EXERCISECULTIVATE AND PRACTISE SELF-LOVE
SELF-LOVE IS THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND MANIFESTING.
When I began writing this book, I kept trying to figure out where I should speak about self-love. It isn’t a step in itself, but whenever I tried to fit it into one of the other steps, I couldn’t help but feel that I wasn’t giving it the attention it deserved. I realized that self-love needed a section all of its own, because self-love is more than a step in the process: it is the foundation upon which all the other steps are built.
Once you begin to cultivate and practise self-love, your ability to manifest will become infinitely more powerful. Self-love empowers you to step into your light, to step into your greatness and to open up space for abundance to enter your life. Self-love tells the universe, ‘I am worthy of love, I deserve success, I am ready to live my dreams,’ and then, this is what you shall receive.
When we love ourselves, we embrace all that we truly are. When we love ourselves, we rise above fears, doubts, insecurities and limiting beliefs and we unlock our fullest potential.
There is no greater gift we can give ourselves than the gift of unconditional self-love.
Without self-love, you cannot manifest. There is no point in creating a vision board and talking about the life of your dreams if, day to day, you still treat yourself with disrespect.
So, how do you begin to cultivate self-love so that you can unlock your fullest manifesting power?
Well, first, I should clarify what self-love really means:
Self-love means truly valuing your own wellbeing and happiness.
Self-love means showing up for yourself and championing yourself.
Self-love means letting go of judgement, regret and negative self-talk.
Self-love means embracing the most authentic version of yourself.
Self-love means offering yourself the same level of kindness, patience and forgiveness that you offer so freely to others.
There are a million ways we can practise self-love: we can make a conscious effort to practise and demonstrate more self-care, more self-respect, more self-discipline. We can create healthy boundaries, we can let go of things that no longer serve us, we can be mindful of the way in which we speak to ourselves. To practise self-love, we can fuel our minds, bodies and souls with nourishing food, thoughts and ideas. We can start saying no to the things we don’t want to do. We can do more of the things that make us happy. We can practise meditation, we can journal, we can exercise, we can look after our skin, we can prioritize sleep, we can drink more water. We can offer ourselves more compassion and kindness. We can offer ourselves space to explore all the parts of us that make us unique. We can speak to ourselves in ways that are kind, encouraging and supportive. There are countless ways we can practise self-love – in fact, I could write an entire book on it.
But really, for me, cultivating self-love comes down to one thing: becoming aware of the choices we have and the decisions we make in each and every moment.
Every minute of every day we have an opportunity to practise and cultivate self-love. Every minute of every day we have to make a choice: do I choose to act in a way that is self-loving or in a way that is not? How you spend your time, what thoughts you choose to attach to, what perspective you choose to adopt, who you surround yourself with, what decisions you make, what behaviour you accept from others, how you govern yourself, what commitments you make, how you feed, fuel, nourish and move your body … all of this matters.
It all reflects your commitment to yourself, your wellbeing and your capacity for self-love. And it is that very commitment to yourself that shows the universe what you believe you are worthy of. Remember: we manifest from our subconscious beliefs about what we deserve.
BEGIN TO CULTIVATE SELF-LOVE
To start making decisions that will lead us to cultivate self-love, we must do three things.
1. Become aware and mindful
We can’t make mindful choices if we aren’t first aware of the choices available to us. We have to start taking time to pause and ask ourselves, ‘Is there another way I could do this: a way that is more loving and more compassionate?’ For example, if you’ve been trapped in the diet cycle for years and you find yourself cutting out food groups, skipping meals or obsessing over some new fad diet, then take a moment to consider whether this is really a compassionate and self-loving way to act, or whether there is another way you could choose to treat your body and approach your relationship with food? Could you stop skipping meals and attaching guilt to your food choices and work to replace those behaviour patterns with mindful and intuitive eating principles, for example? Or, if you watch the news first thing every morning and you find it always leaves you feeling frustrated, sad or anxious, ask yourself, ‘Is this really helping me start my day in the best possible way? Could I make a more self-loving choice? Could I choose to start my day listening to music, journaling or incorporating a ten-minute yoga flow instead?’
2. Honour where you are
What we need day to day, moment to moment, is always going to change. Some days, we wake up and we feel ready to take on the world. Other days, we feel tired, flat and overwhelmed. Self-love means honouring yourself in each moment and making decisions that reflect how you are feeling at that time.
Get into the habit of checking in with yourself, and asking, ‘Where am I at today? How do I feel and what do I need?’ Imagine there is a scale of 1–10, 1 being at your lowest, and 10 being high-vibe superhero. What you need will differ depending on where you sit on that scale. If you’re at a 3, let’s say, then what you will need will likely be permission to rest, nourishing food and fresh air. But if you’re at a 9, then you need to go ahead and use that energy to make choices that will propel you closer to your manifestation: get creative, be productive and move your body!
Don Miguel Ruiz wrote an incredible book called The Four Agreements. I recommend it to everyone, and one of the agreements is this: Always do your best. He writes, ‘Your best is going to change from moment to moment, it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick, under any circumstance simply do your best and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.’
Self-love means giving yourself the space to be human, to acknowledge that we all feel differently day to day and to give yourself what you need, taking that into account.
