The road to loving yourself is lifelong and can be met with a lot of resistance. I have learnt this recently, as I’m on a huge healing journey. I want to be a better person for myself, my friends and my family. The thing that keeps popping up is self-love. We must love ourselves to live a life filled with joy and abundance. I hope this inspires you to learn to love yourself.
What is Self-Love
What comes up for you when you think about self-love? I bet a lot of questions run through your mind. I think a lot of people think they love themselves, but when you think about it deeply, you might realize you have a lot of work to do in this area. Self-love is loving yourself for exactly who you are. Not the image you portray at work or in other social settings, you love who you truly are at your core. That means you love the good and bad. You see your shadows as gifts to grow and learn and you know the good parts of you are gifts and you want to share them with the world. Self-love is the ability to quiet the negative noise and love yourself inside and out.
How Learning to Love Yourself Can Change Your Life
I take time each week to think about the blog post topic I’ve chosen, and this week the topic was loud and clear. Everywhere I looked self-love kept coming up. I said ok Universe, that’s my topic. After I choose my topic, I sit and brainstorm what areas I want to cover. I realized that most, if not all my favourite teachers, books, podcasts, and meditation’s main message is self-love. This couldn’t be a coincidence. Self-love is the path to a life of freedom, joy and abundance. It is the foundation of our happiness. If we don’t fully love ourselves we will be in a constant battle with our mind and our heart.
Lessons Of Self-Love
Louise Hay’s book, You Can Heal Your Life, has to be by far my favourite book for teaching self-love. She walks you through the process step by step and teaches in a way that anyone can understand. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to change their life from the inside. She believes and teaches that no matter what problem someone is having, the one thing she recommends they work on is Loving the Self. She believes Love is the miracle cure for anything. She says “having great respect for ourselves and gratitude for the miracle of our bodies and our minds” is self-love. Not vanity or arrogance, which she says is fear, not love. In the book, she gives examples of how she feels love and ways people don’t love themselves. I found this very helpful. I wouldn’t have thought of some of them as ways we don’t love ourselves. It was eye-opening. Here are some examples of ways we don’t love ourselves:
- We mistreat our bodies with food, alcohol and drugs
- We criticize ourselves
- We procrastinate on things that would benefit us
- We live in Chaos
- We create debt and burdens
- We are afraid to charge a decent price for our services
I encourage you to make a list of things you love and are grateful for and ways you don’t love yourself.
My Road To Self Love
In this Chapter of my life I have decided enough is enough. I deserve better and I will create the life I have always dreamed of. I started with talk therapy. It was a great jumping-off point for me to open myself up to change and my past traumas. I have fully committed to taking care of myself after 8 years of pregnancy, post-partum, nursing babies and having toddlers. I still have a toddler, but I am finding ways to take good care of myself anyway. Every day I make sure to nourish my mind, body, spirit and social connections. Social connections is the one I lack a bit in. My kids are still quite young and I am trying to start two businesses. This will come in time! Here are some of my favourite ways I practice self-love:
- Limit Alcohol
- Move my body almost every day
- Eat nourishing foods 80-90 percent of the time
- Read
- Speak kindly to myself
- Meditate
- Spend time in nature
- Work towards goals
- Do inner work
- Self reflect
- I am honest with myself
- I Forgive
My Favourite Self-Love Affirmations
Affirmations have become a huge part of my life. They can instantly take me from a negative thought to a good feeling for the future. They have taught me that our minds can play tricks on us to think negatively. Here are some of my favourite affirmations that promote self-love:
- I approve of myself
- My feminine energy is beautifully balanced
- I am blessed beyond my fondest dreams
- I forgive you for not being the way I wanted you to be, I forgive you and set you free
- I welcome flexibility and stability into every area of my life
- I’m willing to change
- I’m willing to release old negative beliefs
The work will never end if you are looking deep within your soul. I encourage you to get out of your own way and change your life.
xo Alayna
