Over the course of the past several years, I have become an advocate for self love. Through many experiences, both beautiful and painful, the lesson that has emerged time and time again is that loving myself unconditionally is the root of my happiness. No person, circumstance, object or place can cause me to be happy. I must achieve happiness by completely and unequivocally loving myself. This realization has caused me to dig deep into my soul to be honest with myself about the ways that I am NOT loving myself. I have painstakingly examined decisions, relationships, behaviors and thought patterns about myself that are not loving. It has been an amazing, miraculous journey, and, at times, extremely painful.
I have learned so much about myself, about unconditional love, and about other people throughout this process. I have started to observe others in a compassionate light and see that the behaviors of so many people are borne of fear - and of not fully loving and accepting themselves. The truth is that I don't think that people understand what it means to love themselves. We absorb so much noise from the world around us - from the media, from cultural traditions, from the opinions of others. We are told that we aren't good enough the way we are. We are sold products to make us thinner, younger, richer, smarter, better. And so we live in pursuit of the perfection that we are sold everyday. But perfect doesn't exist. Intellectually we know that. However, emotionally and spiritually we are feeling gutted because we are subconsciously, or even consciously, trying to find happiness outside of us. In her famous TED Talk, Brene Brown says, "We are the most in-debt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in U. S. history." We are spending more money than ever on products, food, medicine, alcohol and drugs in the pursuit of happiness. We have convinced ourselves that if we were thinner or if we could find a boyfriend or if our home looked like a page of a Pottery Barn catalog, that we will have achieved happiness. However, as Brene Brown points out, we are simply "numbing those hard feelings." In the pursuit of perfection, aka happiness, we are actually creating circumstances that ultimately make us feel inadequate and less happy because we are using someone else's standards as the basis of our own happiness.
So how do we truly love ourselves? What are things that we can do to genuinely show ourselves unconditional love in our lives? These are the questions that I have been asking myself. I have been doing a lot of reading and research on love and self-love. I have learned so much and have had my eyes and, more importantly, my heart and soul opened to what it truly means to love oneself and why it often feels hard to love ourselves. There are so many layers to these questions and though, in retrospect, they seem simple, the world in which we live has made it more complicated.
I started this blog five years ago as a way to explore this issue, however, at the time I lacked clarity and some life experience to fully understand that these are the questions my soul was urging me to explore. I called it Create Your Sanctuary because I intuitively knew that we are all the masters of our own happiness and that we need to create our own sacred spaces in our lives in which we can flourish. Over the course of the past five years I have truly come to realize that we must design the life we wish to live. We need to have a clear vision of our authentic selves, not who the world is telling us to be, and we need to be purposeful and intentional in the choices we make to allow ourselves to become that person. Through my blog, and other social media outlets, I will share the process of my awakening and becoming and hope that what I share allows you to become your true self. Thank you for joining the journey!
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