314 Holly Worton ~ How to Practice Self Love: Actual Steps You Can Take Today

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! This week, I’m talking about self love: how to love yourself and how to practice self love. This is a topic that’s very much related to last week’s episode on self care, but it goes a lot deeper. This is a topic that I’ll be working on with myself over the next few months, so you may be seeing more topics that are related to this.

We all hear about the importance of self love, but often the advice more closely resembles self care. What does self love really mean, and how can you get some for yourself? Learn more in this episode.

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

How to get clear on what is self love, what is unconditional love, and what is love to YOU
What exactly self love looks like, sounds like, and feels like to YOU
Why self care is linked to self love – but it’s not the same thing
How to work on your self love: practical, real life actions you can take
Why you need to face the truths about yourself – and how to do that

Things I Discussed

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 315. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today I am going to talk about a topic very similar to last week’s topic, it is kind of a deeper-dive into what I was talking about last week in the self-care episode; so today I am talking about self-love.

I am going to be talking about: what is self-love? Why do you need it? Why might you want it? How to figure out what it looks like for you. Why self-care is linked to self-love. How to work on your self-love and practical stuff on how to do this, because I feel that this is a very nebulous topic. I was doing research, as always, before I hit record on this I always kind of have an idea of what I want to talk about, make some bullet points and then I Google the topic and see what other people are saying about this and see what I think about that, whether I agree with what people are saying, whether I have different perspectives, and I kind of put that all together. It really helps me get into the topic by seeing what other people are saying about it.

So, when I was doing my research for this topic I realised there is so much generic stuff out there on self-love and a lot of it really, to me, falls under the category of self-care. There is a lot of stuff around take time out for yourself and do some journaling and care for yourself and it was all really self-care stuff, a lot of stuff that I covered last week. Which was a good episode I think, I actually think I need to go through it myself and make my own menu of self-care which I haven’t done yet. I kind of have a random list of my ideas, but I would really like to have something written down. So if you haven’t listened to last week’s episode head over there and do so after you listen to this one.

So let’s start out by talking about why I think this is so important and what is it? So self-love, what is it? I was trying to make notes on this topic and what I think this is and I kind of kept going deeper, so I was like: what is self-love? What is unconditional love? And then what is love? So this is going to look different for everyone, it is going to look different for every single individual, but I am sure you have an idea of what love is, what it means to you. And of course I Googled that, and it is so hard to define, it is kind of like this conglomeration of emotions and feelings and it is really, really, hard to define, so I am going to be lazy here and start out by asking you to get clear on what love means to you? You might want to stop this, pause it, think about it.

What does love look like for you when you think about other people, so when you think about friends, family members, partners, what does love look like to you? What does a loving relationship look like to you? And maybe journal on this, sit down and look at and make a list of all the different ways that you know these people in your life love you, what has your partner done for you, your friend, your family? How do they act? How do they behave? What do they do? How do they know that these people that love you, love you? That can be kind of tricky, but I think that will really help you give you an idea of what a loving relationship looks like to you.

Next, what is unconditional love? So you might want to go back and revisit that list, add some things to it, highlight the really important things, but unconditional love is basically love without limitations and without conditions, no matter what. It is loving this person, whether it is yourself or someone else, no matter what the person does, says, whatever. And that is rough, now that I am saying this I can hear myself thinking that’s really, really, rough, because people can do some crazy things really out of character and distasteful things so maybe think about who in your life you have loved unconditionally. If you are a parent, probably your kids, maybe your partner, maybe not, but think about what unconditional love looks like for you, the people in your life that you have loved unconditionally and what that feels like to you. Do your parents love you unconditionally? Think about what that feels like, how have they shown this to you? Your partner, your kids? Go through the people in your life who you have loved unconditionally, and who you think have loved you unconditionally, and write down what that looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like to you.

So now you should have an idea of what love looks like, feels like, sounds like, to you, what unconditional love looks like to you, and then apply that to yourself. Go through your list and think about how those things could apply to you. What that would look like if you were to love yourself unconditionally, that to me is what self-love is. It is loving yourself with no limitations, no conditions, not matter what. But because I think this is such a challenging topic for us, it really helps to look at how you love other people and how other people love you, I think that can be really, really, helpful to get a clear picture of what self-love looks like for you. And again this is going to be different for everyone, you may be familiar with the concept of the five love languages, I will link to that in the show notes. And, again, this is something that applies to couples, it applies to you relationship with other people, but I think that it can be really useful to figure out what your love language is.

