Category - Self-Love

This is a major epidemic that affects so many of us and reeks havoc on our self esteem.

Women are much more susceptible to this particular syndrome.

Ahhh… the Imposter Syndrome. Yes this is one of my biggest hurdles in life.

The Imposter Syndrome is when we feel as though we are not capable and don’t have the tools that we need in order to be successful and claim true success in our lives, when in truth we have all the tools we need and are fully capable but the fact is we feel like a FRAUD.

I bump up against this syndrome frequently in my line of work as I am a healer, teacher, coach, speaker, writer and I feel frequently like I have to have it ALL FIGURED OUT and Be PERFECT before I can even begin to help others.

Fearing that if others see my own sufferings, pains, struggles than they will write me off as someone they would want to listen to for guidance. Having been a massage therapist for 14 years and having chronic pain made me feel like a fraud, like somehow I should be absolved of physical pain because I help other people get out of pain. Or being an empowerment self love coach that I should never doubt myself or struggle with my own lack of self love and personal empowerment.

This is a fucking sham!!!

It’s a scenario where one can NEVER WIN. I won’t ever be perfect enough when it comes to those inner critics that live in my head, I won’t ever have enough figured out to appease those snarling gremlins that try to keep me scared, stuck , and small. The truth is I am great at what I do because I am human too.

The truth is NO ONE has it all figured out, no one is completely free of fear, or doubt, or worry.

In my empowerment coaching program there is an exercise where you go to the mirror and look into your own eyes and you repeat your worst fear of what other people might find out about you – Example:

“I am a fraud and I will never be truly successful. I remain small and with no value to others for the rest of my life. I will never amount to anything!”

You sit and say these things over and over and over while looking into your eyes until it no longer triggers you, until the voice inside says “ENOUGH!!!! This is not true, it’s time to move on!”

If our fears go unacknowledged, and we don’t have access to them or we are unaware of what they really are they can secretly control our lives.

Bringing our Fear to the forefront of our minds, acknowledging it, and then most importantly QUESTIONING IT.  As with the work of Byron Katie and her inquiry- we say “I am a fraud. I am not good enough. I will never be successful.” and then we ask “IS THAT TRUE? How can I know thats true?”

We can limit ourselves in such profound ways if we never question or doubt the inner voice in us that says “we are not enough”.   A helpful tip:

Don’t listen to everything you tell yourself about yourself!

Fears can be slippery tricksters that want nothing more then to keep controlling you. Fear says “Better the Devil you Know, then the Devil you don’t“. It wants you to stay small and it tells you it’s for your own protection. It will try to convince you it’s there to help and keep you safe.

Questioning whether this is the voice of inner guidance or inner fear will open you to new opportunities. How to tell the difference between Inner Guidance and Inner Fear, inner guidance feels good , feels like something is guiding you that loves you , inner fear feels like anxiety, doubt, insecurity.

Inner guidance says “psst…come this way“. Inner fear says “noooo don’t go that way… it’s dangerous“.

Tune in and learn to connect with your inner guidance. Give it a name, a voice you can hear over all others, a sound, a color – anything that will help you get more clear on when it’s true wisdom guiding you and offering you love and support, and when it’s fear keeping you small and afraid.

Love you all- Amber. 

 

A quick post as I have not written a blog in awhile.

It’s been a full year so far and so much is coming up to the surface to be loved, healed, surrendered , and released.

I feel it’s a time of collective healing, as well as deep personal healing.

The last two weeks I’ve had MAJOR breakthroughs on some pretty big wounds and triggers of mine, it’s been great, and scary moving through the pain and being with it in a whole new way.

I’m only going to talk about one of the breakthroughs for simplicity and ease –

I’ve been struggling for a very long while with certain belief systems held by the people that surround me, pretty much since moving to Asheville I’ve had a lot come up around a certain topic ( topic is not the point so I will leave that out)…Every time I’m around people chatting about, or posting about said topic I would feel irritated, frustrated, judged, and sort of exhausted by it all.

