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SELF-LOVE
One thing I know for sure is that it doesn’t matter how successful you are, how much money you are making, how strong you are, whether you are a man or a woman, self-love is for everyone. Loving yourself is not reserved for a select few, but something we all deserve. You, yes you, deserve to be loved. If you feel a void within, if you have been searching outside of yourself for ways to feel love, if you have ever doubted whether you are enough and whether you are loved, it’s time to go to the mind gym. Let’s exercise the love muscle now and create a clear pathway between your mind and your heart.
In this chapter we are going to celebrate YOU. I want you to switch your focus from whoever or whatever has been draining you or upsetting you, and allow yourself to focus fully on how magical and wonderful you are. Think of it like that moment on an aeroplane when the aircrew tells you to put on your own oxygen mask before attending to your child. It feels selfish, but it makes total sense – you can’t help anyone if you are dead! It is time to ignite the love within you, fill up your love cup and let it overflow – there will be so much love, you’ll be able to spread it far and wide. The way you love yourself affects all aspects of your life, not just romantic relationships. It can affect your friendships, your career, your body image. The need to search for validation outside of yourself and settling for less then you actually want all changes when you truly love yourself.
“To acquire love, fill yourself up with it until you become a magnet.”
Charles F. Haanel
Simple changes
I’ve been looking forward to writing this chapter for months and in order to do so, and ensure I walk the walk, I’ve even done a bit of a spring clean of my own self-love practice. It’s just like your wardrobe – once in a while it needs a good old declutter and tidy up. I’ve added my favourite loving kindness meditation to my daily schedule and even recorded a new version of it to send to all my clients and friends. And, of course, I’m going to share it with you too. Upping your self-love practice doesn’t have to be complicated – for example, it can be as simple as changing the way you speak about yourself to others, and to yourself, as you’ll discover in the positive affirmation exercise; moving on from a friendship that’s draining you, as you start to truly value yourself; and knowing you are enough, as you’ll see when you get to the being enough and love letter exercises later on. You’ll find plenty of exercises in this chapter to help you work out a self-love practice that works for you and I’m so excited about the benefits I know it’s going to bring to you!
Soothing ourselves
I believe that as a society we have never needed self-love and self-care as much as we do now. People are under so much stress with the pace of life, juggling careers and home lives, not to mention the pressure placed on us by social media and our high-tech lives. “I’m overwhelmed” is probably the concern I hear the most in my practice. At times I feel that too and those are the days that I meditate twice as much. Self-love and self-care are what we need to soothe ourselves.
Many of my clients, no matter how successful they are professionally, lack something in their personal lives and that something is love, especially self-love. I’ve seen the most powerful and strong business people moved to tears (even those who tell me they never cry) when I have simply asked them to put their hands over their hearts and then say something nice to themselves, like “I’ve got this” or “I’m doing the best I can and that’s enough.” It seems so crazy to think that we would say such things to our friends all the time, yet neglect saying them to ourselves.
So throughout this chapter I want to share with you some of the most powerful tools, which I use with my clients and for myself, to awaken your self-love. To love yourself is your birthright, it’s within you, but it may take some practice to become really good at it and that’s okay. With the toolbox I’ve created for you, in time loving yourself will become second nature.
Loving myself
My mum taught me to love and respect myself, but later in life I realized that I had spent a lot of my adult life looking for love outside of myself. I used to love the phrase “you complete me”, until I kept finding myself in relationships that didn’t really complete me at all. It took me losing my sense of who I was in a relationship before I truly was able to come home to me, and love myself the way I wanted someone else to love me.
Being back on the dating scene in my 30s and not knowing how that whole thing worked, really pushed me to stop and look at my love relationship with myself. I think back then I had actually been running from it because I didn’t want to face it, so I didn’t spend much time alone. I kind of feared being alone or ending up alone. It was during this time I learnt what it meant to really love and respect myself. As my love for myself grew, I started to respect myself more in every relationship and stopped being worried about whether my approach to each relationship was the right one. When I started to realize that what I was seeing in other people, good or bad, was my own reflection I started to make other choices for myself.
I became so aware of my patterns, and my strengths and weaknesses – the things I loved and the things I wanted to improve on within myself. It became obvious to me that if I was not settled within, and if I didn’t really know who I truly was, that was exactly what I would attract in the other person. I remember being in a relationship that was pretty happy, but behaving in a jealous way (without good reason). As much as I tried not to feel jealous, it kept happening. It was super unflattering and really out of character for me and how I actually believed a relationship should be. I realized I had dragged my past of hurt and disappointment into that relationship and I was projecting my insecurity in a really ugly way.
