There’s been a theme developing in my life of late. It started when I read my friend’s (brilliant) book and noticed a couple of sections that mentioned self-love leaping out at me. (by the way, the book’s not out yet, but when it is, I’ll be sharing it all over the place, it’s fabulous).
Self-love. Not self-care, which as you know, I’ve been banging on about for many a long year (click here for some of the articles I’ve written about self-care over the years). Self-love. A term that, honestly, I’d resisted for years, because to me it means a certain kind of self-lovin’, ya know what I’m sayin? (nudge nudge, wink wink!)
But now self-love is taking on a new meaning.
Loving yourself.
Being loving to yourself.
Loving you.
Cherishing you.
Supporting you.
Backing you.
Being gentle and kind to you.
Being your own biggest cheerleader, best friend, and lover.
And I’m really getting how this is different to self-care. Because my self-care is good – I take good care of myself and have done for years. I work on my self-care – I check in with body, mind, heart and soul every day to check how I am and what I need.
But self-love? Hmm. I’m pretty driven, I have BIG dreams, I have a shit load to do (always!)…so sometimes I’m not as loving as I could be. Sometimes I’m a bit of a bitch to myself to be honest.
I’ve improved immeasurably – when I first started working for myself, I was the worst boss I had ever had – and I’d had some arsehole bosses! Now, I’m pretty good to myself…but still, sometimes I am not as loving to myself as I could be.
You know those thoughts “come on, get ON with it”; “stop fucking about on facebook, you’ve got shit to do”; “I can’t believe you STILL haven’t done X, Y, Z and moved the world to the left” etc. I’m sure you have your own versions of them too.
They’re not particularly loving thoughts (and if someone else said them to me, they’d get an ear-full, a death stare, and a “wind your neck in”!) and so I don’t always feel particularly loved.
(By the way, it doesn’t matter how much you are loved by others, if you’re not loving yourself, you’re not going to feel fully loved, there will always be something missing.)
Anyway, so over the past 6 weeks or so I’ve been tracking how loved I feel. Some days, like last week when I had my first ever self-care day, I feel totally loved. Some days, like today, when I have shit loads to do and I’m just not doing it fast enough (seriously? Would I rather it was done right or fast???!), I don’t feel very loved at all.
It’s a work in progress.
What I notice too is that I’m not alone in not loving myself fully. I notice people saying they are stupid, that they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that they fucked up, that they failed.
Hey, sometimes it’s true…we do fuck up, we do fail. We all do. But that is the time for MORE self-love, not less!
So I challenge you to join me in my self-love journey and answer this question:
How loved do you feel right now on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is “I don’t” and 10 is “I am surrounded by a bubble of pure self-love”?
Whatever the answer is, whether it’s a 1 or a 10, it’s not an excuse for more unloving behaviour! Beating yourself up for not loving yourself is the ultimate insult!
Once you know how loved you feel right now (and this can change within minutes, so just take the number that’s coming up in the present moment), ask yourself this:
What loving thing can I do for myself right now?
Haha – I’m getting the answer “go and pee” – I’ve been hanging on cross-legged til I finished this article! No more. As you can see, sometimes the unloving behaviour is ‘small’ and ‘insignificant’…but it’s still unloving. Not letting myself pee til I’m done? Seriously?!
Self-loving is not difficult. It’s easy, but most of us have been trained to be pretty hard on ourselves which makes us feel self-love is some kind of herculean task, when it’s just a habit we need to cultivate. We may also have been mocked for being ‘sensitive’ or ‘precious’ if we tried to enforce some self-loving boundaries.
Well, I say fuck that. I am sensitive. I am precious. And I am going to love myself accordingly. And I invite you to do so too.
By loving yourself.
Being loving to yourself.
Loving you.
Cherishing you.
Supporting you.
Backing you.
Being gentle and kind to you.
Being your own biggest cheerleader, best friend, and lover.
You deserve to be loved and cherished and adored and treasured and treated with kindness and affection.
So love and cherish and adore and treasure yourself and treat yourself with kindness and affection. If other people join in too, that’s a wonderful bonus…but if they don’t, who cares, you’re loving you.
You want to get the best from yourself? You want to have the life you dream of? You want to love your life and be happy? Loving, cherishing, adoring and treasuring you is a GREAT place to start.
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