It’s been popping up for me more and more frequently ( due to law of attraction and that which we focus on, both in resistance and simply by attention and thought – we ATTRACT) so it’s been in my face a good deal.

I finally felt ready to really check in with WHY I’m so bothered by this belief system and why I want to punch people in the face when they talk to me about it. So I did what I do when I really need to get clear on something, I took a candled light bath and did some tapping.

I realized this issue isn’t just around this one topic but many many topics that have come up through my life- and the issue is my desire to have people agree with me and hold my belief system.

I realize my own beliefs are a bit fringe for most, I hold pretty radical views on health , our bodies, our lives, the universe, and how we create our realities with all those topics. So when I hear people saying things about how I should be , or how I should eat, or what I need to do in order to XYZ.. I get annoyed.

I realized we all want people to believe what we believe and to uphold our belief system as life would be easier if we all could agree. We are in a time of very open , very public opinions and every one is shouting from one soap box or another and we are all begging to be heard.

So here I was in my bath tapping through the varying ways I was feeling really trying to get at the root of the nagging frustration I’ve had for several years now.

It came up and it felt like a massive release in my entire body- My inner guidance system sighed a big sigh of relief as the words ” You don’t need them to agree with you for you to be okay”, ” It’s okay for you to have beliefs that aren’t like most and it’s okay for you to hold those beliefs and to trust them”.  I realized I felt scared in my beliefs because there are so few that reflect back or hold the same kind of beliefs I do , that I feel vulnerable in these seemingly odd far out beliefs. Afraid that if no one else agreed with me that maybe I’m crazy or Wrong!??!?

But here I sat and this massive surge of acceptance for my own true guidance came over me, this powerful force that said ” You don’t need anyone else to tell you it’s okay to believe in yourself and your feelings about life to trust and know whats true for you”.

I had no real idea how badly I needed to connect to this part of myself , to hear my own inner wisdom and to trust in it so deeply.

I do believe the power is within us, we have so much more wisdom and understanding of ourselves then we usually allow ourselves to really feel and believe. I am in no way saying seeking guidance, inspiration , and information from external sources is wrong, I’m saying we tend to give our power away repeatedly to everyone and everything and we lose sight of our own voice and true deep inner knowing.

I feel that learning to really really listen to myself, to hear my own true voice inside, tune myself to that voice so clearly that when it speaks I feel it ring out in my body  is the best possible guidance I could ask to seek. No one outside of myself knows what is really best for me, no one can show me myself more clearly then myself. No one can know what will bring true and lasting health, love , joy, power , fulfillment into my life more then ME.

This doesn’t mean I stop learning, questioning, exploring etc.. It Means that I do those things while listening very closely to what messages, feelings, sensations , thoughts , images etc come up for me when being offered information from teachers outside myself.

Finding and connecting with my True North , my guiding star. my inner guidance system keeps me clued in by expressing itself through my body and my emotions.

I now vow to love and honor my own internal voice of wisdom , to love her and practice spending time hearing her wisdom even when a million voices are shouting at me to LOOK THIS WAY , LOOK OVER HERE, PAY ATTENTION TO THIS, NO REALLY THIS IS THE TRUTH, I HAVE THE ANSWER…..

I don’t have to be anyone other then me, and no one has to be me, or share my feelings, thoughts or beliefs in order for me to feel sure and sit in my own power. My beliefs are just that- Mine. 🙂

This is the “Age of Information”. We all have access to what seems like infinite info.

This day and age, we are all capable of being “experts” on any given topic of our choice. What I am here to talk about in this blog is the major difference between having a intellectual understanding of something and a practical fully-engaged, living-it experience.

More specifically, I am speaking on the topic of self help and personal awareness, as well as philosophical and spiritual matters.

I have been studying spiritual/self help information since I was around 11 or 12 years of age. I am now 36.

I really invested myself in this information sometime in my 20’s. I went from curious to ravenous for it.