I knew I had some work to do within myself to be able to trust someone again and that started with loving myself and knowing that I am enough no matter what happens to me, so I left the relationship and began to really work on building my self-love. Thank goodness I did because the next relationship I had was with my now husband and throughout our 10 years together we have had to spend a lot of time apart. I cannot imagine how that would have ever succeeded if I had not worked on my wounds and made the decision to trust and love with an open heart again – being jealous on our busy schedules would have been a disaster.
What are you searching for?
If you want to align yourself with attracting relationships that feel good, where there is mutual respect and joy, your mission needs to be to work on your self-love. Imagine all of the energy you waste looking for those things outside of yourself – now you can spend that time on you. If you are willing to invest in being in a relationship to love someone else, surely you can start by giving yourself some of that support, love, strength and care. Once you start to believe that all relationships are mirrors reflecting back the healed and the unhealed within you, working on yourself suddenly becomes very attractive. As you probably know exactly what it is you would like to attract.
As I shared with you above, in the past I have been guilty of searching for happiness and love outside of myself and really ignoring my own power. I would like you to tune in for a moment and ask yourself: What am I searching for outside of myself? It was a game changer for my own self-love when I realized I am in charge of making myself feel loved, safe, heard, strong and confident. The self-compassion practice (see pages 129–30) will support you in this too.
“If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others. In relationship with others, the other is nothing but a mirror.”
Osho
Keeping an open heart
Many people close their hearts or create an invisible wall after a relationship break-up. They become so frightened of getting their heart broken again that they go from relationship to relationship or settle for someone they know deep down is not right for them, and in the process they end up hurting themselves. This can happen when friendships break down too. When we close our hearts because of hurt or anger, love can’t flow in or out and even our own self-love gets suffocated. My husband and I had both had our hearts broken, and I’ll never forget the day we looked each other in the eyes and agreed that we were in deep trouble. We knew we had both opened our hearts fully and if it wasn’t going to last it was going to hurt. We both jumped in and committed to our relationship that day and invested emotionally as two equals.
I have come to believe that when we are brave we get rewarded. When we are willing to open our hearts to love fully we open ourselves up to the possibility that we might get hurt, but we also open up to the possibility that we may love and be loved beyond our wildest dreams. If we are not willing to risk anything, chances are like anything else in life the return probably won’t be great. I believe we will attract what we are willing to give.
Hypnotherapist Marisa Peer explains how important it is to not carry the hurt with us, but express it as soon as we can. She says that when we are balanced we are able to say to the person, “You hurt my feelings when you…” By doing so we let it go so it doesn’t fester in our body and we are able to open our hearts again.
You are enough
One of the most fundamental things in our lives – I think of it as the foundation our lives are built on – is to know that no matter what has happened to you in life you are 100 per cent enough, always enough. When you can say, “I am enough”, and truly mean it, you are well on your journey to loving yourself. We are all born enough, but somehow through life this belief is challenged. If there are areas of your life where you are not feeling enough, the chances are that this belief was created when you were a child and it’s lingering in your unconscious mind. There are many different situations that can make a child feel they are not enough. Examples might be being bullied or your parents getting divorced and one parent leaving you behind to start another family. You might have felt “Why me?”, “Aren’t I enough for you?” and from that moment the feeling of not being enough was created. Many of my clients ask me to do hypnosis with them to explore why they feel this way.
“I am enough” seems like such a simple statement, but these three words are far from simple. They are very powerful and when we can say them to ourselves and about ourselves, and really believe them to be true, we feel empowered and can more easily love ourselves. Feeling that you are enough solves lots of situations. For example, when we don’t feel we are enough we take it personally when someone comments on our work or something we have created. When we feel we are enough, we are able to see the comment as just someone’s else perspective and not think “I’m useless” or “I’m worthless” or “They don’t like me.” Feeling you are enough means you know that their opinion about you, or what you have made or created, does not define who you are because you are enough.
