How to Love Yourself First

“After all those years as a woman hearing ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m enough.’”  ~ Anna Quindlen

One of the fascinating things about life is how most of us are on a journey back to love. It’s not a conscious thing. One day there’s a realization that the riff between you and love feels like a deadly black hole with a neon sign at the front door saying, “no one comes back from here.” The precise moment of this realization usually occurs from a loss of some kind. And if you’re over the age of 21, well m’dear, you know intimately what I’m talking about.

The roots of that loss were planted many years before and the sprouts have continued to grow into your life in small or large clusters ever since. This is what I refer to as the kinky life. No. Not THAT kinky life (that’s for another post). The kinky life I refer to here is the one created by the moments in your life that caused emotional, physical, psychological or spiritual pain before the age of eight. From birth to age eight we are little sponges soaking up everything around. Lots of good stuff (play dates with friends, getting your first pet, dancing with your Mom in the kitchen, licking up the batter in the bowl with your Grandma making cookies, Dad bringing you the best stuffed animal on the planet for your birthday, etc.). Lots of bad stuff (getting teased on the playground, your pet pooping on your favorite toy, Mom telling you you’re too much when you want to play, burning the pan at Grandma’s and getting yelled at for being such an idiot, Dad forgetting your birthday every year, parents divorcing, abuse, neglect, etc.). ALL of those experiences literally get layered in your physical body and hunker in to take a loooooong nap in your cells.

Dr. Masuro Emoto (doctor of alternative medicine and entrepreneur) beautifully explains this through his water crystal experiments. He had the genius idea to expose water in glasses to different variables. He used words (i.e. taping the word LOVE on a glass or the word HATE or speaking to the glass of water with encouragement or derision). He used music (i.e. playing melodic classical or love songs or speed metal). He used pictures (i.e. placing ones of beautiful things, angels, flowers or terrible things like war torn cities and people suffering from diseases). He also used thoughts (i.e. non spoken good ones, not so good ones and downright hateful ones).

He meticulously recorded the effects on the water by freezing it and then used specialized photography to view the results. He was able to isolate singular water crystals and what he viewed was nothing short of miraculous. The water that received the positive messaging created beautiful, geometric, balanced design in the water structure. The water that received the negative messaging created ugly, distorted, randomly formed design in the water structure.

Why this is meaningful to you is because you, like me and everyone else on the planet, are born made up of 75% water. As you age, the water content of your body diminishes (darn that loss in elasticity of our skin!), but you remain 55% or more water until you die. Put these facts together with Dr. Emoto’s findings and you can see how the kinky life occurs.

Maybe you had similar experiences to me.

Your folks split up when you were young.

KINK! Messaging: It’s all my fault.

Both of them remarried right away. Your Dad’s wife buttered you up really good and made you think you were the greatest thing on the planet until the day of the wedding party when she publicly admonished you for handing out name tags to the guests as they arrived, which she asked you to do, but decided to rage about it and despise you from that day forward.

KINK! Messaging: You’re stupid. You can’t do anything right. You have no worth.

Meanwhile, your Mom’s husband was a fan of using each and every one of the Encyclopedia Britannica books as weapons to hurl down the stairs at your Mom’s head when he was mad and knife throwing across the kitchen at one another was a preferred method of communication. KINK! Messaging: Home isn’t a safe place. Women are helpless and weak.

These are a few examples to whet your whistle and get the gears moving for your exploration.

MOJO EXERCISE:

Think back to your younger years (ideally before 10 years old) and see if you can identify the three experiences that created your initial kinks. These would be the moments where something hurtful happened and you made a decision about yourself and/or life in that moment. These are the beliefs that have held the kink in place all these years.

Use the prompts below and write in your journal. Or download your companion worksheet HERE.

Experience No. 1:

What I Made it Mean About ME:

Experience No. 2:

What I Made it Mean About ME:

Experience No. 3:

What I Made it Mean About ME:

Here’s where it starts to get really cool. You’ve identified a few of your kinks. Woot! Woot! I’m cheering you on because the awareness is ground zero for transformation. You can see how these experiences got lodged in your cellular memory—that’s the electrical wiring from our brain to all our cells. Once an experience gets in there, it can easily be recalled by a similar experience, even if it’s a particular smell. Anyone who’s had PTSD knows that they can be years from the initial trauma, but one day in completely unrelated circumstances something can trigger the firing of information throughout our whole system and activate the memory held in the cells from the initial experience.

Many people will experience spontaneous emotional outbursts (positive and not) when exercising or having bodywork (massage, etc.), especially in yoga or Pilates or dance where the movement deals with the larger muscles groups, especially the sacral cavity. I spent the first six months of my yoga practice sobbing in triangle and pigeon pose. I was embarrassed and confused. One day I finally had the courage to ask my teacher what the heck was going on and he explained that emotion is stored in our cells (aka the kinky life). The hips and pelvic girdle tend to hold grief and anger. Ah! A huge light bulb went off for me and I realized that my body was naturally purging these kinks in order to become free and available to experiences aligned with my true nature (ahem, love baby, love).

Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, refers to this concept as the pain body. He deftly shares that most of the world is running around relating to one another pain body to pain body. Like a continuous run of triggers, therefore no one is actually connecting with the real person in front of them.

The way to radically shift the kinky life and step into mojolicious self love starts with you. It’s been said before and I’ll say it here, you’ve got to love yourself first. Fill YOU up and you WILL connect with a partner who comes full. From this place, you can create the relationship of your dreams.

So mojolicious one, what’s ONE thing you love about yourself? Share your unabashed love vibes with me in the comments below.

Big love,