How to love yourself

The Head Trash + Healing Show with Alexia Leachman

Most of us understand what it means to love another person. The emotional investment coupled with feelings of intense desire and admiration is familiar territory for us. In fact, we consciously take time to nurture and develop our live with others… we say nice things, we offer gifts, we do nice things, and importantly we let them know how we feel. But loving ourselves? Some people just find that plain weird.

So what is self love? Well, maybe we should start with what ISN’T self-love...

Here are some tell tale signs of not loving ourselves

• regular negative self talk
• putting ourselves down with talk of discouragement and
• you push yourself to do things you don’t like doing
• you become angry at yourself when you make mistakes
• you are critical about yourself; your body, your decisions, your behaviour, the way you look, your choices
• you tend to put others first
• you find it hard to speak up for yourself
• you find it hard to exercise, eat well, or break bad habits.
• you don’t look after yourself - No concern for your outward appearance: Putting on dirty clothes, skipping showers, or just plain looking like a mess.
• you feel insecure when other people are doing well: perhaps getting offended or feeling bad somehow when other people have what you want

What is self love?

Self-love is a combination of self-acceptance, self-awareness, and kindness and respect for ourselves. Self-love is both an idea, a concept in our minds that we are worthy of self respect and gentleness, and an action; treating ourselves with compassion and love.

This all sounds fine and dandy, but how on earth do we turn things around?

How to love yourself

On a conscious level, you can begin by

• Spend some time coming up with a list of all the things that make you awesome and brilliant... ask your friends and family!
• Remember to take the time to celebrate your successes, no matter how small… just remember not to fall into the trap of ‘rewarding’ yourself with takeaways, junk food, excessive alcohol on a regular basis, because that is probably more about a LACK of self love.
• Do things that make you feel amazing
• Come up with some positive affirmations and cite them regularly to yourself
• Catch yourself saying the negative things, and re-write your internal script

But, as you will know if you follow this blog and podcast, I’m more interested in how we can dive down deep into the subconscious and do a bit of rewiring... all this conscious action can take a while to take effect and I'm a bit impatient. So I prefer to take the shortcuts even if I pick up a few scratches along the way!

Of course, what I’m about to suggest will involve using our 5 Step Head Trash Clearance Method, so if you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, do it now.

Create neutrality around the core aspects of Self Love

This is important if you’re to make any progress. Here is a list of things that you could start by working on using the 5 Step Head Trash Clearance Method

• love,
• loving myself , self love
• respect,
• respecting myself, self respect
• acceptance
• self acceptance
• kindness, being kind
• putting myself/one’s self first

Take a look in the mirror and say I LOVE YOU

Put some time aside to sit in front of a mirror. Look yourself in the eyes and simply say to yourself “I love you”. Keep repeating this and notice what you feel. You might find this quite hard and it might even make you cry. But stay with it. Even if you just do this, you’ll be making progress, but I want you to take this further.

Notice what you’re feeling when you say this to yourself. What is the resistance that is popping up into your head? Notice the phrases that appear in your mind. Also, notice where your feelings are showing up in your body. Then I want you ‘catch’ what you’re thinking and feeling and add that to the list of things you need to clear using the 5 step process. You might want to start by putting all of these thoughts and feelings in an imaginary bucket and then refer to the bucket contents as THIS and simply add THIS to your list - your subconscious will know what you mean, but be sure to bring all of THIS to your mind when you’re working on it.

Once you’ve cleared THIS, repeat the process again and notice the difference. Notice what’s changed in your mind and your body. The more you go through this, the more easy it will be to identify the dominant thoughts and feelings that need one-on-one attention and that need to be cleared individually.

So, how did you get on? What resistance came up for you? What shifts have you noticed? Let me know in the comments!