The Reflection

I’ve been experiencing several of those now-more-than-ever moments over the past two-plus years. You know the kind of situation… where it feels vitally important to finally get some things in order or to make some much-needed changes in certain areas of life. At times, it feels like everything is riding on my ability to follow through. Yet, when I put that kind of pressure on myself, I often end up spinning my wheels and don’t make any meaningful progress. Can you relate?

But in many ways, I’m fortunate. My training as a counselor and life coach keeps me in the conversation, asking myself, “What’s in the way of having what I most want right now?” Mostly, I’m in the way — buying into some limiting belief, either actively or passively resisting taking action, or not taking responsibility for myself in some way. These are the unloving ways I create internal distress or inhibit my progress. Then, I get upset with myself for doing so, and the cycle repeats again.

What is loving to me is to take 100% responsibility for myself — 24/7. This doesn’t mean I’ll feel good all of the time. But if I’m the one in my own way and causing my suffering, I can do something about that. If something is happening externally that is impacting me, whether I like the situation or not, I can still choose to be loving to me. Sometimes, that includes taking action on behalf of myself or another. Sometimes that means just being there with and for myself, while feeling all the feelings about the situation, including my sense of helplessness to change it.

Now more than ever, it is time to learn how to love yourself. I’ve been carving out a path to self-love for over 30 years, and I’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks and months about how you can embark on your own journey to self-love.

Let’s Practice

Start to build a loving relationship with yourself.

The next time someone or something upsets you in some way, ask yourself 3 questions:

1. What’s my part in this upset?
2. How am I relating to myself that is adding to the pain?
3. What would be a loving response toward myself instead?

Then, take the action(s) you discovered.

The Reflection

“I’m growing despite the pain.” I said this recently to a friend while referencing the death of my father earlier this year. We were talking about the difficult circumstances that often accompany these kinds of life passages.

The phrase reminded me that most of my adult life has been spent learning and practicing how to relate to life challenges in a way that furthers my growth and evolution. Sometimes, admitting that I’ve used painful experiences to grow feels morbid to say, but, mostly, this mindset has guided me, and I embrace the opportunity to benefit from the many ways life opens us up to hard-earned wisdom. 

In the early days of my growth path, I would often experience these challenges as intense upheavals accompanied by severe emotional turmoil, or by seeing myself as a victim. Experiences were fraught with amplified suffering — the kind of that occurs at your own hand by adding a dose of shame, blame, judgment, and/or resistance. The circumstances were hard enough. How I was relating to them made them even harder. The distressful states would last days or weeks. And they occurred so habitually, I didn’t believe there could ever be another way to experience them, let alone to be able to recover more quickly.

Things shifted greatly when I prioritized being loving to myself during difficult times and learned how to be more present and caring toward myself… in all ways. The improvement throughout my life shows me why it’s worth the effort to commit to a life lined with inner work, including learning to love yourself as the ultimate focus. Nothing can replace being there for yourself in real time while dealing with the sh*t sandwiches that inevitably show up along the way.

Let’s Practice

Imagine what someone who loved you would do for you if you were in distress. Do this for yourself. ‘Try on’ being there for yourself when life is hard and when feelings come up, no matter what those feelings are.

The Reflection

When I work with clients around self-love, we talk about the importance of making loving themselves their highest priority. Invariably they ask, “But isn’t loving myself selfish? What about everyone else in my life? What about my responsibilities?”

There’s a big difference between making yourself your highest priority and making yourself your only priority. It is indeed selfish to prioritize only your wants and needs in your relationships. But making yourself your highest priority is actually a generous position to take, because you will never be able to truly give to others when you act from a sense of obligation or sacrifice or just to “look good.”

When you make loving yourself your highest priority, you will come to every encounter already filled with love and know how to stay true to yourself along the way. You’ll share your love out of a genuine desire to be loving. There’s nothing selfish about that.

Let’s Practice

Make two lists:

1. List 10 ways that prioritizing other things or people (over yourself) negatively impacts you.
2. List 10 ways your life will improve when you make loving yourself your highest priority.

