One Day Self-Love Challenge

Yes, I do believe that one of the single most effective and powerful things we can do to participate in the Divine’s transformation of our own lives is to learn to love ourselves more.  Time and time again, as I work with people, when we get to the core of the problem, be it limiting belief, addiction, etc., it is a lack of self-love.  The thing that’s behind the thing that’s behind the thing is that they have placed a very low value on their life and don’t believe they deserve to be happy.    It is the most messed up thing of all and most people are barely aware of it. I genuinely think people want to be happy.  Yet deep down in places they haven’t explored often, they don’t believe they deserve to be happy or are worth it.  It’s the most devious trick in humanity.  Somewhere in our life we were told that we aren’t worth it.  We either were treated that way by those who were supposed to love and protect us when we were young and vulnerable, or because of decisions we made in the past, mistakes, we buy into the lie that we don’t have value and we aren’t worth being loved.  And yet we can spend our whole lives trying to prove that we are worth being loved and go to incredible lengths to try to show everyone that we are of value.

But you don’t have to prove anything.  Let me say it again.  You have nothing to prove.  The fact that God created you is enough.  That oxygen flows in and out of your lungs, bringing life to your blood cells, is enough.  What if instead of constantly trying to prove ourselves to ourselves and everyone around us, we just acknowledged that because we are alive and loved by the Divine, that we are enough.

Tomorrow is the one day self-love challenge.  Now if you just read that sentence and rolled your eyes a little, I understand.  I used to respond in the same manner.  And then I realized that being a control freak and a perfectionist, and being harder on myself than anyone else hadn’t really gotten me the things in life I want… peace, happiness, self-control, etc.  Has the way you’ve been living your life taken you to the heights of your dreams?  So why not take one day and commit to loving yourself?  Why not take one day to be completely and utterly gracious with yourself?  Why not take one day and instead of criticizing yourself for making a mistake, simply affirm that you love yourself anyways, just the way you are?  Here are a few places to start...

1.  Make the commitment to love yourself for 1 day:  Make the commitment and choose love for yourself.  Do it now.  If love is the greatest gift we have to give, what could be possibly wrong with loving yourself for one day in all your thoughts and actions?  Go ahead and literally write it out right now or type it in an email to yourself or send it as a text to yourself.  "Tomorrow I will commit my entire day to practicing self love."

2.  Affirm yourself verbally throughout the day:  Think of the most loving thing you could say to yourself, and repeat regularly throughout the day.  Get up and repeat it OUT LOUD to yourself first thing.  Write it on a post it note and stick it on your bathroom mirror before you go to bed tonight.  If you are having trouble coming up with something loving to say to yourself, try starting here.

3.  Forgive yourself immediately after any intentional or unintentional mistake:  So you just screwed up and maybe no one else knows it, but you do.  Immediately forgive yourself.  If it helps, you can allow yourself to feel your remorse and then say... "I totally and completely forgive myself for ____________________ and I release myself of all my anger and all my disappointment."  Try it.  Forgiveness is incredibly powerful and it is the one of the most freeing things to experience.  In fact, maybe you want to start your day by forgiving yourself for everything you've done that you have yet to forgive yourself for.

4.  Give yourself a gift:  Choose one thing to do for yourself that you know brings you life and you know cares for your soul and heart.  Maybe you love going for a run but haven't had time lately.  Maybe there is a good book you just haven't allowed yourself to read lately because you haven't had time.  Read it.  Maybe there is a friend that always brings you life that you haven't spent time with or talk to lately.  Ask them to hang out or simply call them and just talk.

Taking the one day self-love challenge is a gift that you can give to yourself with no strings attached.  It's only one day.  How bad could it possibly be?  A better question and motivation is, how incredible might it be?  What if you discover some things about yourself?  Wouldn't it be worth it?

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email me via the website and I will be glad to get back to you before you wake up tomorrow.  What do you say?  ARE YOU WORTH IT?

