Tammie“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi
If you identify any of the below take a moment to ground this in your awareness so when you notice it happening again, you can challenge the block or replace it with something more useful. This is a process so just think about how long it’s taken to build this barrier to self-love, it might take a little while to turn it around.
- Perfectionism
- Judgement
- Guilt
- Repressed Emotions
- Beliefs
- Comparisons
- Competition
- Undeserving
- Dishonesty
- Lack of self-forgiveness
When you start to act more loving to yourself you will ignite a renewed relationship with yourself and step onto a path to a blossoming path towards loving horizons. You will also begin to program your subconscious mind with a new way of relating with yourself.
Loving yourself may involve pampering and treating yourself in luxurious ways, yet it may also include less glamorous endeavors, for self-love is about doing what most serves you at a given time, and honoring and respecting yourself accordingly.
Loving yourself could be:
- Cleaning your home, organizing papers and accounts, eating healthy food, paying bills, clearing debts, etc.
- Seeking the healing, insights, and support that will help you release the attitudes, encumbrances, and negative emotions that keep you from experiencing the wonder of your true self.
- Ending sabotaging patterns, habits, or addictions.
- Changing self-limiting beliefs.
- Setting new inspiring and enlivening goals, raising your standards, and reaching for more.
- Doing ‘nothing’; spending time relaxing, reflecting, de-stressing, and simply ‘being’ to allow greater intimacy and connection with yourself.
- No longer sacrificing to please others.
- Respecting boundaries and saying ‘no’ when it feels right to.
- Not settling for less or compromising your dreams or values.
- Living somewhere that you truly love, or transforming, decorating, or renovating your existing home to surround yourself with an environment that is beautiful, meaningful, and heart-warming.
- Nourishing and caring for your body, such as eating healthy food and exercising regularly. You might join a gym, get a personal trainer, or begin fun healthy activities like salsa, yoga, or a new sport or activity like hiking or running.
- Treating yourself to the pleasures of massage, a facial, pedicure, beauty treatments, or a new hair-do.
- Buying new clothes that reflect your truer self.
- Taking up or renewing a creative hobby or passion, be that singing, writing, walking, painting, sailing, or photography, for example.
- Being honest and intimate with yourself, and listening to and honoring your feelings.
- Going on weekends away, short breaks, and holidays to inject greater fun, happiness, and adventure into your life.
- Being in touch with friends and loved ones, and expressing the love you have for them, which will be nourishing not just to them, but to you as well.
- Speaking kindly to yourself, seeing your value and goodness, affirming your positives, and being grateful to yourself.
- Having a night out on the town: going out for a fabulous dinner, dancing, to the movies or theatre, whether alone, with a friend, or romantic partner.
- Meditating and allowing time for greater connection with yourself and quieten the voice of ego.
- Being true to yourself, upholding principles, and standing your ground.
- If you tend to save or hoard money, it could be having a carefree ‘splurge’.
- Treating yourself does not need to be a great expense, however, and can be having breakfast in the garden on a sunny morning, taking a walk in the afternoon, having a bubble bath, a candlelight dinner in, going for a swim, or watching the sunset.
- Spending time in nature to bask in its beauty and grace. We all have favorite nature spots. For some, it is the ocean side, for others the beauty of the bush and for some, it is to walk in the countryside.
- Appreciating yourself for all your gifts, qualities, strengths, and achievements, and having compassion and love for any perceived ‘ugly sides’, weaknesses, stresses, trials, and tribulations.
The Self-Appreciation Technique
If you are not receiving acknowledgment, recognition, or appreciation from others in your life where you might like it, it can reflect where you are denying giving that to yourself.
Take some time at the end of your day to either write down, or say to yourself in the mirror:
- At least 5 qualities you appreciate about yourself (perhaps that you witnessed that day, or perhaps from a past time or event – whatever comes to heart and mind). Recognize and acknowledge positive qualities, gifts, attributes, strengths, talents, successes, and achievements, where and how you make the world a better place simply by being in it, your love, your care, your desire and willingness to grow, and so on.
- At least 5 things you are grateful to yourself for (again, either that you are grateful for from that day, or from a past time, or your life in general – whatever comes to mind). Own and acknowledge the good that you are. Appreciate and be grateful for you! Your goodness, innocence, and light are the truth of who you are. Whatever ‘mistakes’ you may have made in your life, born perhaps of pain, ego, fear, hurt, anger, or being lost, fragmented and self-loathing, know that these mistakes are not who you are. Have compassion for yourself. Forgive yourself. Look to the truth of who you are, the light, and you will begin to feel better and better about yourself, for this is your true nature, and the more you recognize it, the more it will blossom and radiate in your life.
I wish you all the best on your journey,
