Blog / Energy and spirit
Self love: the greatest gift
The phrase has been worn thin by inspirational quotes. Underneath the wear there is something specific, and it looks far less like a feeling than most women expect.
Ask a woman whether she loves herself and watch what happens. There is usually a pause, then a slightly embarrassed laugh, then an answer that is really an answer to a different question. She will tell you what she does or does not deserve. She will list her failures with impressive fluency. She will say she is working on it.
What she will almost never do is answer directly, because the question as usually asked is unanswerable. Love here is being treated as a feeling she is supposed to be able to summon toward herself, and feelings do not work that way in either direction.
It is a set of behaviours
Consider how you would describe someone who loves another person well. You would not describe their emotional state. You would describe what they do.
They pay attention. They notice when something is wrong before being told. They speak to the person kindly, including when the person has made a mess of something. They protect the person's rest and time. They do not let others treat them badly. They keep small promises.
That is the whole definition, and it transfers directly. Self love is what you do, not what you feel about yourself. Which is enormously good news, because behaviour is available on days when warm feeling is nowhere to be found.
It also explains why affirmations so often fail. Telling yourself you are worthy while ignoring your own exhaustion for the fourth week running is not love, and some part of you knows it. Words that contradict behaviour do not persuade anyone, least of all the person saying them.
Why it is harder than it sounds
Most women can name the behaviours easily. Doing them reliably is a different matter, and the resistance tends to come from a few predictable places.
Care is understood as something earned. Rest after the work is done, kindness once the standard is met. Since the work is never done, the care never arrives.
Self kindness is confused with self indulgence. Women who would never call a friend lazy for needing a day will call themselves exactly that, and will produce a detailed argument for why their case is different.
And attention itself feels self absorbed. A woman practised at reading everyone else's needs often finds turning that attention inward genuinely uncomfortable, as though she has taken something that belonged elsewhere.
The reframe that usually lands
Think of one thing you have been putting off for yourself. Rest, an appointment, an hour alone, a conversation you need to have.
Now imagine your closest friend described exactly that situation to you. What would you tell her to do? Notice how quickly the answer arrives, and how much warmer it is than anything you have been telling yourself.
Where a body practice comes in
Self love that stays in the head tends to remain theoretical. A woman can hold an entirely correct understanding of it and still not be able to feel her own tiredness until she is ill.
An embodiment practice changes that, because it builds the skill everything else depends on. Noticing.
Twelve minutes with a yoni egg is twelve minutes of asking your body what is present and listening to the answer without immediately trying to fix it. That is exactly the attention that self love requires, practised in low stakes conditions until it becomes ordinary. Women who practise regularly consistently report noticing their own tension, hunger, tiredness and irritation earlier than they used to, sometimes hours earlier, and earlier noticing is what makes a different response possible at all.
The practice is also, in its own small way, a promise kept. Three sessions a week, made and honoured, in a life where a great many promises to yourself get quietly broken. That accumulates.
What it looks like on an ordinary week
Less impressive than the phrase suggests, which is the point.
It looks like going to bed when you are tired rather than at the time you decided you should. It looks like eating properly on a day when nobody is watching. It looks like catching the sentence you are about to say to yourself and choosing a different one. It looks like keeping twelve minutes for a practice that has no output and no audience.
It looks like letting a thing be good enough. And occasionally it looks like saying no to something you could have managed, which is the advanced version and takes most women considerable time to reach.
Starting where you are
Do not begin with feeling. Begin with one behaviour, and choose the smallest one you can imagine failing to do.
Keep it for a fortnight. Notice the argument that shows up in your head about why it does not matter and why other things come first. That argument is worth meeting, and it does not need to be won by force. It just needs to be noticed often enough to lose its authority.
The warm feeling, if it comes, comes afterward and follows the behaviour rather than preceding it. Most women find it arrives sideways, months in, as a slight surprise.
Practice is easier held alongside other women than alone, which is the whole argument for women's empowerment circles. And if you want somewhere concrete to begin this week, the four week sequence is twelve minutes at a time, which is a promise most lives can accommodate.