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“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”  - C.G. Jung

"Loving yourself…does not mean being self-absorbed or narcissistic, or disregarding others. Rather it means welcoming yourself as the most honored guest in your own heart, a guest worthy of respect, a lovable companion. "- Margo Anand

"Well-ordered self-love is right and natural." - Thomas Aquinas

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The Abundant Truth

I am not finished by any means.  I certainly don’t ‘have it all together’.  I never will.  This is a truth that I have come to not only accept, but embrace.  I am constantly growing.  And one of the truths that I’m growing into presently is that the Divine has abundant resources and wants to supply all of my needs.  I am not the source. Now the jacked up thing about this reality is how much of my life I have lived against this truth.  I have spent so much of my time trying to be the source of my needs.  Trying to provide for myself instead of relying upon The Source for my provision.  I believed for so long that to be a Christian (the Faith I practice) that I have to scrape by or actually just be poor.  How ridiculous is that?  Not only that, I believed that to be a Christian meant that I had to find a way to provide for all of my own needs.  Somewhere in my life I erroneously accepted the thought that relying upon God meant that He would always keep me in a place where I had nothing.  That way I would rely upon Him.  If you don’t realize how jacked up that thought is, you need to pay attention  right now… this is for you!

What if I learned to rely upon God even if I had more than enough of what I needed in my life?  What’s more, what if I learned to trust that God was my only source and supply for anything and everything that ever came into my life?  Emotional stability, finances, creative energy, etc.

God wants me to rely upon God to provide for all of my needs.  God wants me to trust God completely to lead me and direct and guide me into my calling and purpose.  And then I must trust God and God alone to provide for everything that God is calling me to.  I must trust for the direction, the inspired decisions, the finances, and the emotional energy to participate in the things God is calling me to participate in.  Nothing could be more centered and grounded in the scriptures.

And to boot?  I must expect that God will actually provide all of those things which I need.  And why wouldn’t He?  Here is my logic, broken down (because sometimes I need to see things as simply as possible).  If God loves me and created me for a purpose… and if God is calling me to live out that purpose and that plan for me… doesn’t it stand to reason that God not only will, but WANTS to provide everything I could possibly need in order to live out that purpose and that passion?  YES!  IT DOES!

My God will supply all of your needs according to his riches in Glory.  That’s Philippians 4:19.

Have you limited yourself because of wrong belief and thought patterns?  Does God want to free you to trust Him for all that you need?  Let it happen my friend.  Let it go.

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Today I will trust God to be abundant in every single situation.  I will trust that God knows exactly what I need, when I need it and that God will provide exactly what I need when I need it, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and financially.  I will not spend energy worrying or trying to contrive my resources.  I will wait in expectation for my God to supply all of my needs.  I am not the source.

Now is the time for this lesson

I have spent a good portion of my life trying to control the world around me in order for me to feel better about myself and safe and secure.  The problem with living my life that way is that I spent so much energy trying to control the ‘world’ around me that I didn’t have the energy to actually enjoy and live my life.  I had set the conditions of my life so that I could only be happy if certain things in my life were a certain way.  This meant I spent my energy trying to control friends, co-workers, strangers, housing, family, environment, food, etc. (like I said, pretty much anything in the world around me).  What I have recently learned is that if I let go of trying to control the comfort level of my life and trust that the Divine will provide what I need, I have a vast amount of energy because I’m not spending it trying to re-arrange the world!  As I look back, I believe God has been trying to teach this lesson of trust and letting go for many years now. As I recognize that the Divine has been trying to teach me this for years, it is easy for me to begin to feel shame and regret for not learning this lesson earlier.  I can easily get down on myself for not being smart enough or disciplined enough or aware enough or ______________ enough.  You fill in the blank, I’m sure you’re as adept at criticizing yourself as I am at myself.

But this is the beauty of lessons the Divine is trying to teach us and wants us to learn.  It doesn’t matter if this is the first time you’ve come across the lesson (the one the God has for you) or if you have come across it 1,000 times… now is the time to receive it.  It is here before you now so that you can learn from the lesson and grow.

