"Love yourself first and everything else falls in line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world." Lucielle Ball
Self-love has been experiencing a sort of renaissance the past several years. I believe it's a response to years of putting everything else before ourselves and making everything else seem much more important, than self-love first.
We live in a time where life is moving very fast, and in order for us to keep up we feel the need to self sacrifice, meaning we give ourselves up in order to survive in order to reach that goal in order to succeed. But once we get there we realize just how much of ourselves we gave up in the process. We justify our choices with stuff like, "everyone else has to do it, so then so should I", or "if I'm not killing myself I must not be trying hard enough", or "suffering my way through is the only way" . Becoming aware of this type of thinking is the first step to self-love.
Self-awareness is really the key to it all. Listening and learning and getting to know who we really are, not the "who" everyone else sees or wants us to be, but our authentic self. Learning our weaknesses and creating tools to manage them in positive healthy ways, and honoring our strengths and allowing those strengths to empower us. Once we know our weaknesses and strengths we can live more mindfully, loving ourselves along the way. Instead of beating ourselves up over our weaknesses and dimming the light of our strengths, we can create positive self talk and manage our inner dialogue in a happier healthier way, allowing for self-kindness and self-compassion to take root in our thoughts, and lead the way to self-love!
Positive self-talk is vital to creating a loving foundation, where we can learn, grow, forgive, make mistakes, fail, and continue to move forward in self-love in our day to day lives. Whether we're a CEO or a SAHM self-love is the answer to our success in business and in our personal life. So when we make a mistake instead of beating ourselves up over it, we need to step back be open and honest with ourselves and find a solution if needed and fix what needs to be fixed so we don't make the same mistake, learn what we can and keep moving forward, reminding ourselves that mistakes and failures are part of life and part of the process. And when we fail, it is not the end of the world! It may feel like it sometimes, and we may not see a lesson in our failure, so then the lesson may just be in the way we choose to embrace our failures, finding grace along the way as we keep failing forward. This is where self-care comes in, finding positive healthy ways that help us embrace every up and down that life throws at us, so we can gracefully grow and learn as much as possible, loving ourselves into living our best lives and being our best selves.
So how do we do that? By creating a strong self-care tool kit!
What is a Self-care tool kit? It's all our go-to mind body and soul tools that help us maintain a healthy mind body and soul which helps us live a happier healthier life! We are all different and have different weaknesses and strengths and need to build our kits with self-care tools that work for us.
Daily self-care can be positive affirmations, gratitude practice and gratitude journaling, meditation, prayer, regular exercise, yoga, breathe work, earthing...it's also doing things we love...like making time for long walks or catching the sunrise or sunset, it's cooking our meals at home,it's making time to garden or de-cluttering and sparking joy at home, it's sitting alone sipping on a hot cup of tea reading a book... it's making time to do the things that fuel our soul that bring us joy. It's making sure that no matter how busy we are that we are never too busy to practice self-love and practice daily self-care. Self-care is the way we fuel our self-love, because when we do the things we love the things that bring us joy, when we take care of our minds our bodies and our souls, we are saying to ourselves, I love you!
So take time for yourself! Practice self-awareness, practice positive self-talk, and create a self-care tool kit and practice more self-love. We get one life one body one mind, life is precious so let's find more joy in our journey, love ourselves more with a little self-love.
Tamarah
"Conscious Positive Living"