My Intention for this year is learning Self-Love

My Intention for This Year is Self-Love

Last year I focused mainly on my chronic illness and accepting how it affected my sexuality and sensuality. Moreover, I also concentrated on building my own business and getting to a point of financial security (in short: a lot of shadow work on money mindset & limiting beliefs).

So having done a big big work last year, this year I decided not to be less. The journey to feel better with myself was only starting. At the beginning of 2022, I choose to work on Self-Love, letting go and freeing myself from my own judgements.

What is Self-Love for me?

Self-Love is complicated or at least from my starting point.

Since in the past I collected so many rejections in love, I never truly loved myself or my body. Because I needed external validation. Media and society showed me how I wasn’t the classical type of loving girl. Men told me they didn’t like me. In addition, I always felt different but that only added more fuel to my sense of not belonging.

I was so keen on searching for validation outside myself to say: “you are lovable, you deserve love” that I lost.

All I was receiving was instead: “you are not my type because of your physical appearance“.

Hearing this multiple times destroyed my self-confidence which is usually very high (remember that I am an Aries, rising sign Leo and moon in Capricorn). Also almost every time, I was never the chosen one. I was the friend. It was a vicious cycle: people (especially men) didn’t love me so I didn’t love myself. This cycle kept repeating.

Until I decided I had the choice to change it.

Completely.

I had nothing left to lose.

I was discovering myself and in order to avoid my frequent work-wise burn-out, I had to take good care of myself. With endometriosis and a difficult relationship with the medical area, I learned how the only one who can truly help you with the disease, with chronic physical pain and mental health, is you.

IT WAS ME.

This is what self-love is for me: taking care of myself on all levels. The first point in this journey was loving myself.

How to love yourself truly & deeply

Here starts the hard work. There is not a one-fits-all recipe for this. To love yourself truly & deeply, all you have to do is be willing to start. I cannot say it in any other way. You must believe in yourself to do the work, not in the support of others. That can come later but first, you have (and will always have) you!

Think of yourself as your best friend.

The one that will never ever abandon you. No matter what dark parts are inside of you. We all have our demons – it’s part of our survival kit. Don’t hide them in the closet. Be proud of wanting to work on yourself to become a better version of yourself.

Again, the power is in you, deciding and acting.

The inner power inside every one of us is limitless, we have to awaken. And to do something. Not to sit in hope that something from the sky will come down to save us all. No no, I’m more practical. We need to do the work if we want to feel better people. And by that, try NOT to complain for 48 hours, and tell me how you feel.

I can’t stand any longer people who complain and don’t do anything to change their situation.

So my suggestion is: start with the small things. I will give you a list. Choose one or five points and simply try.

So why do I feel inferior to everybody?

I decided to notice how I talked to myself and to change it. To think of me as one of my closest friends. Should I say the same thing to her/him?

No, never.

So by doing this work now, I started to recognize how important and powerful words are. I talk with myself with kindness, grace and love, no longer with judgement and cruelty. And it has changed a lot.

2.How do you forgive yourself?

This second point might be the toughest one: forgiving yourself is not easy but it is something you have to do. I forgave my older selfs, my family, my mum, and I am now trying to channel the pain that is going on through my generational line in order to stop it and heal it completely.

It’s a big job & responsibility I have taken on my shoulders but I can see it and I know it is right. I have the strength to do it. So if I can do this, you can heal and forgive yourself. Always remember what you would say to a friend. You would never be so mean to him/her, so do not be with you.

3.How you gift yourself

By asking myself so much, I never truly find a time to gift myself. To gift myself a present. And this is not good. We have to take care of ourselves even by allowing to receive our own presents. It took one year to finally go to a florist and pick up a bouquet of flowers.

I gave myself thousands of excuses like:

• it’s not the priority
• I can take it from my parent’s backyard
• and so on

All these excuses were just my limit because again I yet had to think that I deserve beauty and love in my life. And then, when I finally brought myself some flowers (only one month ago), I finally started to see how my life is already beautiful. How much love is already in it. Family, nature, friends and myself. Self-love is already within me. I should have the courage to take care of it. To find space and time for it.

So nowadays I decided to gift myself something unnecessary every month: it could be a jewel, a dress, some flowers or anything else. Try it.

5.How is your environment making you feel: good or bad?

And for my final point, I want you to think about how your environment makes you feel. By environment, I mean people, friends, city, town, space, workspace and so on. Where do you feel calm and at ease and instead where do you feel chaotic, judged and constantly on thorns?

For me, I had a really bad friends environment where I absorbed all their complaints and problems. These people only made me feel weak, inferior, and miserable, so my energies and vibes were really low.

When I decided to take care of that, I started my final gesture of self-love.

I removed toxic people and friends from my life.

It was hard because I tried my best to maintain long time friendships, I tried to find a compromise but when you don’t receive a bit of help from the other side, well, you know that they are not doing anything positive for you.

So you are allowed (by me) to let them get out of the way.

Surround yourself with people who cheer you up. People who support you in your darkest moments (that’s easy) but especially in your brightest days (you will see the difference, it’s called envy.)

Try to have a detoxing space around you.

One final note

In this very long blog post, I have opened my heart and shared with you my experience with self-love. My Intention for This Year – Self-Love – will keep going in the background. I know and you should know too, that this doesn’t change in one week, one month or one year. Self-development and self-discovery is a life journey but it is exciting every single day.

You learn to accept your flaws and to trust your gut, you understand how important is your self-care and you use your own inner power to create the life of your desires. Nothing is impossible, trust me.

Within you, there is a wild power. Act with confidence, compassion and grace to turn it on.

I am trying my best. So I will talk to you in my next article. I really missed writing on this blog and I am so glad to put my words on here again. It makes me happy.

Cate