Learning to Love Yourself

Google defines “Love” as:

“A profoundly tender, passionate affection, encompassing deep emotional, biological, and spiritual connections… It acts as a motivating force for compassion, care, and commitment.”

So is love a feeling? An action? A connection? What is love to you? 

I see love as all of the above, plus more! 

 Yes, love is a feeling. I often experience it when I share a warm embrace with my daughter, when my dog is snuggled in my lap, and when my cat comes and makes some biscuits on my belly. 

Love is an action. It’s me making homemade dog food for my dog every week because she can’t digest kibble. It’s me kissing my child’s scraped knees when she falls from her bike. 

And love is an energy. When we learn to tap into love as an energy, we begin to feel it more and more. We begin to “do” it more and more. Love carries us into flow state. Love is a key, and the door it opens is life changing! 

I want to share a story about an experience I had a couple of years ago. I had just started my spiritual journey. I was reading a LOT of Louise Hay (you know her, and if you don’t, I can’t recommend her work enough when it comes to loving yourself!) I was practicing something I learned from one of her books called “mirror work.” If you’re unfamiliar, mirror work is the act of looking into your face and eyes in the mirror and practicing loving self-talk and affirmations. 

This evening, everyone in the house was asleep except me, and I had been having a somewhat difficult and emotionally taxing day. I didn’t feel like doing my mirror work. I didn’t feel like facing myself while I was already struggling. But I did it. I took the time to look into the mirror and say to myself, “Sara, I know you’ve had a difficult day, but I still love you. I know you don’t feel very lovable right now, but I still love you. I love you no matter what kind of day you’ve had.” Tears began to flow, and I was hit with waves of emotion. For the first time, I began to really feel that the words I said into the mirror were true. I had shown up for myself in a way that I never really had before, and suddenly, it was like the world around and inside of me began to shift.

I began to feel this sensation in my chest. It went from the sharp emotional pain of the day I’d been having and transformed into a tingly sensation. Then expansive waves of energy began to flow from my heart. I began to see sacred geometry running up and down the walls all around me. It was like the movie, The Matrix, but instead of zeros and ones, I was seeing these repeating symbols and patterns all around me. I felt this expansiveness in the center of my chest as though my heart chakra was being pulled wide open, and green energy began to glow all around me. I felt as though I was surrounded by the energy of love. It was pouring into me through my heart chakra and filling me until I felt like I would burst. It was, I believe, a transcendental experience. It was something I’ve never come close to experiencing before or since. I was so overcome with love that I felt as though the physical edges of my body were gone. I was fully attuned to the frequency of love, and who I was just sort of… melted away. I can only remember my eyes in the mirror,  keeping me anchored while I had this experience, and then, slowly, it faded until it was just me standing in the bathroom again, looking into the mirror. 

I can’t definitively say what happened to me that night. Maybe it was a download, or an upgrade, but what I can tell you is that I changed after that experience. I could feel the vibration of Love energy, and it’s one of the most abundant resources on the planet. 

I hope that by sharing my experience, I can inspire others to reach for this energy. However, there are no magic words you can say, no instant transmission I can give you to make what happened to me happen to you. There is no hack, no cheat code, or quick fix to living a life led by love. I don’t know if I would have ever had that experience of a “love upgrade” if I hadn’t been working so hard on learning to love myself. In order to work with love as an energy, we need to learn how to love ourselves exactly as we are.  It takes intention and dedication.

So what are the benefits of loving yourself?

Well, for starters, I don’t deal with nearly as much depression or anxiety as I did before I began this work. My relationships are so much better because I don’t need to use them as self-validation or to extract self-worth from them. My relationships are about relating to my friends and family, and are rooted in sharing love and connection as opposed to constructs to lessen pain. 

 I feel self-esteem and self-worth. I have a best friend named Sara who is with me every single day. From the moment I first drew breath in this life, until my very last exhale. The relationship I have with myself is a template from which all of my other relationships grow. The way I talk to, judge, and treat myself spirals outward from me, and affects every single part of my life. I have improved mental and physical health because when I love myself, I want to care for myself. 

Everything is energy. And when we learn to release self-criticism and self-hatred, and embrace loving ourselves, the energy is opened and expanded all around us. We make more aligned decisions, and we build our life from a place centered on joy and happiness rather than creating from fear, anxiety, or pain.  

 How do we learn to love ourselves?

