Why do you even want to love yourself? How does it help with anything, or is it just a woo-woo concept? There is a continuum of self-love and there’s one specific place I recommend starting on the continuum. Listen in to find out more.
So last week, just as a little bit of a recap, we talked about why loving yourself can actually be quite complicated when you have endured trauma, because even though Children, babies are born fully loving the world adds on conditioning to us and we learn to judge and we learn to loathe ourselves and it makes sense.
So if you want to know why, go back to episode 147 self love can be complicated to, understand more of those details. But today I wanted to, I’m going to jump into why do we even want to love ourselves in the first place? What purpose does it serve?
And just for full disclosure, I had been actively in coaching getting coached, listening to coaching calls, becoming a coach, practicing coaching for probably three or four years before I really understood this concept. So a hundred percent zero shade to you if you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why, why do I even want this? Because that’s where I was. I wanted to kind of act my way, take, take the actions into.
Getting the results that I wanted without really embodying the feelings and the emotions that were required to go along with that. So I totally get it. I myself felt like it was fluffy and unnecessary and it’s like, yeah, yeah, of course we want to love ourselves, but that’s not for me. It’s too hard and I’ll never be able to.
So I just want to tell you that if that is you, there is hope because now I’m not going to say that I’m a hundred percent great at this, but I love myself so much more, so much more deeply. I’m so much more ready to come to my own rescue, to be my own cheerleader, to be a friend to myself. And I genuinely did not understand why that was so important until I was able to do it.
And then I was like, Oh, all those times when people said, you have to have your own back, you have to be your own best friend. You got to love yourself. You can’t hate yourself to whatever, to, uh, you know, less weight or to more money or whatever it is that you’re working toward. And it was like, logically, I was like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
But in experience, I hadn’t done it yet. So I didn’t know. So this is the episode where I want to really encourage you to open yourself up to the fact that it might actually be worth it. It might not be the fluffy idea that you’ve been thinking it is, and maybe you haven’t, and that’s beautiful and wonderful.
So why do you want to love yourself? I actually would love it. If you would pause this podcast, if you can, if it’s safe to do so and really think about that answer for you, because I think the answer is going to be different for all of us. Why do you want to love yourself? Or do you not? Because if that’s where you’re at, that’s okay to just be there, be with the, I don’t want to love myself that if that is what is in integrity for you, then be with that.
Okay. I hope you paused the episode. I hope that you thought about that and what your personal answer is and whatever it is, it’s beautiful and wonderful. I’m going to offer you a few reasons why. You might want to love yourself. And the first reason is that it feels good. It just feels better to love ourselves.
It feels better to just love, period, even if it’s not yourself. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But when you increase the amount of love in your life, you are the one that gets to feel the love and it feels amazing. Now in addition to the fact that it feels good, people who feel good change.
So if there are things about your life that you would like to change, if your house is cluttered and messy. If your body doesn’t look or feel the way you want it to, if you have a relationship or multiple relationships that you don’t feel connected and peace around, if you don’t have as much money in the bank as you want, if your health doesn’t Is suffering for some reason, in some way, I mean, the list could go on and on all the ways that we want to change, right?
There’s always going to be things that we want to change in order to make that change easier. It’s much easier to change when we feel good. And there’s this sort of idea floating out in the culture that in order to change, we have to be critical or harsh or judgmental or pushy, but it’s just not true.
Just isn’t true. And last week I talked about, think of somebody that Loves you the person in your life that loves you the most unconditionally and then think of somebody that you feel like is critical and Judgmental to you and which of those people do you want to? Change for or which of those people do you like want to do things with and spend time with right?
So it’s so much easier to change when we already feel good and loving yourself is one of the easiest Well, I shouldn’t say easiest one of the most simple ways to feel good. Okay. I’m just going to remind you from last week’s episode, love is in the eye of the beholder. So if you don’t love yourself, but let’s say your husband does, or one of your kids loves you or your mother or somebody, whoever it is, they love you, but you don’t both can be true at the same time.
Right? It is never a fact that you are not lovable. Every thing is lovable. Every person is lovable. If someone doesn’t love you, that says something about their capacity to love. It doesn’t say anything about your lovability. So I think I lost some of my notes somehow. I had some other ideas of why you would want to love yourself.
Let me see if I can remember them somehow. I I think they got deleted here. Oh, here we go. Another reason to love yourself is to model for your children a better way of being. We all, if you’re a parent like me, most, I’m guessing most people that listen to this podcast are parents for the non parents in the audience.
Just bear with me for a moment. We want to change the world, we want the world to be a better place for our future and for our children’s future. And when you start loving yourself, you are modeling a better way. You are modeling a way that feels better, that is more kind and gentle for the future of the world.