It has taken me 15 years of active, dedicated, and deliberate intention to even begin to really START to embody this knowledge. The first step is intention, the desire to begin to open oneself to something beyond what we are shown in our everyday experience. An opening-up to ourselves and the bigger picture of life.

Every individual is different and has a different level of desire on how far down the rabbit hole they are interested in going. I’ve dedicated my life to knowing myself, to questioning and examining the fundamentals of the nature of reality and our existence. I have given myself completely to this practice.

With that in mind, I am also still a student of myself and the universe.  There was a time in my 20’s when I felt like I had all the answers and I was definitely arrogant and a bit of a fundamentalist in my own way.

It took me years of fumbling around and coming face to face with my own perceived limitations and struggles before I let myself fully acknowledge that I was always going to be a student of life no matter how much I knew.

It took me years of practice and continued focus before I stopped just KNOWING this information and I actually really started LIVING IT.

Right now in our world of technology and social media we are bombarded with endless information about how to better ourselves and live a more fully-enriched and authentic life. I love this and I’m so happy we have so much access to such fantastic and inspiring information. However, I feel due to the endless overwhelming stimulus and continued in-our-faceness of all of this information, we tend to start to block it out and really powerful life affirming messages just become noise.

On my Instagram feed I see about a thousand memes about loving myself and taking care of myself etc. This is super deep and truly meaningful, life changing information , but how it is presented then makes it less likely to be something we really take in on a deep and profound level.

It starts to feel like “Love yourself…yada yada yada“.

I, of course, would rather this Love Yourself Revolution exist than not exist, but what I am wanting to draw attention to is that Loving oneself and really living from a place of deep connectivity with one’s deepest love and compassion for yourself does not come overnight, or due to our exposure to this via Facebook or any other social media.

It becomes just another thing we have floating around in the infinite abyss of information in our minds.

Yes, all information starts with understanding it on an intellectual level, but it takes much more than “knowing something”, knowing the right words to say and what you should be doing, than actually doing it and living it.

We all have to start from exactly where we are, wherever that may be in regard to our own relationship with ourselves.  Knowing the verbiage and walking-the-walk are about a million miles away from each other, but one will lead you to the other with one small step at a time.

I began my real journey with loving myself when I first acknowledging the painful fact that I did not love myself. I “liked” only parts of myself and found certain aspects of myself acceptable, but on an overall scale I did not have a deep connection with my own love and approval. After that, I began examining all the ways not loving myself affected my life, how my own feelings about my worth and capabilities as a human being had shaped and molded my entire existence.

I knew all the mantras “Love  yourself. You are beautiful. You deserve all the love in the world” … “Fear is an illusion. Only love is real. You create your own reality.” I knew it all!! But I didn’t really know how to live my life from the space of those mantras.

I knew them, but in my heart I did not FEEL them. I only half-believed them and I wasn’t sure I believed them for myself and my life.  I had such a powerful belief system in place that told me, “You are not smart enough to really be successful, so why bother. You are terrible with money and you will most likely always be poor. You are not pretty enough, thin enough, sexy enough. You are too moody, too pissy, too intense, too much of an ungrateful bitch that no one will ever really love you”.

That system of belief was running the show and having someone show up and tell me to “love myself” only made me feel guilty and pissed off that I didn’t love myself .

I was so angry after all that time spent over years studying myself and learning everything I could about life, that at the end of the day I still didn’t fucking love myself. The reason I was still so out of touch with actually feeling my own love for myself was because I hadn’t shown up and taken the action of really becoming “one who loves”.

I plastered happy words onto my life but I still showed up in my life exactly as I had always shown up.

Loving myself (or yourself) is much more than words spoken. It is how we show up for ourselves in our own lives. It is feeling the fear of our own greatest weakness and painful vulnerability and then sitting with it in the most love we can conjure from where we are.

We cannot jump from despair to bliss in a heartbeat, but we can move up the vibrational scale of emotions one tiny vibrational, emotional step at a time.