Sometimes we learn these lessons only to realize that we already knew this, deep within ourselves.  We say, “oh yeah, I knew that.  I can’t believe I forgot such a valuable principle.”  It’s like finding an old toy in the attic and remembering how fond of it you were and its new all over again with that same sense of awe and fascination.  Or, we learn the lesson and it blows our mind and we wonder, how have I never been confronted with this truth before?  How has this never been revealed to me until now?

But whatever the circumstance, don’t play the shame game.  Don’t regret that you haven’t learned it before.  Just remember that the only truly important thing about the lesson is that regardless of how many times its been laid before you, now is the time to pick it up.  Now is the time to learn the lesson.

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What are the lessons before you these days?  What is the Divine bringing up within your heart?  What life experiences have brought you to this place at this time to learn this lesson?

Don't Engage... Be Present

Full disclosure... I am unmistakably a believer.  In this space I often use the term 'The Divine' to refer to the Higher Power.  Please allow yourself to replace 'The Divine' with how you've come to know and understand God. ______________________________________________________________________________________

The world has a funny way of bumping into us and completely changing our inner state of being.  One moment we’re happy and content, going through our day, and then BAM!  Someone that we really don’t feel good being around runs into us with the kind of passing comment that can immediately derail us.  We end up having 4 or 5 different conversations with that person in our head for the rest of the day.  Maybe we tell them off.  Maybe we logically box them into a corner and then knock them out with the tremendously practiced words we’ve worked so hard to come up with.  All in our head of course, but knock them out none the less.  The problem with this is that it takes up a tremendous amount of energy and time throughout the day!  Also, we rarely end up having a conversation with the person, let alone along the vein of what we’ve rehearsed in our minds.  There is another way, a way that doesn’t take our entire day hostage.

As painful and uncomfortable moments arise during our day, and they most certainly will, we must be aware that we are experiencing those feelings.  Don’t engage them or try to change the world around you in order to make yourself feel more comfortable.  Don’t spend your energy immediately, trying to do whatever it takes to make those feelings and pain go away.  Instead, sit in rest and relaxation, being fully present with those feelings and allowing the old, hidden, suppressed pain that rises up to come up fully and release itself.  This will take a tremendous amount of faith in the Divine.  Faith that the Divine won’t allow us to be swallowed up by that pain.  Faith that the Divine will provide for us emotionally what we need at that time.

When someone or some circumstance bumps into you and makes you extraordinarily uncomfortable, ask yourself… What is it I’m feeling?  Inadequacy? Insecurity? Fear? What is behind that feeling?  More of the same?  Or something different.  Let yourself be purified and healed as you allow yourself to go through the uncomfortable moments of fully recognizing your pain and discomfort emotionally, instead of suppressing those experiences and hiding from the truth. The Divine will care for you in those moments, even when its painful.  You will come out the other side with great clarity and confidence of the Divine within your heart.  It is only after you have been fully present with your discomfort and pain and that it has passed by without you being wrapped up in it, that you will have the clarity to decide what it is, if anything, that you want to change in your life.  Maybe you just needed to have those emotions come up so that you could be fully present with them and allow those emotions to slip away.  Or maybe when life bumped into me they came up to show me things about myself that I would like to change on a deep level.

One thing is for sure, if you spend your energy trying to keep yourself comfortable all of the time, you will be left with an empty life that is full of busy work and controlling/manipulative behavior… completely unaware of what is truly going on deep within your own heart.  NO THANK YOU!

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Today I will allow myself to have the courage to trust The Divine and relax as problems arise throughout my day.  I won't hide from the discomfort or the pain that bump into me today.  Instead, I will take a deep breathe, sit with my discomfort and ask myself... what is being revealed within me?  Why is this so uncomfortable?  How can I move forward?  I will trust The Divine will provide the way for me.