Another reason is because when you love yourself, it brings clarity. When you are operating out of love, decisions are easier, just ideas flow more freely. Things just come into focus without us having to do work to bring them into focus. And the last reason I will say of why you might want to love yourself, and remember this is personal.
So, these reasons are my reasons, but they don’t have to be your reasons is just because it’s who you want to be. I want to be a loving person and that includes loving myself. In fact, sometimes this isn’t true for all people, but sometimes we have to do that work to love ourselves before we can truly with authenticity, love other people.
All right, so now I want to talk about starting with neutral. There’s a continuum of, of love or unlove. I think it starts with dislike or disgust, and then it moves into tolerance and then allowance and then familiarity and then maybe curiosity, then concern and then acceptance and then love and then affection.
So, wherever you are on this continuum, it’s okay where you are. We want to just take little baby steps to move up, move toward the loving side of the continuum. So I find that helpful to notice that it’s a continuum and I’m not trying to jump from disgust to love for myself. I want to go from, if, if there’s loathing or disgust, I want to go from that to tolerance and then from tolerance to allowance, right?
Just baby steps along the way, keeping that in mind that we are baby stepping. Along the way, I do have some questions that can help us with these baby steps. And I want to say here that yes, we’re talking about this in the context of loving yourself, but it might be more effective to start. Without focusing on yourself and I, I kind of hinted at this earlier, but just bringing more love into your life in general, right?
That feeling of love. So for the remainder of this episode, I want to just focus on feeling love in general, right? So what do you love? What comes up when I say that? What do you love? Do you love sunsets? Do you have a pet that you love? Do you love some kind of art? Do you love some kind of pop culture, music or a TV show or a movie?
Do you love cooking some activity that you love to do? Think about what you already currently love in your life. And when you do those things, first of all, do more of those things, but do them embodied. And what I mean by that is when you’re doing the thing you love to do. Maybe it is. Let’s just say cooking.
I love to cook. I love to create meals that are delicious and beautiful. I don’t, by the way, love that, but I’m just using that example. Really notice how it feels in your body while you’re cooking, while you’re putting things on the plate, while you’re writing out a menu for this next week and in shopping.
And maybe you don’t necessarily love all the steps involved. But what? So in that process, do you love, and can you notice that? Can you notice the joy, the pleasure, the love that it brings into your body? And can you allow that to be there? In the book, the big leap, which is a great book, it’s, it’s pretty quick and accessible.
He talks about this thermostat that we have, this emotional thermostat, and that many of us, we actually. Keep ourselves in the negative end of the emotions, like feeling frustrated or maybe, you know, loathing or something like that, because that’s what we’re used to. That’s where we’re familiar. And as soon as we go up the thermostat to, you know, joy or peace or fun or something like that, we self sabotage to bring ourselves back down because we’re not used to being there.
So as you do more of what you love, Whatever that is for you, feel it in your body as a way to expand your capacity to feel love, right? So once you expand your capacity to feel love a little bit more, there might be a little bit of space there for you to love yourself. What does love feel like in your body when you’re doing that thing you love and the love is not focused on yourself?
What does it feel like? What does love feel like? What’s the fingerprint of love in your body? What set of sensations lets you know, Oh, this is love. I just, the easiest way for me to feel this way is to think about my kids and I have a college kid. She’s starting her second year of college and she just left earlier this week to go back to college because she’s in Europe and so they have a little bit different timeline.
And I’m noticing that I’m feeling like I miss her and I get a little bit choked up even like tears come to my eyes. My nose tingles a little bit. I get that lump in my throat because I miss her. And also because I’m so proud of her. I’m so proud of the person that she’s becoming and the things that she’s doing in the world.
And it takes so much courage to go to another continent and figure out housing in another country and city and to have arguments with future roommates and then to resolve those arguments and like, Oh, I’m so proud of her and this missing this longing for her and being proud of her. Different flavors of love.
I think it’s not like romantic love, like there’s different flavors of love. That’s probably a whole other episode. I could add that on but when I feel that way, when I think about loving my daughter, It feels really warm. It feels expansive. If you’re watching on YouTube, you probably noticed that I have my eyes closed because I’m trying to, I’m trying to notice what that feeling is.
What, what are the set of sensations in my body? It’s like this warm puddle in the bottom of my gut. And then I also feel it in my chest. This kind of swelling. It makes me sit up a little bit taller. And love for me, when I think about love in my body, it always makes me sway from side to side as if I’m rocking a baby.
That’s just what love does to my body. It feels warm. It feels open, expansive, and then it makes me want to sway. So does love make you want to move in some way? That’s part of the fingerprint of love in your body. Okay. Another question is, When in the past, have you felt love? Have you had a romantic relationship or maybe with your parents or for me, like I’ve been to Hawaii a handful of times and I just love Hawaii.