If I am in fear, someone telling me that “fear is an illusion” is more painful and frustrating than helpful and inspiring. Do I believe fear is a construct of our own minds? Yes, but when I am smack in the middle of it, knowing something and being able to access it in my being are two very different things .

 

How Do We Go From Knowing to BEING?

I think every one may have their own personal journey, but I do think there are some steps that every one can take .

FIRST, I believe total willingness and deep intention to really move beyond Knowing is the most important step you will take on this journey. If you aren’t truly invested it will prove challenging to really dig in and get deep into the roots.

SECOND is a willingness to let go of thinking you already have all the answers. (This was the most important step for me.) Even if you don’t like the answers you have we still have a tendency to be attached to our beliefs even when they are painful and not serving us. Letting your mind be open to new insights and depths of comprehension. If we are holding tight to our current reality, it is that much harder to let a new one in.

THIRD is questioning every belief and thought you have. I know that sounds crazy and like a lot of work, but it is a major player in breaking down the barriers to a new level of being. We will never truly know the greatness of ourselves until we know the source of our pain and struggle, so taking a long hard look at all the thoughts you are thinking on a daily basis gives you great insight into what beliefs are holding you back. Every belief we have carries an emotion and emotions are our indicators of what we are creating in ourselves and our lives. If the thoughts you are thinking on a daily basis bring you anxiety, pain, fear, and depression then those thoughts are attracting more thoughts like themselves ( which is the nature of the mind) and those thoughts are in turn attracting more things into your life to feel anxious, depressed , and fearful about. Beliefs form our reality.

Looking at what a belief is…  What is a “thought” to you? Where does it come from? What is it’s purpose? Do you have control over your thoughts? YES! Does this take time, energy and lots of fucking practice. YES!

It is like any new skill. We cannot expect to take it on and be a master in an instant.

What you think causes the way you feel, and the way you feel causes the way you send out vibrations that then in turn attract all matters of circumstances and events into your life.

By really examining how our thoughts and beliefs about our thoughts are affecting every part of every day, is a major step in looking at life and yourself through a new lens.

When I say “We are all one“, it is a delightful catch phrase that has a pleasant idea behind it. But living from this belief is a whole other ball game. Really living our lives from a place of connectivity with one and another and seeing how we are all a part of each others lives is a major shift in our reality of separation. Living from the space of oneness… seeing how that person in traffic is an extension of yourself, seeing how your boss’s shitty behavior is an extension of yourself, and on and on. Seeing that every person and every thing that comes into your life is an extension of yourself is HUGE!

When I live from that space, I am able to slow down and be aware of how I am the creator of my life and the players in my life are showing up and reflecting back to me the thoughts, feelings, fears, and actions I fear, want, need, hate, love, etc.

Life really changes when we live it in full responsibility!

This can be infuriating as well as utterly liberating all at the same time. At times I wish life were different and that I believed in chance and coincidence and fate, but I am a firm believer in my own creative link to the universe and being a co-creator with life, not a person merely affected by life’s creations.

I can very easily choose to be unconscious and to not be deliberate in my thoughts, actions, and deeds, but in the end I end up with results that may or may not be what I want. It can be a big task to ask someone to acknowledge their power. To own their life in way they may never have thought of owing it. But the path I have found to being an active, loving, conscious participant in my life has been to take responsibility and to own my life fully.

Showing up of for yourself can look countless ways for countless different people. For me showing up and being one who loves, meant… leaving work that felt unfulfilling or painful, checking in with myself on why I allowed certain people to continue to treat me poorly, looking at my relationship with my boyfriends of the past and asking myself “Why did I stay so long, what about that behavior was serving me, and why did I think I deserved to be treated that way?“. It meant taking action where I could take action and/or lining up my energy in preparation to be able to take action in the future. It meant getting my thoughts and feelings about a given topic into a space of connectivity to what I was really wanting, versus taking action from a place of fear or from being focused on lack of what I wanted.

