and I see people screaming at one another. I think to myself, show compassion, what is happening for that person right now? I’m sorry they feel so overwhelmed by life right now. To be honest, I can understand why they would feel so overwhelmed, there’s so much going on for all of us right now!
A client gave me this great book on Self Love, and there’s an AmpCoil Journey on ‘self-love’ too. Every client that’s done the Ampcoil journey on ‘self-love’ ends up crying at the end of it, myself included. You know how I love evidence, and science, and love to have all the research. I was like “How can pulsed electromagnetic field therapy really improve a love of myself?”
We hear a lot about self-care, and we put self-care in the same box as loving ourselves. But you can do a lot of saunas, hot yoga, foot detoxes, dry skin brushing, eat really well, do your meditation or your mindfulness, and still not actually love yourself.
When I do Qigong you can see the different organs and how open and closed they are. What comes up for me when I’m at my heart, is that I can always be more open towards myself. When you’re looking at whether or not you love yourself, or when you’re going through a body scan and come to your heart, what do you see or feel?
What I see really often is that we’re not able to actually love ourselves. We’ve learned to love others. We’ve learned to serve. We’ve learned to get accolades for doing things for other people.
But how often do you PAUSE and stop and tell yourself, I love me! If you sit with that for a moment, what does that feel like? When was the last time you told yourself that you loved yourself? Do you wake up each day and tell yourself that you will love yourself? I’m going to be totally honest, until I started on this journey a few months ago, I didn’t. It didn’t even cross my mind to say “I love you” as I looked at myself in the mirror each day, or when I first woke up in the morning.
Where are you hearing those words from? If you’re in a romantic relationship, maybe you’re hearing it from your partner. Maybe you hear it from your parents or from your children. But if you live alone or even if you live with somebody, do they tell you that daily? Do you tell yourself that daily?
When you write gratitude and you’re grateful, and you’re thankful for things in your life, and the world that we live in, what do you say you’re grateful and thankful for about yourself? Do you write a list? Do you start the day, each day, thanking yourself and being grateful for your talents and the gift that you bring to this world? Or would that be considered arrogant, pride filled? What do you think about this?
So my challenge for you today is, just start this process. Do it for a day, do it for a week, do it for a month. But not self-care, but self-love. It can be as simple as starting the day and ending the day with, “I love you.”
I’m really pausing and breathing that in, then let’s start being grateful for some things about ourselves. How does that feel? How does your life change? Just pay attention, build awareness, and just have some fun with this challenge. You may already be doing it? You may not like this? And if you don’t like it, feel in to that. What don’t you like about this? Why don’t you like this challenge? What is it bringing up in you? It’s an interesting challenge, right? Let’s see what happens.