Embrace self-love
February is the month of love and for one day in the year, we celebrate love. We often forget how important self-love is and this is something we should be practicing daily.
I have been working closely with a personal trainer to get my health back on track. With her permission, I share her insights when it feels like things are just not going your way.
“Hello, my beautiful souls. Happy Valentine's Day. Happy Day of Love. I don't know about you guys, but just reading there, I think it is much aligned where it isn't so much about what you're doing with your partner on this day that everyone's declaring as the day where you recognize love. But for me, it started feeling more like a self-love day, bringing love into yourself, and then whatever happens from the outside world in is like a bonus.
I think this is all aligned and it always is what it needs to be in perfect timing, even on the days when you feel like you're having a tower moment, and by that I mean it's normally like you've built up something and it feels like that whole thing is crumbling down, and it feels devastating, and all the things come with that sadness, the feeling of like a waste of time or betrayal of self or of your own time or what you tried and feel like a failure, and all those crazy, crazy thoughts come in.
The narratives come into the space when you're having a tough day or a tough period in life, and so often this comes through, especially at this time of the year, because often there's an expectation of it being so amazing and so loving and so light, and then anything less than that is almost emphasized even more. So, it might quite possibly be divinely timed to be on this day, when you feel the way you're feeling.
I can relate on some very different level. It's taken all of me, despite what I think of myself sometimes, to stop that and make it different, and it doesn't come easily. It doesn't mean you even know how. It's just the decision to not let that negative slide get more momentum. It's just to stop that for a moment, even if you don't know what to replace it with, just to stop believing it, because the more you believe it, the more it will be and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We can sit and tell you all the most beautiful things that we see in you, but until you start to want to see it, it won't fall into your world yet, and it's difficult to hear those things when you're not in a space that any of that feels true. But I'm here to tell you that what you're feeling, it's validated, it's valid how you're feeling. It doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean those things are true, that you've reached dead ends, that everything is for nothing, that there's no way forward and there's no hope. I think that's the furthest thing from truth on all levels, all the time.
I wanted to share with you the fact that I understand that place, even though it comes through differently for each of us, and I want to tell you that it is not set, and it's not permanent. It's a moment, it's a fleeting period, and it's valid that you're feeling that way, but it's an indicator for things to just be decided to be different, and it may take a day or two or a week, but at some point, you start deciding little things, little better things. When we say better than, we know that I'm not even talking about better choices and food here. I'm talking about little tiny things. A better option of letting that voice run is to stop it, and even if you believe it in your soul, you're like, yeah, but it's true for me. Don't reiterate it. Just stop it. Don't give it the power.
To be better than yesterday would be to be less powerful in reaffirming what you don't want, because that holds power, and it's going to pull it more to you. The way to get out of the pits is to stop looking down and start looking for ways up. That's the start, and it can look like little breadcrumbs, and yes, start again, and yes, step again, but it's something I've learned. The journey is never just done. It's always starting again, and sometimes it feels worse than others because you feel like, damn it, I've been here a thousand times before. I'm here again, so what's going to make it feel any different that I'm just going to fall here again if I even try to get out?
That is something, I don't have a word for it, that is so enticing for the human psyche to sit in comfortably saying, I'm familiar with this, so why even try? It's hard, and it's sore, and it sucks when I try to get out of here because I fall here, and I'm comfortable here because I know how to be here because I've been here for so long. That's the stuff we want to walk out of. That's the tar, that's the stickiness, and we walk out of that tar pit, you've still got stickiness stuck on your soles, and you're walking tar all over the show, all over the house, until one day you keep stepping out of it. It's less and less and less on the feet, and slowly that tar, you start avoiding coming back, but it's a process and a journey, and we are here for you!”