I like to call this part, "becoming the main character!” For many of us, growing up was all about pleasing others. As a child, it was our job to make parents, teachers, or coaches happy. We obeyed them, and we learned that going against what they wanted of us would often lead to punishments or, at the very least, disapproval. This means our nervous system is wired to please everyone else. The thing is, every time we choose to do what makes others happy and ignore our own feelings or needs, we are essentially telling ourselves that we are not as important as the others in our lives. This lowers our self-worth and self-esteem. Since we learn this as children, we often don’t know what our real feelings and needs are!

I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional family. Codependency was rampant, people pleasing everywhere you looked! My family was all about emotional manipulation, and caretaking of everyone else’s feelings was the role I was cast in. I twisted myself into knots trying to make everyone else happy. This, of course, continued into my adult life and romantic relationships. I found myself thirty years old, on a therapist's couch, terribly depressed, anxious, and not even really knowing anything about who I actually was. 

I was not the main character in my own life. I was a supporting role for everyone else. It was time for me to take a good look at myself and my life and decide I really wanted to start living. I had just become a mother, and I didn’t want to raise my child to be a people pleaser like I was. I wanted to raise a woman who never had to feel the way I felt. I was being swallowed by my depression, and I had to fight tooth and nail out of that pit. It was my daughter who gave me the courage. I don’t know if I could have done it for myself, but I was good at doing things for other people, so my healing really began for my daughter. It doesn’t always matter why you start, only that you start. 

So what gives you motivation for this work of loving yourself? If it’s for a loved one, ok. If it’s for no other reason than you deserve a good, happy life filled with love, AMAZING! But if your motivation to start is to spite your ex, your mother, your bully from Jr. High school, who am I to judge? This is a process, and your motivation is going to change once you start decentering others. Meet yourself where you are and begin! 

If you are anything like me, and suddenly realize you don’t know much about yourself, this next part is so fun! 

Self Discovery! It’s time to take yourself out on some dates and learn to enjoy your time alone. If you can, find some time every day to spend with yourself. If this is really hard for you, that’s ok, everything gets easier with time and practice, and this will too. 

What kind of media do you like? Books, movies, music? Start experimenting and paying attention to yourself. Maybe you will find new things that you never realized you liked! Try new foods, take yourself out to dinner or lunch once in a while. If you’ve only ever cooked for others, try to make something for yourself that you love to eat and put tons of love and effort into it. Try different clothing styles, change your hair, use an app to try different hairstyles before just chopping the bangs yourself, though! 

Pay attention, what feels good to do? What doesn’t? Go smell every candle in the store and pick out the one that smells amazing. Try new things you’ve never tried before! And I’m not saying you have to do all of this alone, if you’re nervous about going to a yoga class and you have a friend who does it all the time, ask to tag along! As long as you’re really scrutinizing yourself and asking yourself, did I enjoy that, or was it just fun because my friend was having fun? Do I feel pressure to say I liked it if I didn’t? 

One silly little thing I discovered about myself is that I like small things. I like to cut my pizza into small bites and eat it with a fork! If I make pizza at home, I cut it into rectangular strips so they fit in my mouth without touching the sides of my mouth! Silly, I know, but when I do this small thing that, yeah, may sound stupid or frivolous to someone else, I know it’s an act of love for myself. It's me caring for myself and taking the time to show myself that care. It's such a small thing, but it allows me to enjoy my meal all that much more for taking a moment to do it! I would do it for my child, why not for myself? 

This can also be a very uncomfortable process, and you have to honor that aspect as well. Once you start prioritizing yourself, chances are, others in your life who have been the priority are going to feel some type of way about it. This is where boundaries come into play. 

Learning Boundaries.

If you are someone who struggles with boundaries, trust me, I get it! It's something I practice with every single day of my life. I highly recommend a therapist for this. If you have a lot of toxic relationships or are mired in codependency, it’s very, very hard to change these habits without the help of a professional. If therapy is really, truly inaccessible for you, maybe look into support groups? Online communities can also be very helpful, as well as self-help books like “Codependent No More” Are also very helpful. This process isn’t easy, but it is so worth it. I can’t express enough how impactful boundaries have been in my healing process. Boundaries are a way to protect, honor, and love yourself. And once you start learning how to have and hold them, the love you feel for yourself will begin to really grow exponentially! 

Learning who you are and unlearning these survival patterns is profoundly healing, But they don’t mean much if you haven’t learned to be honest with yourself. A great way to start this part of the process is mirror work. Looking into your own eyes and talking to yourself can be one of the most difficult things you’ve ever done. If you’ve spent your life only looking in the mirror to criticize yourself, if the way you’ve always spoken to yourself in your mind or out loud has been to berate yourself, mock yourself, or belittle yourself, chances are you don’t trust or like the person in that mirror. Switching into loving kindness and compassion when you look at yourself in the mirror can feel like trying to climb a mountain with bare feet and no gear. If you avoid looking into the mirror at all because you dislike yourself so much is also an issue that may arise with this work. 

