Here’s why the stuff you know about self love and body love doesn’t stick
/Here’s why the stuff you know about self love and body love doesn’t stick
(which flows into intimacy issues and feminine energy blocks, doh...)
Let’s go through the usual advice we all get for self love
Get out of your head
Quiet your inner critic
Learn to love your flaws
Accept yourself
Stop hustling all the time and go with the flow more to get ‘into your feminine’
So you do this stuff and it feels better, for a while.
But then suddenly the self criticism rears its ugly head again, and it’s just as bad or worse than ever.
Life feels hard.
You wonder, does this shit not work for me? Am I terminally broken? Is this just something I am not meant to have?
It’s heartbreaking.
I started hating my body at 12.
I was curvier than my friends and it got me attention I didn’t want.
I would routinely cry clothes shopping and wore clothes that were a few sizes too big to try and hide.
I felt disgusting.
It got better as I got older, but not much.
I was always in a struggle with my body - trying to control my weight, my hormones (OMG don’t get me started on my hormones), feeling I couldn’t have or wear nice things because I wasn’t good enough for them.
Here’s what I tried to change this
Getting to my ‘ideal weight’
Dressing ‘to balance my flaws’
Lots of exercise
Yoga & meditation of various kinds
Yoga retreats, ‘goddess’ retreats, specific women’s spirituality & feminine energy training
Supplements, working with naturopaths
Therapy
All the self help - books and courses on self love, confidence, hypnosis, NLP
I sound like a self improvement nutter but this was over years and the self hate often manifested as depression and anxiety and I was desperate to get rid of it.
Here’s what I experienced:
Improvement for sure. But self love, nope. Not remotely.
I felt like a fraud as a yoga teacher talking about self love and body acceptance.
I valued everyone else’s opinion more highly than my own.
I put everyone else first.
My mood was severely affected by my weight and hormones.
I struggled to ask for what I wanted in any context but in my relationship worst of all.
Then what happened:
It still makes me wriggle with discomfort, but it meant my efforts for genuine intimacy in my relationship were stifled.
I didn’t feel worthy of the love I wanted.
It meant I felt disconnected from feminine energy because I didn’t deserve to.
I had literally given up on self love at this point and was just happy things were better than they used to be.
Then my marriage ended.
I was blindsided with shame, guilt, fear of the future.
I started exploring Tantra and jade egg because, why not? The worst had already happened.
And one day, I was walking to the shops, and I realised... I felt good. Not just good, amazing! Glowy.
Happy for no good reason.
Joyful.
I know finally understand why I was stuck for so long, and why this destroyed so much of happiness and my relationship.
When we don’t work with all the parts of the brain, things don’t stick. If we want changes in life, we have to EMBODY them.
There are three parts to this, and we have to work with them all in an integrated way for it to be effective.
Mindset. We have to be able to imagine and visualise how we want our lives to be and it has to make sense to us.
Desire. We have to want it at an emotional level. If you see your goal but it feels scary or you can’t believe you can have it, it’s harder to take the right action toward it.
Body wisdom. This is the part most often left out. It’s not just feeling your body, although that’s a good start.
I have some really exciting things to share with you about all of this that I am rolling out over the next couple of weeks!
But if you want to try a sample session I am doing 10 free 20 minute calls over the next few weeks where I will teach you a quick and easy way to make it part of your life.
They are not sales calls. They are short, powerful sessions to get you started.
Book yours here https://bookruth.as.me/