So, there are five of them, I am linking to them in the show notes but basically they are words of affirmation, so people telling you or expressing verbally that they love you; acts of service, so doing things; receiving gifts, that is clear enough; quality time, so spending quality time with the other person; and physical touch.

So, think about how that applies to you? Are you telling yourself loving things? Now maybe you are not having a full conversation with yourself out loud, but what is your mind chatter like? What is your self-talk like? Are you beating yourself up all the time or are you building yourself up? Acts of service: so that would be self-care stuff, all the stuff I talked about last week, so how often do you do things for yourself? Self-care: receiving gifts, now I am not saying that you need to go out and buy yourself a bunch of crap, but when was the last time you bought yourself a nice little thing? Quality time: and this could be self-care, this could be just making some time for yourself to do whatever you want to do. When was the last time you spent some quality time with yourself? A lot of us are running around, really stressed, and we need that quality time. Physical touch: so there is such a thing as self-massage, I am not really into to it, you might be. Basically, I am not talking about {laughing} intimate self-massage but that’s also an option! But I am talking about self-massage, massaging your arms and shoulders, I am not into that because I don’t find it relaxing. So, what kind of physical touch do you need to give yourself? Maybe it is going to a spa, getting a massage, maybe it is self-massage, maybe it is other kinds of other kinds, what kinds of physical touch could you give yourself to show yourself that you love you and again that could be getting a message from someone else, or getting a pedicure, or a manicure, a head cranial massage, I don’t know, those are some examples, you are going to have an idea of what works for you.

So, those are the five love languages and I think that can also help you take a look at and please go to the show notes, click on the link and it is just 5lovelanguages.com/ but check that out there is a quiz on there that is really interesting that can give you a feeling for how you naturally express love, because everyone has a preference. But, if we are looking at improving our self-care, and improving our self-love, it might be a good idea to pick one thing from each category and give it a try and see how that improves your relationship with yourself and your sense of love for yourself.

So that should help give you an idea of what self-love looks like, feels like, sounds like to you and I think self-care is really, really linked to self-love, because some of the ways we can show ourselves love is by practicing self-care. And, as I say this, I am aware that these are all kind of, they become like, I don’t want to say meaningless buzz-words, but I feel like these phrases are really thrown around a lot, like: oh you need to practice self-care and you need to love yourself and that has led to this kind of superficial information available online. So I am really going to try to be practical with this and I am really going to try to bring it home which is why I think I did a good job with that last week in the self-care episode, because I think it is important to bring this down to really practical stuff and specifically find the practical stuff that you can do to make your own life better and to feel better and to live a better life and to love yourself.

So self-love is something that has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks because, a couple of weeks ago, I had my latest plant-healing apprenticeship weekend. And in it we were told that we had to choose a plant or have a plant come to us to help us work with kind of our biggest topic in life to heal. And we had determined that my biggest topic to work on is self-love and that is not a surprise.

So the plant that I suspected I was going to work with was lavender and lavender to me is very much tied up with self-care because it is relaxing, calming, soothing, but I wanted to confirm that, so I ended up going to Mayfield Lavender Farm which is this really gorgeous lavender farm, about half-hour away from where I live and I am going to link to that in the show notes in case you live in the UK and want to go there, now is the prime time for the lavender. So I went to see the lavender because I wanted to talk to the lavender and ask it and kind of get confirmation that it was indeed the plant that I am meant to be working with for self-love.

So I think what I will do is I will just cut to the recording of lavender, so what I did with lavender, in the same way that I did for my tree book, I recorded myself channeling lavender, I think this is really, really, interesting, I think it is a really good recording I am going to have to edit it a little bit before I pop it in here but here we go:

I am the plant of self-love. I am the plant of self-love because I am the plant of self-care. When you think of lavender you think of sleep, gentle, relaxation, kindness to yourself, caring for yourself, loving yourself, taking the time out of a busy day to give to yourself, to care for yourself, to love for yourself. Taking the time out of doing things for other people, helping other people, and instead choosing to help yourself.

