Falling in Love with SELF
What does it mean to love yourself? Really. Let’s sit together for a minute and talk about the power of self-love for us as spiritual, emotional, and physical beings. In this blog, I’m sharing my favorite tips for developing a self-love practice and some questions to help you get started.
Why is self-love so important?
Self-love is not just important—it’s absolutely essential to effectively open yourself up to the possibilities ahead of you. If you aren’t open and encouraging of the most brilliant future you can imagine, you won’t receive it.
Self-love is more than just love. It’s a commitment to care, intimacy, and attention you give to yourself. When you have it, or are cultivating it, you’re holding up a mirror to your own potential and saying, “Damn right you’re worth it.” Doesn’t that sound beautiful? This starts with giving yourself permission to do so.
Why is self-love so difficult?
In short, because every damn body makes it that way. We are not taught to value our thoughts, minds, and bodies as wholly as we value those of others, especially if you are a person of color. We are instead taught to seek approval, defer our opinions, and see our own needs as an afterthought. It is encouraged in our society for everyone to repress their own power by denying them confidence. For Black femme folx, self-love is even seen as an act of radical defiance. It is punished.
The story you tell yourself about the love you deserve is what informs the way you’ll allow others to treat you. For society, it’s easier when you don’t love yourself. Self-love is difficult because when we don’t love ourselves, no one else is obligated to love us well either.
Deep questions about self-love
If you’re ready to invest your energy in a self-love practice, I want to challenge you, right now, to go in with both feet. Immerse your whole self in the process of developing this practice. Make it a commitment as deep as the way you love your partners, as intimate as your most sacred connections, and offer yourself the spiritual openness of divinity in connecting to yourself.
The following five questions are a space from which you can begin. Use them in whatever way feels good for you, or thank and dismiss them if they’re not serving your loving purpose right now.
How can I speak up to celebrate or challenge the things that matter to me?
When is my next opportunity to put myself first without guilt?
Where can I show myself my full and undivided attention?
What fuels my passion and interests internally? Externally?
Do I value my joy and pleasure?
Some of these questions might send you on a WHOLE journey—and that’s okay! You might also find yourself with a clear answer that does not open a door into contemplation. Invite that clarity, it’s leading you toward fulfilling self-love with focus.
Three ways you can ignite the sparks of self-love in your life
So what’s next? That’s totally up to you and the most excellent part of it is you can’t get it wrong. I’ve included three of my favorite ways to inspire self love in my own life. These are the things that, when we lean into them, help us see ourselves for our rawest, most radiant selves.
Put pleasure on a pedestal
Yeah, I mean sex. But what I don’t mean is restrictive sex or the homogenous concept of sex as only a penetrative two-person act. Pleasure, sex, and intimacy are critically undervalued in our society and, to be honest with you, in our own internal worlds too.
Set aside some time to feel things out, literally. Choose self-pleasure as a way to reconnect with passion and intimacy. This may take a few forms. Try masturbation and intimate touch (with or without the goal of orgasm), explore fantasies through aids (like porn in audio, story or visual form), and intimately re-introducing yourself to what sex and pleasure mean when you reclaim them as a practice for you and only you.
Explore shadow work
Jungian psychology identifies 8 parts of our unconscious mind, and the most often neglected is the shadow self. This part of you is something that is subconsciously pushed away through shame or judgment throughout your life. Your shadow self is made up of these rejected and forgotten parts.
To begin exploring your shadow self, you can go it alone to truly dig into the deepest parts of shame and past trauma—but you can also choose to start the work in individual therapy with a therapist who is experienced in the emotional and often spiritual impact of shadow work. This work can help you to unleash the purest form of self-love by fostering self-acceptance that’s unconditional within you.
Date Yourself
What’s your perfect date look like? If you’ve never done it (or even if you have), take yourself on that exact date to the best of your ability. When we date, we are courting someone else’s interest and compassion with our own affection and curiosity. Why not give that experience to yourself?
Dating yourself opens up a dialogue of curiosity and attraction to understanding in your life that forces your hand in treasuring your time.
During these dates, you can carve out the time and energy to put yourself on a pedestal and begin to truly listen to the brilliance of, well, you.
Are you ready to embrace your why?
Begin to reconnect with self-love today. If you’re ready to open yourself up to the power of therapeutically and intentionally loving yourself, I’m here to help you connect with that path.