If looking into a mirror is too painful, you can also try to find a photo of yourself as a child. It’s often more difficult to berate and belittle ourselves when we look at ourselves as a child. Often, it softens our hearts and begins to open us up to self-compassion. Talking to and working with our inner child is an amazing, but also difficult process. However, I’ve found that this difficult work is so incredibly rewarding. Struggling promotes growth, just like building muscle in the gym. When we do this inner work of learning to love ourselves, our capacity grows. Sitting in pain and discomfort and teaching yourself that you can do it, and survive it is a key to maturing and growing as a person. 

When I first started mirror work, telling myself loving affirmations (shoutout Louise Hay again) felt like a joke. I felt stupid. I felt dishonest. I called myself a liar inside my head while my mouth said, “I accept and love myself exactly as I am.” I hated my face, my body, my hair, my teeth, and ugh, my voice. Has anyone ever heard a worse voice than mine?! No, I was convinced they had not. But I didn’t give up, because something began to stir inside of me. A part of me was listening and ignoring the inner critic. A part of me still didn’t trust what it was hearing from me, but it wanted to. And it liked hearing that. It liked hearing nice things about myself. I believe this part is my inner child. The little girl who only wanted to be liked and loved and accepted by others was starting to feel acceptance from me, grown-up Sara. And it led to a more authentic relationship with myself. They say “fake it until you make it,” and that’s what I was doing. I did my best to fake loving myself, and somewhere along the way, I actually started doing it! Big props to my therapist, but also to myself. I give so much credit to others for my journey, but I was the one who stayed on the path, and now I’m here talking to you about how much I love myself. Way to go Sara! You’re amazing! 

Self-Care

 It’s not just spa days and shopping sprees. Self-care is so multifaceted that I cannot cover it all, but I want to go over the basics with you. 

To me, self-care is about accommodating yourself. Setting yourself up for success and putting yourself and your needs first. It’s about brushing your teeth every day, not because you don’t want your dentist to judge you for cavities (shame), but brushing your teeth every day because you deserve to have a mouth that feels clean (love). It's about putting your laundry away straight out of the dryer because wrinkled clothes make you feel disheveled. It’s setting boundaries with yourself because if you’re on TikTok past 10 PM, you don’t sleep well and feel terrible in the morning! Self-care is taking care of yourself like you would your child or loved one, and then taking it one step further, and doing it because you truly feel you deserve it! 

And here’s a big thing: if you don’t do what you need or want, if you make a mistake, THAT'S OK! This is a “practice” of self-love, not a “perfect” of self-love. There is truly balance in all things, and self-love and self-care are no exception. Yes, it’s important to hold yourself accountable and learn to navigate that accountability without spiraling into shame and guilt, and it’s just as important to lean into self-forgiveness and self-compassion when mistakes inevitably arise. One of my favorite musical artists, The great Qveen Herby, has a song that says, “It's a form of self-abuse to be a perfectionist.” And I feel that in my bones. I am such a perfectionist. When I am not perfect (which is most of the time, let’s be real), I beat myself up, judge, guilt, and shame myself. At least, that used to be my MO, and guess what, sometimes it still happens! And when it does, I say “Oopsie!” And I tell myself, “You don’t have to be perfect for me to love you, Sara. I love you no matter what!” And I feel the feelings in my body, and I let them move through me, and I let it go. How many times in your day could you replace shame and guilt with compassion? How often do you find yourself being judgmental towards yourself or others? Can you shift your energy slightly into something else? Into compassion? Into love? Once you start working on self-compassion, your ability to bring compassion to others grows as well. 

There is so much involved in this topic that I could write pages and pages about it. I have gone over this writing many times and, to me, it’s still not perfect. But it is real. It is true, and how I feel,and the processes that I have worked through to become who I am, who is also not perfect. 

I hope that a part of this writing stirred something in you today, and that you look in the mirror and see someone worth learning how to love. Someone who deserves love, compassion, and forgiveness. I believe that the entire world benefits from love, love of self and love of others. And there is no better day to begin than today! 

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my writings! If you feel called, please check out my events. I am hosting a monthly meditation circle centered around love and healing. I also host a spiritual book club that is all about self-growth and healing. Please don’t hesitate to reach out through call, text or email if you have questions or thoughts about anything you have read here today, and please, if you’re struggling with self-hatred, know that you can ask for help. You can learn how to grow from exactly where you are. 

Thank you again. I love you!