We’re talking about self love a lot lately. Thank goodness, because we sure weren’t talking about it when I was growing up. It integrates into almost every conversation I’m having with my colleagues, clients, and friends these days. And as big topics go, sometimes things can get a little skewed and dysmorphic as we seek to understand and apply the principles.
Straight up: I think loving yourself is very, very important. It makes you a more solid, happy, centered person. Self love can help you take care of your needs, eradicate co-dependency, help you stand strong when the chips are down, and be a better, all-around person.
But self love is not the holy grail.
There’s lots of insistence out there to have a solid base and ever-expanding amount of “self love.” The message is that if your life is a mess or you are making poor choices, it’s because you lack self love. And if you had more of it, you’d be happier, make better decisions, make more money, and choose better relationships.
That’s a lot of pressure, y’all. It makes us feel like we better hurry up and GET SOME so we can fix our lives. The message is always: love yourself more. And we know we don’t. At least not enough. So we’re thrust into a state of scarcity and a low-grade anxiety with the guilt that we’re letting ourselves down. Yet again. We scramble to amass as much self love as we can to rescue our underdeveloped, anemic self esteem.
This is the shadow-side of the self love message.
Overall, the current awareness around self-love is a helpful one, and those of us who are talking about it and promoting it have really good intentions. But I think we have to temper it with some balance, namely, that self love is only one part of living a healthy, wholesome, spiritual life. And we must discuss the order of things: that good, healthy choices come from a place of self-respect first. And from those good choices, self-love grows. Not the other way around.
Self-love is the beautiful, hand-beaded gown (or impeccable Tom Ford tuxedo) you get to wear to the ball of life. It opens up the access to living a life of freedom, creativity, and contribution. It is cultivated over time by consistently making decisions that promote your self-respect, personal worth, and authenticity.
So this is my point: self-love is a process, built layer by layer, one tiny decision after another, over time. It blooms slowly over weeks, months, years. The good news is you have enough of it, RIGHT NOW, to do anything you want in life. You want to start a business, change jobs, leave a painful relationship, have a hard conversation with your mother, find a new partner, set new boundaries for yourself, launch a creative endeavor: You have enough self-love right now to do that. And whatever you lack in self-love, GRACE will cover. Grace is the heavenly elixir that holds your world and my world together as we grow. Just ask for it and you will be infused with the strength, clarity, and love to make the right choices for yourself. This doesn’t mean that life will be a perfect yawning chasm of brilliant decisions, but you are safe, and your well-being is not solely dependent upon you having enough self-love.
“The amount of love I have for myself right now is enough for everything I need to be and do in this moment.”
Say this over and over. Does it make your soul feel good?
I don’t care if you’ve made every mistake under the sun, sabotaged yourself a million times, have gone from one shitty relationship to another, and have never heard of self-love until today. YOU are enough, and the love you have for yourself right now is enough. You can turn yourself and your situation around even if you’re bankrupt in the self-love department. As you go through your life, your self love will grow in direct proportion to the way you treat your self, others, and circumstances with respect.
Give yourself time. Be patient with yourself. Listen to your gut. Keep your promises to yourself. Show yourself compassion. And remember: you are enough.
With so much love,
[ image credit: Anahata Katkin ]
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Comments
Tamarisk
Awesome, Steph. I’m so glad there are more of us stepping up to challenge some of the notions that swirl around about self-love and self-care.
For me, a big part of slef-care is this: we need to get better at feeling our feelings, so we can begin to feel better.
Making poor choices is NOT an indicator of not having enough self-love or caring for yourself adequately enough. All of us are a lot more nuance and complex than that analysis would have us believe.
Our family of origin stories matter, the fact that we’re sleep deprived matters, the fact that someone else has made a decision to blow up life as we know it (a sudden break-up, for instance) matters. You must believe that you are doing the best you can at the time, even if on reflection, it doesn’t look that way.
Self care is a practice and we get better at by doing it badly!
I love your mantra, by the way. LOVE IT!
Erin
Love this. Such a beautiful message…and so needed…as finding self love can become one more thing that we beat up on ourselves for.
I would like to share something that was a bit of a revelation for me lately on this topic. And it was wrapped around what we are naturally. It is just another way or spin on the self love topic but it hit home for me and released the anxiety of looking to improve my self love “situation” so to speak.
What I came to and fully feel now is that self love isn’t “out there”…it is not something I can improve on. Basically…it isn’t something I can obtain. The reason for this is that I AM LOVE. We came out as babies…naturally loving, naturally trusting, naturally forgiving, naturally compassionate, naturally full of laughter, naturally hopeful and naturally free. We ARE that. That is who we really are at our very core. Underneath everything else…I am love. So, in my quest for being a more trusting woman or more loving to myself…I have reversed the order of how I go about it. Instead of trying to love myself…I start to unpeel that which might be “hiding” the love that I already am. I release more …and the best is I REMEMBER who I am. That sentence used to not mean much to me…but now…oh, how it does. I remember that I don’t have to DO anything. In my natural, authentic state…I am the most beautiful creature that exists…and so is everyone else. When people show up as painful or creating conflict…I get to see them as love…covered up by a whole bunch of fearful beliefs…trying to defend themselves.
Like I said, it is just another way to spin it…but it helped me to put down the “try harder” stick and relax a hair and realize that the trying to find the love to bring it back to me was only pushing it away further. I can almost instantly remember it when I remember that I don’t have to do anything..>I am already love…and it is my NATURAL way of being…the rest can only come from fear based beliefs. Which are okay too…just some stuff I picked up along the way that I do my best to sit back down on the ground when I am ready to let go.
So…as always…I adore your posts and your authentic way of presenting this to us. You truly are a light sweet Stephanie…and I am honored to have you in my life.
Love and hugs,
Erin
Monica
I think it’s interesting that you challenged this notion saying that self-respect, self-worth, and authenticity come first. I can relate to the idea of having tremendous respect for myself, but feeling too obligated to others and not honoring the self-love portion. I never understood the concept of “digging” myself because I always treated myself “well enough”.
To ask about another point, is authenticity honoring all your feelings (and your intuition) no matter what? How would you define it aside from “being true to yourself”?
Heather VonBerg
“It is cultivated over time by consistently making decisions that promote your self-respect, personal worth, and authenticity.”
It is like planting seeds and thoughts to grow luscious and true identity. Thank you for your words.
Steph
Beautifully put Heather – yes!!