It’s so easy ignore ourselves.
When I was a kid, my family were in a school run/carpool with a few other families. One of the mums was a lovely, tiny Scottish lady. It was in the days before seat belts were a thing (yes, I am that old), so whenever she braked or went around a corner, she’d throw her arm out to pin me against the front seat.
Sometimes I’d ride to school sitting on hay bales in the back of a Land Rover (we were very much country mice), and sometimes I’d ride there lying above the engine on the platform at the back of an orange VW camper van. It was an eclectic mix.
But back to the Scottish lady, and her words of wisdom:
She observed one day, as she was talking to my Mum, that most of the women she knew must have the word GUILT running down the middle of them like a stick of Blackpool rock. And that if you cut them open, it’d be there for all to see.
NOTE: I’ve never tried it, and I certainly don’t recommend it, but I think she might have had a point. And it’s not just women.
We’re told when we’re tiny that we have to share. We’re told that it’s bad to be selfish. We’re rewarded for self-sacrifice, and lauded for always putting others first. Well, OK, if not lauded, then maybe criticised slightly less.
And all of this can conspire to create a subconscious belief that we’re not worthy of good things. That we’re not worthy of kind words, that we’re not worthy to be paid at a level that sustains us, and that we’re not worthy of happiness.
Another wise woman, an American this time, told me to stop waiting for people to tell me the things that I wanted to hear. How about, she suggested, I say the words that I was craving to hear?
Try it, it’s a life-changer. Seriously empowering.
Instead of waiting for someone to tell you how great you are, tell yourself. Tell yourself that you are loved, and that what you do is worthwhile, and that you are worthy of Good Things. Tell yourself everything that you want to hear from someone else. Use all of the words that you wish <insert person’s name here> would say to you.
This is not to say that relationships with other people are pointless, far from it. But it’s also worth pointing out that none of us can have a healthy relationship with someone else without first having a good relationship with ourselves. This is the energy of the Sacral Chakra. Our emotions can guide us away from what makes us feel sad, bad or mad, and towards what makes us glad.
If we listen to them.
I can now accept that loving myself is the best way to achieve what I want to achieve. I can accept that I must treat myself with love to become the best version of myself, and I can accept that simply doing this has given me a new lease of life. The short cut for me was Chakra work, but you do you, Boo.
You’re not obligated to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. And if you’ve been self-sacrificing - ask yourself this, did it get you what you wanted? Or did it just get you more of the same?
But let’s revisit our relationships with other people for a moment. Do you treat yourself the way you treat the people you love? Do you talk to yourself in the same way? Or do you call yourself names and put yourself last? Do you constantly reinforce the feeling that you’re not worthy by treating yourself the way you’d never treat anyone else?
I’m going to ask you a question now - what if you were already worthy? Just the way you are now? What if you didn’t need to change anything before you were worthy? Could you think for a second how you might change the way you treated yourself?
Would you eat better? Sleep more? Talk to yourself nicer? Exert your boundaries more?
What would you do if you were already worthy?
Flick that switch, it’s worth it. And if you need any help with working out what ‘feeling good’ looks like for you, then try out The Joy Edit. It’s what it was created to do.
Love,
Alli