We only love ourselves to the extent that we allow ourselves to love ourselves. It cannot be done to us or for us by anyone else. If you are miserable in your life now and you are blaming others, that may feel better than owning your own part in the very misery you hate being in, but it will not change it.

I never ever want anyone to read this (or anything I write) and feel guilty or down on themselves, but it can occur when we have not been in the mindset of taking responsibility for our life and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Being one who loves is not about looking at yourself and your life and feeling like you are failing at it. No, it is really the opposite. Seeing how you create your life is not about blaming yourself for how shitty it may have turned out, but acknowledging your POWER of creation in that process.

The beauty is not only just knowing you are powerful in a “yeah, yeah, yeah… I’m powerful” sort of way. Its about feeling into the depth of who you are, looking into your mind and your soul’s deepest longings and seeing how life thus far has really shown up for you in exactly the way you have let yourself believe it would.

When I don’t know I’m powerful, I then give my power away to everyone else. I think other people can get what they want, but not me. Great power and owning it, will not be something that you wake up with after years of self-doubt and insecurity. A step in the direction of power is practicing consciously creating your life. By paying attention to how you feel, what you think, and what manifests in response to that.

You cannot take my word for it. Nothing is more infuriating then someone else telling you how to live. My desire is to have people choose for themselves to take action in going deeper, in moving beyond words that they know that are positive and uplifting, to living the Truth of those words. It is messy, scary, fun, amazing, playful, mind blowing, endlessly upsetting and will challenge you to the very depths of your being. But if you’re willing to go into a space of experiential practice, I can promise major shifts in your life.

From “Knowing stuff” to “BEING ONE WITH THIS KNOWLEDGE” is about breaking down our limiting beliefs and about opening up to new ways of thinking. Its about unlocking the mystery of You and delighting in everything you find, including all the horrible, ugly, messy shit you’ve swallowed over the years in regards to yourself. Its about moving one tiny, sweet step at a time in the direction of love and compassion for yourself. Its about looking into your own heart and finding all the reasons why you DO deserve all the love you have ever wanted. Why do you deserve this love? Because you were born and exist. Amazing how simple that is. We think we have to work so fucking hard to be lovable when really all we had to do was show up.

Think of a baby. Does that baby need to do something for you in order to deserve love? No! We believe this about babies but then tell ourselves a whole different story when it comes to ourselves.

How do you practice loving yourself? What does it feel like, look like, sound like?

How do you connect with and embody deep self-worth and self-love?

I have met a lot of wonderful people who say a lot of wonderful words, but in the end words are empty if I don’t see someone being it. As Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world“. He didn’t say,  “Preach the change, but you don’t have to actually do the work yourself.”

BE the love you want. BE the friend you want. BE the lover you want. Take it all in. Take all of life in. Change life from the inside, not from the outside. Be in Love with YOU & watch how the world will follow!!!

 

 

A note on some of today’s triggers that got my juices flowing, kicked up my anger, my pain, and most importantly buried beneath both my anger and pain…my FEAR. What I have come to deeply understand and feel most this past year, the lesson that has come up again and again and again and again and mother-fucking again is simply this…

I must. Listen. To my own…GUIDANCE!!!

I’m open to hearing other teachers. I’m ready and eager to learn, grow, and have new perspectives light up before me. But everything keeps circling back to MY OWN VOICE, MY OWN TRUTH. Learning to trust in this has been HUGE. I am a teacher, a guide, a leader, and a speaker. But what I want most is for everyone to find their inner-compass. To commit to themselves with fierce dedication and utter devotion.

I want to help create a space for women to re-learn, re-shape, and re-member who they really are. I know the one voice I need to practice loving, hearing, responding, and resonating with is MY OWN. Offer me your guidance and ideas, but know my heart must always listen to what feels like it’s own most resonate tune. There are SO many teachers, SO many voices and I feel I can go mad at times trying to cram them all in and make it all fit.

