Courting Yourself

You must become aware of the richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there…. Once you become aware of it and have faith in it, you will be all right.

Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

Two definitions of courting are “to try to gain the love or affection of, especially to seek to marry” and “to seek someone’s love; to woo.” I would add “to prove your commitment to someone and to gain someone’s trust.”

What do you need to do to prove your love to yourself? What would you like to do? While courting yourself can surely be a daily action, a retreat is a powerful time to focus on this because you are taken away from your habitual ways of perceiving yourself. You are in the perfect space to court at-one-ment, the realization that you are the lover and the beloved, that you are whole and complete in yourself. You can shower yourself with the kind of thoughtfulness you want from a lover. You can affirm that you possess the same commitment to your relationship to yourself as you do to a beloved partner, that you will be there through sickness and health, in good times and in bad. That you actually want to spend time in your own company.

Prepare

Your journal and a pen.

Reclaiming Your Desires

Use one, two, or all of the questions below to discover how you might like to court yourself.

• Recall all the ways you have pleasured, pampered, and loved other people in your life: lovers, children, friends, sisters. Perhaps you’ve made favorite meals, rubbed feet, bought thoughtful gifts, typed papers, made costumes, reassured, dressed up for…. What do you do for others?

Loving actions I do for others…

Loving thoughts I have for others…

Loving things I say about others…

• Spend a moment or two thinking about your relationship with yourself. Run through the same categories.

Loving actions I do for me…

Loving thoughts I have for myself…

Loving things I say about myself…

• Imagine how you would want your ideal lover to court you. What would he or she do? If you are in a relationship, especially a long-term one, what do you find yourself wishing your partner would do for you? Think about all the times you have found yourself saying, “I wish someone would _________ for me.”
• Imagine how you would like your ideal lover to perceive you. What qualities would you most like to be appreciated for, loved for, known for in your relationship?
• Ask yourself, If I were trying to convince myself that I loved myself, I would….
• Ask yourself, If I were courting the most essential, authentic me, what courting actions or behaviors would I avoid?

Suggestions for Wooing Yourself

The only rule about courting yourself is that you enjoy it and that it increases your self-esteem. Shadow comfort and addictions have no place in courting. You don’t want to court your false self, the self that is so good at pleasing others or the self that doesn’t believe in you. You want to do things that make you say, “Oh, yes, that really pleases me.”

See Good Ways to Listen: Shadow Comfort.

One snag that arises when courting yourself is the feeling that to do so you must be worthy, you must be special, beautiful, talented, one of the chosen. For those of us who suffered through high school with pimples and flat chests, it can seem impossible to believe we could be desired. But whatever our limitations and whatever our pasts, our humanity—our basic aliveness—means that we are good enough for self-love, self-respect, self-kindness. You don’t have to do or be anything to deserve this.

Writes Frank Andrews in The Art and Practice of Loving,

In self-love there is no object being loved, and no object doing the loving; there is the experience of loving. That is what self-love means. All loving is self-love. The experience of a yes directed toward a beloved affirms at the same time the life in which it occurs.

Here are some self-courting traditions you might enjoy:

• Experiment with loving that doesn’t diminish you but increases your love for yourself. Love your cat, and feel the good feelings of being someone who is capable of love. Write a letter to a good friend, and as you do, recall the mutual regard you feel for each other when you are together. This practice is not done in the spirit of “Look how great I am because I can love” or “I am worthwhile because someone loves me.” Instead, gently acknowledge the spirit of the Tibetan word Namasté, which translates roughly as “The god in me bows to the god in you.” To love is to be love and to be worthy of love.
• Write a love letter to yourself using John Gray and Barbara DeAngelis’s technique. Address the letter to yourself, for example: “Dear Jennifer.” Begin the letter with criticisms you have about your relationship with yourself, the ways you are falling short in your self-care. Then write about what you are afraid of in your relationship with yourself. Move into listing what you desire in this relationship, what you are pining for. End with an expression of true love to yourself. Just write a few sentences for each area—criticism, fear, wants, and love—from you to you. Do not end your letter until you genuinely feel and express love for yourself, even if that means taking a break and doing something else for awhile. Mail your letter to yourself. Open it days, weeks, or months from now or on a retreat one year from the day you wrote it. Or give it to a friend and ask her or him to mail it to you next time she or he notices you are feeling down.
• Complete these sentences: “I feel ______. I need ______. I want ______.” This exercise comes from Kay Hagan’s Internal Affairs. An example: “I feel tired. I need to rest. I want to take a nap with my cat.” Or “I am feeling excited. I need to do something with this energy. I feel the urge to eat, but what I really want to do is paint.”
• Imagine love beaming from your hands. Visualize this love however you wish, but see it with your mind’s eye. Direct this love to whatever part of you needs attention—a part of your body, an aspect of your psyche. Nothing is too insignificant or too horrific for this love to ease.
• This courting tradition is from The Intimacy and Solitude Workbook by Stephanie Dowrick. Make a list of what you can trust about yourself. Start with the basics. Include everything you can think of—nothing is too ridiculous. Include only the things you are sure of, even if they are negative or sad. Don’t include what you trust about others; you can add that at a later date. Forget order of importance. Here’s my partial list:

I trust I love my daughter.

I trust I will wear clothes when I go out of the house.