This is not selfish, this is not being unkind to others, this is being kind to yourself first because you cannot truly be kind to others, you cannot truly be kind to others without helping yourself first.

You must always help yourself first so that you can live in a balanced state, a place of peace, a place of centred-ness, a place of grounded-ness so that you can help others. You cannot be of service to others if you are not of service to yourself first, if you do not care for yourself first. You cannot. And I speak of grounded-ness, you see we are in a line, in many, many lines, grounded and deeply rooted in the earth. My fragrance is not a sweet, light, fragrance it is a deep earthy fragrance. It is a warm fragrance, a comforting fragrance, a fragrance that helps me help you.

This is one of my purposes to help, to help with self-love, to help with self-care, to help with self-kindness. Being kind to yourself, loving yourself gently, calmly, quietly, caring for yourself with sweetness, with gentleness, with love. I am here to help with self-love which we know can be difficult, we know it can be tricky, we know it can be difficult for you humans because you are so often taught that to love yourself is arrogant, to care for yourself too much is selfish, and as I have said and as I will say again you must help yourself first.

Without helping yourself first you cannot truly be of service to others.

So some of that was a bit difficult for me, I just listened to it again because I did a bit of editing before I came back to this so that I was fresh with the message before I went back to talk to you about it. There was this one part where lavender says: you must always put yourself first and I think that is really, really, uncomfortable for a lot of us, if you have got kids, you have got to keep your kids alive and well so there are definitely going to be times when you can’t put yourself first, and I am sure that goes the same if you are another kind of carer. However, going back to the oxygen mask analogy, if we are not alive, if we are not alive and well, it is really hard to help other people.

So, I hope you found lavender’s message interesting. I am going to be working with lavender over the coming months, and possibly do more podcast episodes about this topic. It is definitely something that I am going to be diving deeper into and really looking forward to it because this is one of the biggest topics in my life and I think it is one of the things my soul came here to really, really, work on, because my self-love has been not great, it has definitely improved over the last decade but the previous decade I was in a relationship where my self-love, self-esteem, everything else was completely broken down, so I had to build myself up from negative levels of self-love. So it has been a long, rocky, road for me and, self-love, I feel like it has been at the root of a lot of my work that I do, a lot of the mindset stuff, I really think that doing this mindset work is an act of self-love because you are caring for yourself enough to improve the things that you want to improve in your mindset so that you can have the life that you want to live, that is self-care.

But, again, I don’t think self-care is the same as self-love, so how do you work on your self-love? Before I talk about this I think it is worth you pausing this to rate yourself on a scale of 1-10: how much do you think you love yourself? What is the quality of your love for yourself, of your self-love on a scale of 1-10, 10 being highest, 1 being lowest; how much do you love yourself? Ask yourself that question in whatever way you need to but, honestly, I think it is worth you getting clear right now honestly on how much you actually love yourself. Pause this if you need to.

So, how to work on your self-love, to me it is all about self-acceptance, this is all about facing the truth about yourself, it is total and unconditional self-acceptance of your complete package, of the complete package that is you: who you are, where you are in life, where you have been in life. It is about forgiving yourself for past mistakes and past decisions and instead focussing on the learning, what did you learn from those experiences? Because it is not worth beating yourself up about the stuff that you have done in the past, if you haven’t learned from it, because that was all learning opportunities.

So let’s delve a little deeper into this, your complete package, I have done a lot of blog posts on really digging deep and exploring who you are; where you are; and where you are going in life. And I think the answers to those two questions are part of what make up, what I have called “your complete package”, so it is who you are; where you are and where you have been in life. What have you done up until now? And so I am going to link to those blog posts because I think it could be really useful to go through those posts and really get clear on the answers. I really think that answering the question of who are you is one of the most important questions we can ask for ourselves and I think that can be an entire life’s journey, it can be life’s work, getting to know ourselves. Getting to know who we are as people and getting who we are as a soul if you believe in the whole multiple-incarnations thing, which I do. So, I am going to link, as I said, in the show notes, to blog posts that can help you get clear on who you are and where you are in life, but also looking at where you have been is important so again like I said, forgiving yourself, looking at how your life’s journey has made you who you are today, because all of our experiences both positive and negative, good and bad, welcome and unwelcome, they inform who we are today. So I think it is really just useful to sit down and journal on this stuff, if you are not into journaling I don’t know ponder the questions, but I find that really getting this stuff out of my head and onto a piece of paper and a notebook and a file in my computer helps make it real, otherwise it is just this jumble of crap in my head. So really get clear on who you are, where you are today in life, and where you have been and how all those life experiences has made you who you are today and like I said this is all about facing the truth about yourself, the good, the bad, the ugly, pull it out of your head and put it onto paper and really get clear on it.