I am the one voice I’ve been dying to hear and believe in. This year has been about finding my voice and bringing it into the world. Then it became about listening to myself and what feels best for me in any given situation. Even if I seem insane, or selfish, ridiculous, petty, or off-the-mark completely…trusting in my own knowledge and wisdom has been life transformative.

I feel for perhaps the first time EVER…that I TRULY BELIEVE in MYSELF!

Written with happy tears streaming down my face, while sitting bottomless in preparation for tonight’s bath. That is all for tonight. 

Self-love has become the new buzz word, the new spiritual, emotionally intelligent thing to do. I am a teacher, a believer, a spouter of this great amazing thing called self-love, but I am also here to say “it’s deeper, it’s richer, it’s fuller, it’s more powerful than we have even begun to comprehend“.

The truth is I think most of us are confused. Confused about loving ourselves, confused about being told to love ourselves, confused about how to love ourselves and wondering if we already did love ourselves before we were told it was what we were supposed to be doing. Using loving ourselves as a way of beating ourselves up, feeling like we should do it “better”, love ourselves “more”. But how?!

It seems like it should be the most natural thing we have ever done, but after a lifetime of being gently, and sometimes not so gently, dragged away from our own inner-guidance, things can get cloudy. I have devoted years to actively learning how to love myself. It has been an amazing challenge, the hardest part being the moment I realized I barely even liked myself and most definitely did NOT love myself, nor did I know how.

The most shocking thing about that discovery was the fact that all this time I thought I did love myself. I was deeply spiritual, I had done personal growth work, I had been in therapy, and I took yoga classes. The truth was I only loved parts of myself. The parts that went to yoga classes, were spiritual, and did personal growth work. What about my anger, my jealousy, my negative self-talk, my critical and judgmental side? Those parts of me were most certainly unlovable. So I set out on a mission to integrate those parts into the “Love Zone” (hard work). Total acceptance, forgiveness, embracing the dark (shadow) self was and is mind-blowingly challenging. I wish all it took was awareness and then *poof*…you love all of yourself no matter what, but it is a far greater adventure than just that. Becoming aware is a huge and essential step in the process, but I am here to say it is just one step of infinite steps towards deeply embracing, loving, and adoring ALL of one’s self.

Even to say the word “self” is complicated as we are composed of so many facets, so many characters. “Self” is a very slippery slope. So when doing self-love work my deepest suggestion is to be as utterly, painfully, balls to the wall, open and honest with all of those “selves” you are doing your best to know and love. Trying to lie, hide, or evade yourself is utterly counter productive. I’ve had to admit some unbelievably heinous things about parts of myself. I had to own them and stop trying to push them away and push them onto other people. Owning up to myself, even though very embarrassing and hard at times, ultimately freed something up inside me. It created space for something other than hurt and fear. I had to look at how I hated myself, how I used self-hate as a weapon to keep self-love, acceptance, and appreciation far out of reach.

Self-hate can even masquerade as self-love acting like it is trying to love you by telling you to exercise, be healthy, and feel good, but the underlying feeling you get is that you are fat and unhealthy. Beating ourselves up about how we should be better, how we will change, because how we are now is gross and worthless. How many times have I tried to motivate myself through fear and judgement all through the guise of self-love? I know when I am actually being motivated by love because it feels good. I feel inspired, uplifted, supported. When self-hate is masquerading as love I feel guilty, shameful, less than, tired and defeated.

Learning how to truly fall in love with ourselves means taking a long look at some false premises we have set up for ourselves. Looking at patterns and beliefs, opening our minds, our hearts, our bodies to new dimensions of thought. Decoding some of our fear patterns and blocks we have built against love. Defining what love is to us and practicing everyday to open ourselves to new depths of knowing ourselves. Fearlessly exploring who we really are!

Believing in yourself is paramount!