I trust I love Chris.

I trust I will feed my dog, Atticus, and take care of him when he is sick.

I trust I try very hard to be a loyal and caring friend.

I trust I will wake up in the morning.

I trust I can walk.

I trust myself to deal with loss.

I trust I can read.

What do you trust about yourself? Work on this list over the course of several retreats (this is a great retreat-in-the-world activity). Read it aloud. If you wish, you can also make a separate list about what you trust about others.

Stories

Saral told me her story of courting herself during a three-month retreat she took to heal herself of childhood abuse:

I had heard of a ritual in which a woman married herself, and I wanted to do that. But I was unable to commit to myself, so I had to court myself first. Before I left on retreat, I bought a ring because my wedding ring reminded me of my commitment to my husband. I had realized when deciding to take my retreat that I had always committed to others first. I found I could wear the ring only on top of my wedding ring. I wasn’t ready yet. Then on the day I left, without noticing, I switched the positions of the rings. When I got out of the car, after driving for three days, I noticed the switch and I remember saying, “How perfect,” because this retreat was the first time I put myself first. It was the perfect symbol.

Marylee discovered she loved the idea of courting herself:

I set this retreat intention: “How can I recharge and honor myself?” I could only take one day away because of a big project at work. When I was doing the exercise “Imagine how I would want my ideal lover to court me,” I discovered surprise was a big element. But how could I surprise myself?

I decided to write down on cards the courting actions I wanted, to put them in a box, and to draw them out as I went along. Some of the things I wrote were eating lobster and drinking champagne on the beach at sunset, rubbing scented lotion on my body, getting compliments (I wrote down some affirmations and put those in another box to pull out when I needed a compliment), reviewing personal goals and my level of commitment, meditating, eating frozen bananas with chocolate sauce, and window-shopping in this funky, youthful part of town. Of course, I had to do the arrangements myself, which I thought would take the surprise out of it, but I kept reminding myself it was for me, for my beloved.

I am a skeptic. I didn’t expect to feel any different, but I did. I felt kinder toward myself and hungry for more time with me. I loved the box idea because it made me feel I was being taken care of. Next time, I want to do a retreat at a spa.

Margie is recently divorced, and she hated the idea of courting herself:

It seemed like a cheap replacement for the real thing. What I wanted from my ideal lover was to feel I was beautiful and that he would never leave me. I couldn’t figure how I was going to be beautiful for myself. Getting dressed up and taking myself out to dinner to eat alone made me want to shoot myself. I asked myself, “What makes me feel beautiful besides someone telling me?” I made a list: I feel beautiful when I’m clean from a shower, when I’m fishing alone on the lake, when I’m sore from exercising, when I get a manicure and a pedicure, when my apartment is clean, when I go to sleep in a pretty nightgown, when I take time to make my surroundings pretty, when I take time to make myself a nice meal instead of a Lean Cuisine, when I’m alone and don’t look in any mirrors. As I was doing this, I realized that I didn’t trust my view of my beauty unless there was someone else (preferably a man) to tell me I was beautiful. And that somehow this was tied into my not trusting that I would always be there for myself. I realized through doing this what I wanted from a man he could never give me—to be there forever—but I could give it to myself. In fact, I’m the only one who could ever give this to me.

I set up my retreat weekend (Friday to Sunday midmorning) to be about reassuring myself and believing I was beautiful. My intention didn’t become clear until the first evening when I realized the question I was asking myself was “How can I live my life and feel worthwhile without someone else telling me I am?” I did things like look up the word beautiful in the dictionary. I covered all my mirrors with scarves. I arranged flowers for myself, and as I did, I thought, “This is for me because I like me.” I made myself a perfect omelet, which took three tries. I felt strange at times, but I kept at it. The best part was working on my attitude, on telling myself as I did each little thing that I was doing it because I found myself worthwhile and likable. That was powerful and very difficult.

For Long Retreats

Almost every retreat can benefit from elements of courting yourself. This is an especially useful chapter to turn to when you are feeling lonely during your retreat. I interviewed several women who dedicated many a retreat to courting themselves. As one said, “How can I treat my partner with respect and love when I don’t treat myself that way?” Another woman said, “It was too embarrassing to treat myself nicely with anyone else around. But after doing it in solitude for about a year, it spread to the rest of my life.”

See Retreat Plans: A One-Day Well-Being Retreat and A Half-Day Trust Retreat.

For Mini-Retreats

Organize a mini-retreat around a theme: courting your body, courting your attitude, courting your spirit, courting your home, courting your rhythms, doing for yourself what you do for others. Use the questions from Reclaiming Your Desires to determine what you can do for yourself.

For Retreats in the World

A great spur-of-the-moment courting retreat is to make a trust list. Another is to get a massage.

For Retreats with Others

You could take turns performing self-marriage ceremonies for one another. Sitting in a circle giving one another neck and back massages, washing one another’s hair (this works best outdoors when it is warm), and massaging one another’s hands or feet while taking in what you are receiving are all good group courting exercises. So is an affirmation circle. Also try a soliloquy circle, doing timed talking on the subjects “Courting Myself,” “Loving Myself,” “Shame,” and “Guilt.”

See Retreating with Others: Affirmation Circle and Retreating with Others: Soliloquy Circle.