The first step of this is getting clear on “your package”, I am not sure if this is the right way to explain this, but I think you have an idea of what I mean, and I am saying package and not baggage. We talk a lot about baggage we have accumulated from the crap that we have experienced, but I think baggage is not a good way of looking at it in this case, I think we are talking about the package, which is more of a positive word, because there is nothing good or bad about any of this, this is just who we are, what we have done, where we have been, where we are and the first step is facing the truth and getting clear about it, getting clarity about this stuff. The next step is total and unconditional self-acceptance: this is who I am, this is where I have been, this is where I am this is what I have done. Forgiving yourself, as I have said, and just being totally okay with all these things. So maybe you have been struggling to lose weight for the last few years, accept that this is where you are, this is who you have been, this is who you are. That’s okay. Later you can make a plan to work on that, take the actions you need to take to change that. Maybe you are ashamed of how you treated an ex-partner, you made some decisions that you are not happy about, you hurt the person, whatever. Forgive yourself, you can’t change that stuff you can focus instead on the learning and make better decisions in the future. So forgiving yourself is really, really important and you have really got to dig up all the stuff, all the stuff that you have been afraid of, all the stuff that you are ashamed of, all the stuff that you dislike yourself for, I don’t want to say that you hate yourself for, but maybe you feel like you hate yourself, dig up all that stuff, put it down and get it out in the open and just accept yourself for it.

So, how do you do that? This is, I am still on this journey so I do not have the definitive answers for you, all I can tell you is what I have done and what has worked for me and what I recommend. Doing the mindset work, so maybe you need to make a list of all the stuff that you don’t accept yourself for and then flip that on its head and write down: I completely and utterly forgive myself for [doing this thing]; I complete and totally forgive myself for [making that decision]. However you want to word it, find what wording looks good to you, make those lists and then do the mindset work you need to do to clear that stuff, so using PSYCH-K® I would just create belief statements saying: I completely and totally forgive myself for x, y and z. Or using whatever technique you use, you can tap it out if you are familiar with tapping, if you don’t know what tapping is Google it, there are a ton of tapping videos there online, you can find all kinds of information. So use whatever technique you are trained in or find a professional to help you to work on accepting these things. I would as I said start out by making a list of the stuff that you need to forgive yourself for, tat you need to accept yourself for, and do the work, work through the list one-by-one.

Forgiveness, I have talked in the past about (I am going to totally mispronounce this!) Ho’oponopono, it is a Hawaiian forgiveness technique, I will link to that in the show notes and Google that, and again there will be a link, but Google it if you want to learn more beyond the link that I share. And use that to forgive yourself for things that you consider to be mistakes or poor decisions, and just keep doing, rinse and repeat. Like I said I am still working on myself for accepting myself, I am still unhappy about some of the decisions that I made in the past and I find myself focussing more on the shame or the disappointment or being unhappy with myself for those decisions rather than focussing on the learning. So when you find yourself going back to beating yourself up for that crap from the past, flip that on its head, do the mindset work, do the forgiveness work to release that stuff.

This is such a huge journey this road to self-love, this road to self-acceptance, and it is not like you are going to sit down with yourself for half-an-hour, or an hour, and just get it done. Pay attention to when this stuff crops up, pay attention to when you see yourself feeling bad about yourself and make a note that you need to work on this stuff, to do some more work.

So again, how to work on self-love, it is all about self-acceptance, facing these truths about yourself, it is about total and unconditional self-acceptance of the complete package of who you are, where you are in life, where you have been, it is forgiving yourself and focussing instead on the learning.