Sarah’s story
My client Sarah had been dating a guy for a year and desperately wanted the relationship to move onto the next level. At the same time she would often complain about the way he spoke to her disrespectfully and his lack of communication whenever it suited him – he was always leaving her hanging, while she waited for him to get in touch. She had fallen for him and told herself, and me, that he was the one, even if there were things about his behaviour she did not agree with. She would even make excuses and defend his poor behaviour at times.
When I asked her how it made her feel when he treated her this way and what she really wanted to say to him, she said she felt disrespected, doubted herself and felt that she was not good enough. She really wanted to tell him that his behaviour was not okay, but she was afraid that if she did he would break up with her. I asked her to reflect back over her life and notice if there were other times when she had felt this way. She said that when she was a child she felt that her parents didn’t have time for her and they left her on her own a lot or with different nannies or family members. It made her feel as if she was not a priority, not worthy of their time or love and not important to them. Looking back over that situation she became aware that his behaviour was a familiar pattern being played back to her and although she knew how to cope with it because the situation was similar to her childhood dynamics, it wasn’t what she ultimately wanted from a relationship. She also understood now that it wasn’t that her parents didn’t care about her; they were doing what they thought best by providing a steady income and good schooling, which meant them being away from home and her. Later she also discovered they had their own relationship difficulties, which helped her accept that they did what they could from what they knew and their limitations. This is often the case – parents do the best they can given their conditioning through childhood and their circumstances. It may not be what you would have done or what you find acceptable, but it can help to understand it from a different perspective.
I asked her what she would advise her best friend to do in the same circumstances. She said, “I would tell her to know her worth, respect herself and know that she is 100 per cent enough and deserves someone who sees that and loves her the way she loves them.” I asked her if she was willing to accept that advice for herself. It took a moment and a lot of tears before she said, “I’m going to work on loving myself and I don’t want a relationship until I’m ready to go into one knowing I am enough.” I was extremely proud of her coming to this conclusion and excited to watch her blossom on her self-love journey. What catapulted Sarah to look at her wounds was a romantic relationship, but the same conclusion could have been reached through any type of relationship. It is not so much about the relationship or the challenge, but more about what it brings to the surface to be acknowledged and healed.
Withholding love
If someone withheld love from you as a child, you may withhold love yourself or have become a needy adult – perhaps you have become fixated on wanting love from a particular person and, as a result, you’ve been willing to accept crumbs. Let’s just unravel this for a moment. Let’s say your parent didn’t show you that love because they didn’t love themselves, that because of their own conditioning they didn’t know how to give that love to someone. Have you ever considered that? Often when we understand that person’s full conditioning, how they were raised, their limitations, we start to understand the reason why that person wasn’t able to give us what we needed emotionally, why they only gave us “crumbs”. I like the analogy of accepting crumbs because really I’m sure you deserve the whole cake, and as you fall more and more in love with yourself, you will come to know that too.
And, by the way, what’s that person’s story, in your life now, who is giving you crumbs? Do they love themselves enough to know how to give love? Are they ready to be in a relationship? Or are you perhaps subconsciously the one who is withholding love because that way you won’t get hurt? Are you receiving crumbs because that’s all you believe you deserve or because you are only really giving crumbs yourself?
We’ve all been in situations where we fall out with someone we care about, but both parties are too proud or stubborn to say sorry. Instead we both withhold love from one another, until one of the parties suddenly reaches out and then all is forgotten. The same goes for a situation that is frustrating you beyond belief – you are actually better off sending that situation and the people love rather than anger and hate, even just in your mind, because clearly love is what is needed for it to be resolved, healed or for you to let it go, and sending love rather than negative thoughts will serve you better. It may be that the relationship is beyond repair and that it has caused a lot of hurt and upset, but you will feel a greater peace within when you wish that person well in some way, whether that’s by wishing for them to find love within, healing or happiness – in essence, by doing so, you are letting yourself off the hook from needing to hold a grudge against that person. When we hold a grudge, it is only ourselves that we hurt.
“Withholding love is a form of self-sabotage, as what we withheld from others, we are withholding from ourselves.”
Marianne Williamson
Become your own thought detective
To truly know your own worth you have to be willing to start celebrating yourself, stop putting yourself down and stop comparing yourself to others. I want you to learn to be your own thought detective. Start to notice how you are feeling in different situations during the day, especially the moments that challenge your self-worth. It can also help to write your feelings down on your phone or in your journal. What were you doing in that moment? Who were you speaking to and so on? When you notice your sense of self-worth switching, notice what it is triggering in you and try to change your actions and switch to focusing on having a more compassionate mindset in that moment.
