Roadmap to Self Love

“Your mistakes are different from my mistakes, but your innocence is the same as my innocence.” - A Course in Miracles

The journey towards self love is filled with stops and starts. It can be confusing as to why something that seemingly should be easy can be so difficult. It is a journey that can at times feel lonely, and one that can take a whole lifetime. However, it is a worthy and necessary endeavor and it is never to late to begin. I realized through the mirror of some tumultuous relationships in my 20’s that I had work to do around self-love and consumed a steady diet of self-help books looking for answers. I reached a major turning point though around the time I turned 40. Aging offers up some wonderful gifts. It’s a time when, if you have been a parent, your children may need you less and you have more time to prioritize your own needs and desires. It’s a time when you begin to assess your professional or service goals and think about how far you have come and where you would like to go. It’s also a time when our bodies will tell us if we haven’t been taking care of them as much as they need.

I was going through a little bit of all of this around 2017 and I decided to dig into the resistance I was feeling and take an honest look at the beliefs I was holding around how much I really deserved love and success in my life. Self love is so important because it has implications for both our personal goals/ desires and also our larger human community. It is very hard to claim what you want in life if deep down you don’t think you deserve it. Whatever beliefs we are holding on the inside we will find reflected on the outside in our lives in some way. And on a larger scale if we want to build a world in which everyone has value, we have to make sure that every part of ourselves is also valued. The compassion that you can show to others around you will ultimately be limited by the compassion you are able to give to yourself.

It was around this time in 2017 that I picked up a book of essential oil blends by Desiree Mangandog titled, “I Am Worthy”. One of the blends was called “I love myself”. It had a bunch of my favorite oils in it and I decided to prepare the blend and put it in a roll-on bottle. As I went to put the label on the bottle, it seemed sort of an audacious thing to write. “I love myself”. Did I actually love myself? Everyday as I reached for the bottle to roll it on my wrists, I saw and said those words, “I love myself”. I used that blend everyday for several months until it ran out. When I look back at that point in time and realize how far I have come on this journey, I realize that I was pretty far from believing those words as I said them each day, maybe some days more than others. But I was practicing loving myself. By doing that action each day, I was showing myself that I cared. This is what self-care is really doing for us. Though it is physically and mentally restorative to take time for yourself and have a bubble bath or take a stroll through a garden, get a massage, etc. It is also an important gesture you are making to yourself that says you are important and you really care for yourself, body and spirit. Self-care can initially be a crucial part of your self-love journey.

Over the last 5 years I have been working on another perilous leg of this journey, which is forgiving yourself for not being who you think you should be. As Maya Angelou puts it, “you have to forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.” At every point in your life you were doing the best you could with what you had at the time. This life is a journey of learning and exploration and you are allowed to learn through doing. You are allowed to learn through living, through trying. You have permission to learn from mistakes and dead ends. You are not required to be anything specific except yourself. This journey is not a race or a competition and it is okay to be wherever you are in your own process. That means that 5 years ago or 2 months ago or yesterday when you were a mess and everything seemed like it was falling apart and you took so many steps backward that you were behind the starting line again… you were allowed to be learning through that as well. Self love requires copious amounts of grace and forgiveness.

As I discussed in previous blogs, it’s important to not “should all over yourself”, because beliefs that we are not what we ‘should be’ are huge blocks to self love. These road blocks are the expectations we put on ourselves based on standards that society or our parents told us were acceptable and the very hard time we can give ourselves when we don’t measure up to them. My very first blog was about removing resistance and it is a huge part of the work I do in Biofield Tuning. When we are resisting what is because we don’t think it’s good enough, we don’t think we have enough money, we don’t think we look the right way, we don’t think we have the right relationships, then we cannot move into flow with that thing we are wanting. Resistance and flow are opposites. For the things we desire to flow to us and with us we first need to accept that where we are right now is perfect. An affirmation I use daily right now is “I accept myself as I am”. At first it may seem a less audacious proclamation than “I love myself”, but if you try it you will realize that to say it and really feel it is quite the feat. Can you really accept yourself as you are right in this moment? It is truly a breakthrough that will bring you to tears when you can. Other days it may seem elusive again, but you just keep trying every day. That’s it, that’s the journey. The reward is in the process because you never truly reach a summit. You wake up each day and accept where and who you are just as you do for the other people you love unconditionally, your children or your partner or your pets. You will thank yourself for it and your life will transform through that love.