How to Love Yourself in Deep Sacred Ways

Welcome to the Healing the Feminine Podcast, I am your host Tiffany Crawford and today’s topic is How to Love Yourself. 

Before we get into today’s topic, I want to invite you to please listen to our intro Episode, if you have not already. It breaks down how I see and approach the conversation around feminine energy and masculine energy, and what Healing the Feminine is all about. 

The first episode naturally is about self-love because that really is the gateway to any healing, beginning to love and honor yourself enough to HEAL. Not suppress symptoms, not just feel better for the moment (which no shame in wanting to feel better, we’ve all been there), but to really heal ourselves (our lives, our minds, our bodies, and our souls). 

If you are on this journey, in any capacity, congratulations! With each step, you reclaim deeper levels of healing, power, and sovereignty. A woman (or man) that knows how to heal herself and her life is reached beyond measure – for she knows the well of goodness lies within her. 

Now to get into today’s topic. With any topic and on each episode my aim is, with the time we have together, to distill the topic at hand to give you greater clarity on what may be going on in your life around the topic and steps to get started on shifting this area of your life.

What is self-love?

Learning to love yourself – this is such a surface-level simple topic. Like of course, I love myself, not many people would publicly or even internally proclaim that they don’t love themselves. 

However, pull back a few layers and look at what love truly is. 

This is truly a transformative topic because it is an opportunity to really look at love, and what it means to love someone or something in your life, including yourself. 

A really good friend of mine when I was in college, used to always say Tiffany, love is a verb. It is not just a feeling, it is how you behave and treat someone. 

how well do you love yourself?

Considering that, my question for you is – how do you treat yourself?

Are you kind to yourself? Do you take the time to get to know her? Listen to and validate her feelings? Support and encourage her dreams? Show up for her dreams? Honor her needs and wants? Set boundaries to ensure those needs and wants are met?

Are you beginning to catch my drift? How many no’s and how many yes’s did you have to the above questions?

So how do you learn to fall in love with yourself? When you engage with a romantic partner (a spouse, significant other, or even someone you would like to get to know in that capacity) – how do you like to be treated?

The first thing that comes to mind for me is I like to receive care and attention. That is foundational. 

self-care as the entry point to self-love

How do you give yourself care and attention?

Self-care – How do you care for yourself? Your body, your mind, your finances, your life?

Self-care is something we hear and talk about so much that I can begin to fill elusive. It can be massages, manis, and pedis, traveling, or even as simple as taking time to rest and asking for help.

It is the perfect entry point to cultivating self-love. The key is in the intention behind how self-care looks for you. If you are just going through the motions, then you will just be going through the motions. 

If you are using that time intentionally to slow down, get to know yourself, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am using quotation marks because it really all just IS.

When it comes to learning to love yourself self-care is essential in beginning to listen to your needs and wants and respond to them. Creating a habit of honoring yourself where in the past you may have ignored or suppressed yourself. 

 This is important for a couple of reasons:

1. It creates the time and space for you to pay attention and listen to what your mind, body, and soul need

2. When you begin to honor those wants and needs on deeper levels you create a feedback loop in your mind that you are worthy, you are loved, and you are honored

The next podcast is going to go into self-care much deeper as this is the foundation and where to begin.

cultivating self-awareness to deepen your self-love

As you begin to make giving yourself care and attention a priority you will gain an increased level of self-awareness. This self-awareness creates the space for healing work. 

Emotional pain, heartbreak, shadows, limiting beliefs – you name it, all of those things will begin to become clearer. The breakup that you had in college that you never truly processed and just kept going will begin to whisper to you.

Here you get to forgive, yourself others, release blockages, and cultivate deeper levels of awareness.

At Healing the Feminine we have an acronym for HEAL which is a higher energetic alignment in love. 

HEAL: HIGHER ENERGETIC ALIGNMENT (IN) LOVE

What you are doing as you are forgiving, releasing, alchemizing your pain, rewriting stories, and rewiring your brain through this self-care and self-healing feedback loop something magical happens.

The negative self-talk slows. The self-compassion and kindness step in. Grace has her way of loving you up. And guess what?

Yes, deeper levels of awareness are unlocked. Each level of awareness holds clues to what you need and want to feel and be loved – by you. 

aligning with your true desires

Your heart’s truest desires begin to whisper to you, your heart opens up and gives you all her secrets. 

And as you go deeper and deeper into this healing you can begin to embody the love that you are – not just in theory but in how you walk through life. 

Knowing and honoring your boundaries becomes a priority and a necessity vs non-existent and nebulous at best. 

The permission to be who you are begins to creep in as the need for validation from others packs their bags. 

Your dreams deferred, undermined, or only partially expressed begin to emerge in new powerful ways. 

loving yourself fully and wholly

Self-love just like healing is a journey. And it’s really about giving yourself the permission to see your own greatness, beauty, brilliance, and power in all of its forms. To see the shadows, the things you don’t like, that once shamed you and love those parts of yourself just as much as your greatness. 

One as a whole.

There is no self-love without self-acceptance. So just look for the parts of yourself that you reject and can’t be with. For that part is running the show just as much, if not more as the parts you are willing to see. 

Self-acceptance does not mean complacency, self-acceptance is loving all of who you are and simultaneously honoring who you are becoming. Because honestly all of it is You. 

All of it – and loving all of it, is the way to release the parts that no longer honor your path with gratitude, and nurture the parts that are craving to blossom with patience, kindness, and without keeping a record of wrong. 

I will leave you with this Rumi quote:

There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready tone filled. You feel it don’t you?

Rumi

Love yourself deeply enough each day to kindle that candle and fill that void. 

This is Tiffany Crawford, signing off. I love you, until next time.