The Reflection

These days, I’m aspiring to be more present and precise with how I put words to thoughts or experiences. There’s something more genuine and vulnerable about taking the time to do that. For example, we often hear the phrase, “Everything happens for a reason.” Currently, I find myself irritated by that statement. What fits better for me is the notion that the things that happen or the experiences we have are valuable prompts for self-reflection. Maybe that’s what the statement means, but I think words lose their meaning when we overuse them — they become rote sound bites we apply to everything.

And then there’s the timing of delivering such statements. Despite our good intentions, when we say, “Everything happens for a reason,” the statement can land in a quite unloving way for someone who’s in the midst of one of life’s storms. In my experience, whatever growth or learning we glean from difficult circumstances is often harvested in hindsight — and, especially, after we’ve had time to digest and metabolize what happened.

Let’s Practice

In your communications with others, try slowing down and giving some space to your thoughts as they become words. Allow yourself time to recognize your thoughts so you can say what you mean and become more transparent in your communications. Watch what happens next and consider how that deepens your connections with others.

The Reflection

It has been a rough couple of years here in Earth School. For many people, multiple areas of life are up for grabs — career, health, relationships, finances. Personal bandwidth is operating at an all-time low… and frankly, what it takes to thrive seems far away and rapidly shifting.

In our current culture, productivity is valued over all else. But from where (inside) are we doing all the doing? Who we are being is often overshadowed in the name of productivity. Our worth is automatically tied to two things: 1) how much we do and 2) what we do. That double pressure sets up and reinforces a mentality of conditional acceptance of self (and others) located outside of ourselves. The measuring stick is found in modern praise metrics such as, ‘likes’ and ‘follows’.

I believe a great transformation around what we value is well underway. The intensity of the last couple of years is reshuffling the priority deck for many. Learning to love yourself in practice, not just theory, is the medicine of the moment.

More than a decade ago, I was talking to a friend about what felt like the emergence of “a new way of being” on the planet… a way of valuing people that isn’t defined by what they can do for us. Knowing that our value is intrinsic — that it can’t be earned or measured by numbers and norms — is part of this shift. And here we are! This new way of being is finally arriving.

So… How are we being with and to one another? Let’s make the most of this new way of being by doing the inner work that will allow us to be more loving to ourselves and, therefore, more loving to each other.

Let’s Practice

Let’s take this on together. Join me for a deep dive into learning to love yourself. Contact me today to join my ongoing Loving Yourself 6-week group program. Because we learn best through experience and in the presence of like-hearted others, come ready to participate and lean into the opportunity to level up your lived experience.

The Reflection

Building a loving, reliable and consistent relationship with ourselves is what allows us to show up and live a meaningful life. What constitutes a meaningful life varies among people, but living one is a universal desire. A common ingredient of a meaningful life is living our life with love.

We reach for our dreams and goals not with full confidence that we’ll achieve them, but with full confidence that we’ll be there for ourselves when life gets hard, when we want to quit, or when we fail. With that full confidence, we know we can pick ourselves up and dream again.

A loving relationship with ourselves is a prerequisite for loving others — both those we know and those we don’t. After all, that’s where the love comes from: within our own wise, compassionate heart. How can you expect to share love with another if you have no (or limited) experience of loving yourself? When we don’t love ourselves, we spend most of our energy trying to get love from others. If or when we do get it, there’s no place inside for love to land — like we have a hole in our love bucket. We keep trying to get more because the love never seems to last.

Loving our self is the only way to heal from the wounds we received early in life. We have all been shaped by our early life experiences. From some of those experiences, we created strategies that were protective at the time, but they turned into patterns that continue to play out in adulthood. Those strategies and patterns became unnecessary and maladaptive, ultimately blocking our happiness and negatively impacting our relationships with others. Since we can’t go back and change the experiences we’ve had, we are left with two choices: 1) continue to suffer by reliving the painful patterns, or 2) relate to ourselves NOW in a loving, caring, parental way — by giving ourselves the love now that was missing and needed back then.

Let’s Practice

When you feel triggered by another person’s unloving behavior or by a life circumstance that feels difficult and/or challenging, instead of mentally making your case against the other person or situation, take a slow deep breath. Then ask yourself, “What does this part of me, the part that’s feeling the pain, need from me right now? What would be a loving way I could relate to or interact with myself right now?” Allow yourself to show up for yourself as the ideal loving parent or friend we’ve all wished we had in times of distress.