Self-Love: The One Thing That Changes Everything
In my work as a licensed doctor of psychotherapy, I have studied pretty much every modality out there, from EMDR, to cognitive behavioral therapy, to plant medicine.
And, by far, the most powerful and effective modality I have found, through the decades of my practice, is self-love. In fact, recently one of my clients shared that she felt she received more helpful guidance in one session around self-love than in a year of more traditional therapy.
I did not learn anything about self-love in all the years of my clinical training. Instead, I learned about self-love through my own experiences in the trenches of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Self-love completely saved my life. That sounds dramatic, but it really is the truth. Self-love completely saved my life, and every gift that I have in my life, everything that is going well in my life, is absolutely because of self-love.
If we want to do any single practice to help ourselves feel better and to literally transform both our inner and external worlds, self-love is the number one thing that we can do.
And self-love is a practice that we can do completely on our own; it is free; and it is available to us 24/7. There is pretty dense programming in our society that you need to go to therapy to transform your life. And I am here to say, as a therapist, that I do not believe that this is true. I believe that we all have everything we need within us to transform our lives. I have witnessed this over and over again with my clients. Self-love is one of the most powerful tools that we have.
And one of the reasons why I am so passionate about sharing about self-love, and especially self-love practices, is because we all hear that we are supposed to love ourselves. We all know that this is true, but I know for me it took a long time to figure out what that actually meant in my daily life. I struggled with what I could actually do, to love myself.
So I want to share 10 tangible self-love practices that myself and thousands of clients have used with immense success. These are self-love practices that you can implement and embody TODAY!
- I. Set self-love intentions
- 2. Use self-love affirmations
- 3. Practice presence with yourself
- 4. Spend time alone with yourself
- 5. Act from your own values
- 6. Privilege your own dreams
- 7. Do not settle in your life
- 8. Pivot where your own intuition is leading you
- 9. Act from faith, not fear
- 10. Release yourself from participating in any non-loving interactions
And further, my number one overarching practice of self-love is self-trust: a complete trust of yourself, a complete honoring of yourself, a complete acceptance of yourself. This means that whatever is arising within me, I am honoring it – whether it is an uncomfortable feeling emerging; whether it is a desire I have; whether it is a red flag that is coming up; whether it is a dream that is coming through me; whether it is a value that I am deeply connecting with. This is a comprehensive, radical, ubiquitous honoring/trust/privileging of yourself. This orientation is the number one practice that I embody myself and that I guide my clients to embody, and it undergirds all the practices that I have shared above. This does not mean that we can’t listen to other people or seek advice or guidance, but it does mean that we run everything through our own intuition, our own guidance system, our own gut instinct. We are sovereign beings, with the final answers to be found within ourselves. This one practice alone will change your life!
In my own experience, through the practice of self-love, I have seen profound changes in every area of my life, from leaving behind anxiety, depression, and loneliness, to enjoying financial abundance, a successful career, loving relationships, and improved health and appearance. (Yes, self-love helps us look our best!) And, I also know that no matter what is happening externally, I know there is a place within me that is ever full of love. One of my very favorite self-love affirmations is: I am deeply loving myself through this.
We can all embrace self-love in our own lives, we can all transform our own lives, and we can all be ambassadors of the self-love revolution!
Self-love: the one thing that changes everything.
With every blessing,
Dr. Tassel Faith Shanebrook, Ph.D.
Visionary & Founder, YOU ARE YOUR OWN HERO