If you know hanging out with certain people is going to make you feel crap, why are you doing it? Is that what loving yourself looks like? No! If you are following certain people online and they make you feel awful about yourself, unfollow! At the dreaded annual company or family party when that one person corners you and you can feel they are dumping on you and making you feel bad, have an excuse up your sleeve and politely finish the conversation and move along. You do not have to stay and listen and be dumped on emotionally and verbally if you don’t want to, just to avoid upsetting someone and at the expense of your wellbeing.
Knowing your worth is also about having the courage to choose relationships that are going to lift you up. Be confident that if you pass on a relationship or move on from someone another one that is better aligned with you will appear. When you know your worth you stop comparing yourself to others and putting yourself down and you start choosing relationships and the company of people that lift you and light you up. See pages 89–90 for a great exercise that helps you cut the cord with negative people in your life.
Reframing with positive affirmations will support your self-love and self-worth journey and it’s a tool you can use all day long. By the end of the chapter I’m hoping you will be a reframe champion!
Meeting your needs
Time after time my clients tell me they are scared to be honest with their partners about what they need from the relationship. It is really important to have this conversation at the beginning, and that includes for work relationships too. If we fail to communicate what we want, for fear of losing the relationship, our needs won’t be met and we risk losing ourselves – we shrink to fit and that will cause its own pain and frustration, leading to both physical and emotional problems.
Self-love leads to higher self-esteem and as a result your needs are more likely to be met in a relationship. When your love for yourself and your self-esteem is high it becomes logical and totally okay for you to communicate your needs in any relationship. You will ask for what you want in an authentic, assertive and confident way rather than being needy and fearful of the outcome and you will be able to move on more easily if the needs you have communicated are not accepted.
“If you communicate one thing but want another, it’s incongruent. No one is going to read your mind. If you want something you are going to have to ask for it.”
“If I love myself I love you, If I love you, I love myself.”
Rumi
Body image
I’ve had many clients who struggle with body image issues. By the time I see them they have often tried all sorts of diets, abused their bodies and each time ended up back in the same place because the root cause is still there lingering in their subconscious. And that is not going to be conquered by any diet – only with LOVE.
Falling in love with our bodies can be hard. Many of us have a skewed idea of what we look like and are constantly striving to perfect our bodies and looks. However, no amount of looking good is going to make you feel good if you don’t love what’s inside of you. You will be striving for perfection, the unreachable, and there will always be something that will catch your attention that you are not going to like. That’s why Simone’s story struck a chord with me…
“I stopped waiting for you to see it, I stopped waiting for you to say it, And I just looked myself in the mirror and said, I LOVE YOU.”
In New Zealand earlier this year, I went to the launch of Simone Anderson’s book Journey to Health. It was an inspiring and heartfelt evening. I read in an article she had described “her health to be at stake” before she started her weight-loss journey and that her relationship with food was one where “food brought her happiness”. Simone became an Instagram sensation for documenting her very honest weight-loss story, inspired many and built a strong following. She lost 194lb in a year, but no matter how amazing that is, it was something else about her story that really touched me that evening.
At the launch I remember her mother saying that her daughter’s weight-loss journey had “started with her deciding to love herself”. That to me was everything. Right there, that’s it, guys, that’s where healing starts by loving ourselves right here where we are, not where we are going to be. By meeting our own needs, soothing ourselves and treating ourselves lovingly just the way we all deserve. Simone said she actually chose to love her excess skin before deciding to have surgery to remove it.
“It’s quite simple, when you love yourself you make different choices for yourself.”
A diet might sometimes feel like a quick solution, but it’s not the long-term answer that’s going to make you feel good in your body at all times – that happens only when we choose to LOVE LOVE LOVE ourselves. Every shape is beautiful and it’s far more important to focus on being healthy and to learn to accept and love yourself than what diet to try next.
I truly believe that when we love and respect ourselves we become unafraid of showing up in the world the way we were born to show up.
Bernadette’s story
“A friend gave me Camilla’s number and said, “Call this Life Coach. I think she’s perfect for you.” I was looking to work with a coach that understood how to boost confidence and give me mind tools I could use in my career and sports. As I was putting Camilla’s phone number in my phone, I dialled her by mistake and she happened to pick up as she was driving. I was planning to call her in a few weeks, but when she picked up something told me it was meant to be and I had to book in immediately.
