Saturday, February 2, 2013

Self-Love




I have come to believe that self-love is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to the process of healing. All other love grows from self-love. Without self-love, there is little motivation to heal, there is no impelling Will to Live.

Anita Moorjani (DYING TO BE ME), Louise Hay (YOU CAN HEAL YOUR LIFE), Barbra White (MAGNIFICENT YOU) and others have written about the importance of self-love, especially in healing. It can feel like an impossible task if the idea is foreign to you. I'm speaking from my own experience. I read about it years ago, I included it in presentations and in advising healing clients. I could not stress to them enough the magnitude of the importance of self-love. I facilitated a journaling group for a few years and we would always have the 'homework' of performing at least one act of loving self-care per week (and reporting back to the group). I started talking about (and even journaling about) self-love 16 years ago. I understood from a logical/mental standpoint that self-love was essential to healing; yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought "It's okay. I can skip that part. It's not THAT important."  I could not have been more wrong!!!


I read Anita Moorjani's book the same week I watched Wayne Dyer on Oprah and I remember him saying something like "I am God. We all are. We DESERVE self-love." Those two events made the light bulb finally turn on - I really DO need to love myself if I expect to heal through this cancer experience. 



I started by opening my heart to everyone I knew and everyone I saw. I talked of love to myself in the mirror (I could never do this before). I gave suggestions of self-love in all my guided imagery sessions. Guided imagery, even when I'm the guide, is the best meditation I've ever experienced. I read Barbra White's MAGNIFICENT YOU and that really helped me to understand that it IS possible to love oneself. And, I experienced Self-Acceptance Healing with Barbra White. I had judged myself very harshly and believed that I did not deserve to be loved - by anyone, especially not by myself. I had no idea what love really feels like. LOVE is amazing and magical. LOVE is everyone and everything - and I am part of that. I AM love. We all are love. Wayne Dyer says there is a spark of the Divine in each of us.  We are at once totally Divine and totally human. The Divine part is who we REALLY are.  The human part is pretty much an illusion we have created to exist in the physical dimension.


Click here to experience a wonderful 3-minute experience in feeling loved.  It's a video called "A Love Letter to You From the Universe"  by Gisele Frederich.


Self-love is about allowing myself to be who I really am - the Universe currently expressing itself as a human being (I think Wayne Dyer said that). It's about accepting that I am also human with all my human eccentricities, imperfections and emotions - both negative and positive - with an attitude of compassion and love in place of judgment and criticism. It's about making sure that my needs are fulfilled, that my voice is heard, that I communicate my truth from my heart and that I AM LOVE in thought, word and action.  It's about "giving myself a break" from the stress of always striving for perfection. It's about believing that I am lovable just because I exist (thank you, Anita Moorjani). 

Self-love is about loving myself the way I would love my own child. I remember when my daughter, Erin, was little, and I had said something like, "I will always love you, no matter what."  She asked if I would still love her if she was mean to me.  I said, "yes".  Then, she asked if I would still love her if she was punching me and I again replied in the affirmative. Then she asked if I would still love her if she was stabbing me with a knife, trying to kill me.  After some thought, I realized that the answer was yes. That's what "no matter what" means.  I certainly wouldn't be happy or enjoy it, but I would still love her.  This is the kind of love I am giving to myself and it has totally changed who I am.

Here is a challenge for you: write in your journal (or just make a plan for) what you will do for yourself today or tomorrow that is an act of loving self-care, a demonstration of self-love. It's a great way to start on the path to totally unconditional self-love. With much love from my heart to yours ♥ Mellifluous Mega-Magnificent Maggie McDee ♥