Let’s start by answering some questions about self love and self care to get us started!
What is self love and self care?
Self love and self care are deliberate acts of kindness that you create for yourself. Places where you gift yourself compassion, grace, care, and love. It creates a space where you can come back to yourself, take a breath, and be as you are. These acts of kindness create moments of little to no resistance or struggle making them feel super nourishing.
Why is self love and self care important?
The longest relationship you will ever be in is the one you have with yourself. Your human experiences can chip away at that bond you have with yourself, and creating inner love and care helps to rebuild that bond. It’s an active experience of listening to what your body, mind, emotions and being need to feel supported and whole.
You love externally to the capacity you love internally. You also allow love in, to the capacity that you love yourself. This means that your capacity to love yourself determines the depth at which you interact with love amongst the world around you. So deepening that inner love and care helps to deepen the love experience you have throughout your life.
Often when hard or negative things are going on in your life they tend to hold your focus outside of yourself, in places where you don’t always have power. When you activate self love and care in those moments it helps to bring your focus back to your heart and story, and that is where you really have all the power.
How do you create self love and self care?
Honestly there are endless ways of creating self care and love. I have broken it down into 3 areas for you to focus your attention, but they all weave together to create an inner depth of love for yourself.
I created a self love and care Bingo board for you to use. It adds in an element of play and joy as you try to bring more self love and care into your life.
Physical Self Love and Self Care: This area activates physical expressions of self care and love and can be anything that brings you back to yourself. The key is listening to your body and being to see what it might need or want. Here are some suggestions to get you going.
- Meditation / Breathing are both great ways to physically express care and love. I get that meditating isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But there are lots of different kinds of meditations. You can do guided meditations. You can listen to chanting in a meditative way. You can meditate with your eyes open looking at something beautiful and holding only thoughts of appreciation for that thing you are looking at. You can go for a meditative walk where you focus on all of the nature around you. You can earth, where you put your bare feel on the ground or in the dirt or sand as a meditative act. You can also do simple breathing exercise where you focus on counting your breaths. All of this helps to focus your mind and relax your body.
- You can do an at home spa day. I LOVE these. You put on a hair mask or facemask or both and watch some of your favorite heart centered videos or listen to some of your favorite podcasts. You treat yourself to some yummy snacks and then take a long shower or bath. Put on something cozy and just listen to your heart and body as you embrace that relaxed and regenerative experience. If you don’t have time or space to do a whole day or afternoon just pick a couple of things that you can do to bring that spa energy into your day. Something as simple as drinking cucumber or lemon water, or using some yummy lotions can bring that self love and care vibe into your day.
- Sleep in! Sleep is such an important part of creating space for your physical body to feel good. Create a space where you can wake up without an alarm. If you can’t do that allow yourself time to nap or just be still, quiet and not distracted even if you don’t fall asleep.
- Give yourself a dance party. Turn on your favorite music and just dance it out. It doesn’t have to be long; even a few songs will activate joy in your body. It can be a great act of care and love.
Mental Self Love and Self Care: This area is often over looked when it comes to self care and love but, it is one of the most important. Your thoughts shape your feelings and often your feeling extend into physical actions.
- Bring conscious awareness to the origin of your thoughts. This means activating a filter of curiosity and calling out where you thoughts are coming from. Is that thought coming from your amygdala and grounded in the essence of fight, flight or freeze. Or is the thought coming from your prefrontal cortex and part of a higher leave thinking and create solutions? To bring in love and care you don’t even have to take any action, just notice where the thought originated.
- Think about yourself in the way that the divine, universe, god, or whatever langue you have for that divine essence thinks about you. Ask yourself; “Am I treating myself the way the divine would? Am I seeing myself thinking of myself in the way the divine would?” This one may catch you off guard a little because it’s like a gate keeper to your thoughts and can filter out a lot of unloving and uncaring thoughts you might be thinking without noticing.
Focus on gratitude and optimism. I did a whole video about creating a practice optimism and I will link it here <<VIDEO>> Calling out what you are grateful for on a daily basis is very powerful. It set’s your focus on your higher-level thinking and is a radical act of self love and care. I recommend doing it in an external way. You can write it out, create voice memos or videos. You can do it on your own or with someone you trust and love as a witness.- Give yourself a thought party. This is where you let yourself daydream about the things you want to create in your life. You give yourself permission to think as though there are not limitations. You don’t get attached to specifics but you allow a positive stream of consciousness to play out like a move in your mind’s eye. That job you want, that home you have been dreaming of, the friendships and how good it feels to be connected… you just let yourself go all the way there. Again don’t get hug up on the detail just soak in the feelings of it all happening.
Emotional Self Love and Self Care: This area is actually an underling component and a mix of the last two but is important enough to be called out on its own.
- Love yourself more then the actions and thoughts of others. This one is great because it helps you shift your focus from other people who may be working you emotionally back to your own heart and self love and care.
- Honor your feeling however they show up, and allow yourself the room to find your way back to your inner alignment. That inner alignment will help you make way for the positive evolution of your feelings.
- Call out your emotional desire and ask the universe or divine to help you create it. If you want to experience joy call it out and then keep an eye out for it. If you want playfulness, happiness, ease, thrill or to be emotionally tickled by life call it out and ask for help to see it in your day.
- Listen to your emotions with the understanding that you have the power to direct them they don’t have the power to direct you.
What are the benefits of self love and self care?
Self love and care starts to take conditions of your personal human experience off of your worth and value and ability to be loved. You love yourself beyond the wounds other people gave you, beyond the limitations you picked up along the way, and beyond any entangled experience that might be holding you back. Self love and care helps your heart heal by coming back to yourself, and in that place of inner alignment you really understand your power as a human being.
You love yourself more then you are willing to let other people’s stuff into your story. You have so much love and care for yourself that the things other people do don’t cause you to doubt yourself. The love within you is stronger then them leaving you out. The love within you is stronger then the negative things they are saying to you. The love within you runs so deep that those negative thoughts you are thinking about yourself feel so uncomfortable and untrue, that they can’t take up residence in your mind any longer. This means having a love and care for yourself that is stronger then other people’s actions, opinions, judgments, or ideas about you.
Why is it valuable to create a self love and care practice?
Acts of self care and love are brilliant and turning those acts into a practice is really powerful. When you make a practice of regularly listening and checking in with yourself then offering compassion, grace, care and love to yourself in response you sift your whole dynamic. When it becomes a practice you set into motion a powerful cascade of love that flows through every thought and action that you have. So even if you are met with negative experiences it’s no match for that inner bond that you have with yourself. So everything becomes a little bit more doable.
Ok, so tell me some of your acts of self love and care. We also have three more weeks where we are focusing on LOVE. Tell me what love topics you want me to focus on or what questions you have about anything related to love.