Never in a million years did I know when I started working with her two years ago, to gain more confidence, that I would be going on an inward journey that would prepare me for the toughest year of my life. It was a year when some of my most precious relationships got challenged and a lot of the year was spent in different hospitals visiting my dearest. In one year I almost lost my brother just before we lost both my dad and then my mother. It was a year I would not wish upon anyone – so extremely emotional, sad and exhausting.
Thank goodness I had carried on working on myself with Camilla. We worked on different subtle wounds hidden in my subconscious and the importance of self-love and self-care, and the importance of having a deeper connection with the breath.
I honestly don’t know how I would have gotten through this time without the mindful tools Camilla gave me. With so much going on around you, it’s easy to get caught up and neglect yourself and I was close at times, but Camilla would remind me that then I was no good to anyone. I needed to look after myself, sleep, meditate and eat well. Being able to pick myself up and centre myself helped me beyond belief. I wasn’t just able to show up fully for myself, but I was able be there for my parents when they needed me the most and also be there for my siblings. I can’t believe it took such a life-challenging situation for me to truly know that loving yourself and knowing your worth and that you are enough really is so vital in life in whatever you are going through, and that really helps you make choices in life that are aligned with that even in the most difficult times.”
What we can learn from Bernadette’s situation is that self-love sees us through even the roughest of rides. With self-love comes resilience and inner strength to carry on in the moments where we feel like we can’t.
Self-compassion and your heart
Self-compassion is important to boost self-love. It means to be compassionate to ourselves whether things are going well or not, and it means being able to forgive ourselves when things are tough. It means meeting yourself exactly where you are at and knowing that you matter in this world and that you are lovable.
This exercise is an alternative to the traditional mindfulness-based loving kindness meditation, a practice I urge you to make your best friend. It’s impossible really to talk about love and then not talk about our powerful hearts (we’ve already looked at how everything is vibration on page 33). One of the things I have learnt by studying and teaching the chakras, or energy fields, in the body (see page 148), is that we often try to “work things out logically” in our minds and are completely disconnected from the feelings in our heart. When all we have to do is listen to how we feel to find the answers. There is an excellent saying I try to live by that goes “You know the truth by how it makes you feel”. However, sometimes we ignore this because it’s not what we want to be feeling and if we act on it, it won’t lead us towards the outcome we think we want in that moment. So we ignore how we feel and stay figuring it out in our minds.
When we drop into our hearts this beautiful feeling area, we are able to connect to a powerful source of energy. In her book High on Heart my dear colleague Jessie May Wolfe explains the power of our hearts: “Your heart’s electromagnetic field holds enough power to light up a small city.” Some will even say there is a “heart brain”. I have experienced many profound moments with my clients where they have allowed themselves to drop out of their thoughts and logical minds – away from the “should”, “must” statements – and into the feeling and the guidance in their hearts. It’s often like a light-bulb moment – suddenly they know exactly what feels right to them and what they need to do.
Knowing what I know now about self-compassion, having studied and taught different mindfulness practices and truly understood the benefits of having a daily self-compassion practice, it’s beyond me why we aren’t all taught this at school. In one of my favourite books, The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook, Tim Desmond explains how the brain has a care circuit, which creates the experience of compassion, warmth and love. And with compassion training this can actually grow in size. When it’s activated through self-compassion, it can reduce every form of emotional distress, including anxiety, anger and depression. It’s a powerful practice and one that has seen many of my clients through difficult times and supported them through anxiety and stress.
I guess the first couple of times I was encouraged to put my hands over my heart and say something kind or loving to myself, I didn’t really understand how powerful a practice it actually is, but it didn’t take long to feel the difference it was making to my life and my clients.
Mind Maintenance
To help you stay with this feeling of self-love, I’d like you to do the following every day for a week:
Meditate: Take a few minutes to connect to your breath by simply observing how the breath is flowing through the body.
Reflect: Start to reflect on the following sentence: I choose to love myself because I am love.
Journal: Write down what came to mind, without judging it. Perhaps even acknowledging how your love for yourself has improved from when you started this chapter to now. Even just being open to the idea is movement in a positive direction that will support you.
So I hope you’re feeling fulfilled and enriched by a feeling of self-love. I’m now going to show you how to maintain that and take good care of yourself. See you in the next chapter.