So that to me is kind of the one thing you can do to work on your self-love, it is about accepting yourself. But it is also about working on self-care, working on self-trust, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-love, self-worth, self-talk; and this is all about doing the mindset work. So, I have written books on business mindset, I am going to write books on personal mindset, but the business mindset stuff is still applicable, you just take the stuff that I talked about and apply that to your personal life if you don’t have a business. I have written a lot about self-trust, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-value, self-worth, self-talk; so get clear on what is the mindset work that you need to do to improve this stuff and do it. This is all about doing the inner work. I am aware that this is such a big topic, there is so much you can do, and I feel like this is going to end up being more than one episode, this is a good place to start.

Action

So, what can you do to take action today? First of all I am going to recap what I have talked about: look at what love means to you, what does unconditional love mean to you? What does self-love mean to you?

So get clear on that by looking at what you would expect, or experience, from a partner, friend or family member, how you show your partner, friends, family members that you love them and see how you can apply that to you, to a vision of what unconditional love looks like to you. That’s the first step.

Next step: work on accepting yourself, so facing the truths about yourself. I am going to repeat this for I think a third time, total and unconditional self-acceptance of the complete package of who you are, where you are in life and where you have been in life.

Forgive yourself. Now, again, this is all going to take time, you are going to have to keep doing this stuff, I have been doing this work for years and it is getting better, it is not like: oh no you are going to have to work on this for the rest of your life until your die, or the next ten years of your life, or the next ten, or twenty years, or forty years. It gets better little-by-little, it is not like you have to do twenty years of work with yourself and then you will see the results, you will see the results with each step that you take. You will see the results with each little session of work that you do with yourself, from the journaling, from the mindset work, you will see results; and little-by-little, step-by-step you will start to accept yourself more and start to care for yourself more and start to love yourself more.

So the last thing to do is to work on self-care and if you don’t know what that means and you don’t know what to do ,go back to the episode, which I will link to in the show notes, and work on that stuff.

As I said, if you Google: what is self-love, how to practice self-love, a lot of the stuff that is going to come up is simply practicing self-care, and I think that is a part of it, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think it is all about unconditional self-acceptance.

And, it is no surprise that my heart-centred energy work (HEW®) that I use with my clients and with my patrons in Patreon, is all about self-love, self-acceptance and self-trust. Those are the big three things and I think the more you accept yourself, the more you love yourself, the more you will trust yourself. All this stuff is interlinked, and it is all linked with self-esteem, self-confidence, self-value, self-worth, self-talk. All this stuff is interlinked so work on one area and it will have ripple effects to all the other areas, but I think the deep-rooted issue that it all comes down to is self-love.

I hope this episode has helped you get clear on what self-love looks like to you, as an individual, and I hope that it has given you clear practical actions that you can take today, tomorrow, forever, to develop your love for yourself, to develop your sense of self-love, to help you to practice self-love in the way you might love a friend, a family member. But this is more important than all of that, because if you don’t love yourself, how are you going to really, really, love someone else? And this is such a paradox because I think most of us find it easier to love someone else than to love ourselves, but I really think that the root of everything, the root of all love in our lives is loving ourselves.

So, I hope you found this episode interesting and useful as always I would love to hear what you think, you can email me: [email protected], or find me online on social media and get in touch there. I would also love for you to join me on Patreon and this is super-linked to today’s topic because every week for my $5 and above patrons, I do heart-centred energy work, sometimes it is multiple times a week, but the promise is once a week. So, you, if you sign up at that level or above, you will be getting heart-centred-energy-work done-for-you, at least once a week, as long as you are subscribed. It is an easy way of getting a little bit of extra support with your self-love, because heart-centred-energy-work is all about (as I said) self-love, self-acceptance and self-trust, so, I would love for you to join me there, if you head to: http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton you can join me there.

As always thank you so much for listening. Please send me feedback I would love to know what you think, I think this is a really deep and juicy topic. It is probably something I will be writing a book about, but I need to work more with lavender, I need to work more with myself, before I can have more stuff to tell you and more ways to help you help yourself.

So thank you for listening. Next week will also be a solo episode and I will see you then. Remember to visit https://www.hollyworton.com/314 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you so much.