What I mean by this is that Everything we believe about ourselves is what we will experience of ourselves. If we sit around thinking (and more importantly feeling) unworthy, unlikeable, ugly, fat, stupid (fill in the blank), then that is what we will come to know of ourselves. We have merely convinced ourselves that we are those things based on patterns of thought and looking to outside influences to tell us how to feel about ourselves. I am not going to sit here and tell you media, movies, magazines, are all evil and the cause of all our own self-loathing. I am going to tell you that they influence our thinking an if we already feel bad about ourselves we can use those outlets as confirmation that we are in fact, lacking.

The key here is to re-examine all those beliefs you have formed about yourself over the years and really honestly ask yourself “are they true?” If you answer “yes”, I want you to then ask “how can Ireally know they are true?” My point here is learning to look with new eyes at old thoughts that most likely come from a wounded, sad part of yourself. I used to think I was very incapable of many things. I was terrified to even try new things as I was sure I would fail and be humiliated. New jobs, reaching past my comfort zone would send me into a panic attack. I would freak myself out so bad about the new adventure so much that I would usually end up quitting the job sometimes even before I started.

As I really began my journey of deeper self-discovery, I started really looking at the beliefs I had formed about myself and questioning there legitimacy. Where did that belief come from, and was it really true about who I really was? Could I change that belief and in turn no longer be held back by it? This is a process of listening, opening, and practicing hearing all the things you tell yourself about yourself and deciding what you want to keep believing and what you’re willing to let go of and change. A belief is only a thought you keep thinking and have thought upon long enough that it appears to be true. What I am asking you to do is to look inside and search for the True you. How do you know you have found the True you? The True you feels beautiful, feels light and open. The True you feels powerful and empowered. Thoughts that tell you you are weak, pathetic, less than everybody else are not the True you.

Suffering happens when we are taught to believe that what is happening to us is wrong and a mistake and we should have prevented it. We learn to think of life as a reward and punishment: If I am “good”, good things happen to me and I get what I want. If I am “bad”, bad things happen to me and I don’t get what I want.

In a nutshell, we have learned to believe that self-hate, that relentless onslaught of judgement, criticism, and blame, is what prevents us from being cruel, selfish, and indulgent and that without being constantly watched and controlled we will be hateful and harmful. It is a lie!

The only way we are ever going to stop abuse in all its forms is by ceasing to believe that punishing people makes them “good”. Your love will always be conditional as long as you are excluding any part of yourself from it.

This article has a wonderful perspective on the war that women have waged against their own bodies. I think that the validity of taking a look at what we make “FAT” mean about us and our lives is a huge step in the right direction. That all the wonderful campaigns for women to love their bodies as they are, are a great step in a new and positive direction but that it is not most likely the end all be all answer to our self loathing.

I promote Self Love and Acceptance on all levels of our being , but I also know by spouting “self love” that does not necessarily mean the recipe for change. True self acceptance, true deep self love and self worth come from a place of change and questioning constantly what you are bombarded with on the external level. Looking into our own minds and the programs we have received about beauty and being a Woman and then questioning them, dismantling them until they no longer look and feel the way they did before. Learning to see our bodies through a different lens, coming to ourselves and embracing the power and magnificence of being a woman, of being human and being in a body at all. Coming to the very powerful life altering reality that how we look is not what truly defines us.

I know it’s been said before but truly sitting with that , meditating on this truth, letting it sink in seep down through the layers of bull-shit we have programed into our minds. We all have bodies, we all change and grow, and morph into different versions of ourselves, the young WILL GROW OLD. No one is immune to life and the changes that come with it, and hating our bodies along that journey is an ultimate waste of our precious time on earth.

I have suffered with my own criticisms and battled my own demons of self hate and loathing. As I grow older and things get softer, rounder, and more saggy I feel those programs of “not enough” and “should be better” creeping in. I feel the pain of those beliefs…they burn and twist my insides and it’s torture.

My greatest tool is LOVE when those voices and beliefs start moving in. Question them, pick apart where that belief came from, remove it’s power to influence you. Question everything you think, and watch as new truths emerge!