3. Honour where you want to be tomorrow
Our lives are really just a culmination of the choices we make. When we act in ways that are self-loving, we honour not just what we need in the moment but also where we want to be tomorrow. So often, we make impulse decisions that satisfy us in the moment but negatively impact on our future selves. Anyone who has ever self-sabotaged (which I’ll assume is every one of you reading this) will know what I mean. But self-love is taking authority over that drive for instant satisfaction and instead making choices that will serve your future self. For example, if you have a deadline for tomorrow and you choose instead to go out, or procrastinate by scrolling through Instagram, you are simply sabotaging what your future self needs. By making the choice to apply self-discipline and focus on meeting the deadline, however, you will have made a decision that honours what your future self needs and deserves: that is practising self-love.
THE ULTIMATE PRACTICE OF SELF-LOVE IS PERFECTLY BALANCING WHAT YOU NEED TODAY WITH WHAT YOUR FUTURE SELF NEEDS TOMORROW.
Self-love manifests itself in every decision we make. Each and every day, commit to finding more ways to show up for yourself and demonstrate the compassion and love for yourself that you deserve. Keep doing this until it becomes the automatic way you govern your life. Keep practising until your cup is so full of self-love that it pours out to everything and everyone around you.
FORGIVENESS AND NON-JUDGEMENT
I couldn’t talk about self-love without talking about forgiveness and non-judgement. How many times have you made a mistake or acted in ways you weren’t proud of and then berated yourself for days, weeks or maybe years? When we hold on to shame, guilt, anger and resentment, we keep ourselves trapped in the past. We hold on to the energy of those experiences, which keeps our vibration low and holds us back from all that we want to manifest.
A client I began working with at the start of 2020 told me, ‘I want to manifest it all’: a new job, a new apartment, a feeling of true confidence and her soulmate. Within six months, everything she had wanted to manifest had come to her except for her soulmate. I started to ask her a little more about her past relationships and she revealed that she had been cheated on by her last two partners. She said that she had mostly ‘blocked out the experience’ but that, deep down, she still blamed herself for ‘allowing’ it to happen, and she constantly questioned whether she had somehow pushed them to cheat in the first place. She also said that she felt embarrassed that, as a successful career woman, she had not been able to see the signs right in front of her.
By attempting to block out the experience, she was not allowing herself to process all of her feelings surrounding it or to change the narrative of self-blame she had attached to the experience. Remember that trauma, pain and emotional distress are all energy; when they are not given the time and attention they need to be moved, released and healed, they live within our physical body. This means that when we try to ‘block out’ our past experiences, they have nowhere to go, so they stay within us, lowering our vibration and keeping us trapped in the past.
My client’s experience was affecting her in another way, too: by blaming herself, she was creating a subconscious fear that history would inevitably repeat itself. It was only when we worked together to create a safe space to process the experience, to remove self-judgement and blame, to choose a new perspective and instead for her to offer herself complete compassion and non-judgement that she was able to remove her deeper, subconscious fears around meeting someone. I also encouraged her to work with one of my favourite mantras – ‘My past does not dictate my future’ – as a reminder that she has the power to change her future story. In doing the inner work, she was able to create room for her soulmate to enter her life. I received an email from her just recently and the subject line read, ‘I met THE ONE!’
To unblock the path that leads us to our most magnificent future, we must let go of the parts of our past that cause us to feel those low-vibe emotions of shame, guilt or anger and instead offer ourselves complete non-judgement and forgiveness. To do this, we must acknowledge these three truths:
EXERCISE
I want you to think of something now that you are holding on to, something you are judging yourself for. Write down the experience you feel shame, guilt or anger around.
Now write a letter to your past self. Offer yourself compassion and kindness, and acknowledge and identify whether your actions were driven by pain or insecurity. You might write something such as ‘I forgive you; you were doing your best, I know you were hurting at the time, it’s OK, I love you.’
Now write down the lessons you learned from the experience and the value you have taken from it.
Repeat this exercise for anything you are still holding on to.
Note: Every time I have done this exercise in a workshop with others there has been a release of emotions and tears. If you find yourself crying or feeling particularly emotional while doing this, please allow space for that and allow yourself to feel liberated in doing so.
THE TRUTH IS THIS: BY LEARNING FROM YOUR MISTAKES AND EXPERIENCES AND BY EVOLVING THROUGH THEM YOU PRACTISE THE GREATEST FORM OF SELF-LOVE, WHICH IS TO GROW. READ THAT AGAIN.
Self-love is the driving force behind manifesting so we must cultivate it every day, through consistent practice and commitment. We must make choices to behave, to respond and to think in ways that build our self-worth and propel us into becoming our most powerful selves. We must offer ourselves non-judgement, compassion, forgiveness and kindness every day and in everything that we do. No act of self-love is too great or too small. From drinking a glass of water to leaving a toxic relationship, everything we do defines who we are and who we become.
Note: I understand that, for some people, the idea of ‘cultivating self-love’ may seem incredibly daunting, especially if low self-worth and self-esteem currently seem to limit you at every turn. You may be thinking, ‘Sure, it sounds easy in theory, but how do I suddenly just act like I love myself?’ I understand your reservations; I was so consumed by my self-loathing my entire life, I never thought it would be possible to reach a place where I could honestly say that I love who I am. When people said the word ‘self-love’, I would roll my eyes as though it was some imaginary concept that would never be within reach. But with time, practice and commitment I did reach it. And so can you.
Undoing years, or decades, of built-up insecurities, limiting beliefs and low self-esteem is not something that can be done overnight. But we can make the decision to begin making more loving choices right now. The decision to commit to self-love is half the battle. Then it is about choosing, each day and each moment, to cultivate more self-love in your life, little by little, because that is what you deserve. The more you do it, the easier it will become and the more natural it will feel.
While we cultivate self-love, we simultaneously work through the other steps in the manifesting process.