It’s something about being surrounded by beaches and warmth and the ocean. And it, it’s just like this envelopment of, oh, like I can let go and I can relax and it just feels so easy. Right? So that’s another way that I noticed love in my body. It’s like, it feels easy and it feels relaxed. But when in the past, have you felt love?
What was happening? Who were you with? What were you thinking? Right? And can you, as you remember that, can you feel that? Even a little bit in your body right now, can you let that in just a little bit right now? And I kind of hinted to this, how does love move? If you were to just take a moment, especially if you’re not driving or walking or doing something else.
And, and you can go into a space where you’re by yourself because sometimes this can feel vulnerable. I learned this from Rachel Hart, who is a life coach school coach. She has asked ourselves, how does love move? And you can use this for any emotion, but since we’re talking about love here, how does love move for you?
If you ask yourself that question and then you let your body take over. What do you end up doing with your body? This is why it’s a little bit vulnerable because we’re letting our bodies take over and we don’t really know what it’s going to do. But like I said, for me, love always has this sort of swaying and almost like I want to hug myself, right?
That’s part of the fingerprint of love for yourself for how love feels in your body. It doesn’t even have to be love for yourself. And then finally, Um, I just want you to think about if you’ve ever had the experience or can imagine the experience of seeing an infant, brand new newborn infant. And there’s just something about that, at least for me.
And I’m assuming for most people, this little baby infant that has tiny little fingers and tiny little toes and they’re just their skin. And Oh, I love it feeling love for that right now. But when you see that newborn. You’re just, most people, at least, I don’t want to insinuate that everyone feels this way, but I think most people have this spontaneous love for this cute, perfect little newborn.
And yet they haven’t done anything to earn it, right? And they’re just so lovable and they’re whole and perfect. And honestly, if you don’t believe that, then this podcast probably isn’t a great fit for you, and that’s okay. But I think for most people, we can think of a newborn infant, and we just feel the love overtake us in the that squishiness, right?
Like, oh, I just want to love them and hug them. Um, and so we can, if you’ve ever had that experience, especially, and if you haven’t seek it out, ask someone who just had a baby, like, can I just look at your baby? It might sound weird, but you could tell them I’m working on love and feeling more love in my life.
And I heard that seeing a newborn baby.
They are completely lovable and whole, and you probably spontaneously love when you’re around that newborn baby. And just remember that you, at one point in your life, were a newborn baby. And you were completely whole and lovable, and there was nothing that you had to do or be or look in order to be lovable.
That version of you is still inside of you. And for whoever’s on this journey of self love, if that’s helpful, then take it. If it’s not helpful, then just ignore it for now. Okay. So this was kind of a lot. I just want to recap. We’re talking today about why would you want to love yourself and spend some time really reflecting on.
What is the truth for you? Why do you want to love yourself? I gave you a few ideas of why you might want to love yourself, but there’s probably something totally different that comes up for you. And then I encourage you to start with neutral, that there’s this continuum of loathing. To loving and that we don’t have to jump straight to love.
We can go just to tolerance and or allowance or neutrality. We can start there. Can we just feel a little less disgust or a little less loathing for ourselves? And if. You being the object of your love isn’t working for you yet, which it’s totally fine if it’s not then think about what it is You already love and just focus on bringing more love into your life.
And then I asked about the fingerprint of love So when you’re doing those things that you love when you’re with the people you love What does love even feel like in your body? How do you know that you’re feeling love? And then the final thing as the recap is to think about a newborn baby who is completely lovable and for most of us It’s very natural to look at them and love them.
Let that be a little exercise. Next week I am going to focus on love exercises, love practices. And just as a little sneak peek, I’m going to talk about ring theory. I’m going to talk about the judger. I’m going to talk about taking care of yourself and honoring your desires. I’m going to talk about using the mirror.
Love is a decision and then there’s going to be a fabulous surprise at the end of the episode. It may or may not be a meditation if that’s your thing. So that’s enough for now. And so are you presents opens very soon, October 1st, I believe it’s just a week away. So if you want more support in potentially.
Being able to love more or loving yourself more or connecting with yourself, please come and check it out. Schedule a free session with me. And I’m going to call this a safety check session because I want to make sure that you feel safe with me because the work we do in, in this emotional work is, is very vulnerable.
So you really need to feel safe with me. The other thing that you can do is connect with me on Voxer Voxer V O X E R is a free app where you can leave voicemails or texts. We can asynchronously go back and forth. I am loving Voxer. It’s one of the things I love. So come over there, introduce yourself. I’m @Denitabremer, or you can find me with the email address: Denitabremercoaching@gmail.com.
Links
Recent Comments