Seriously Souled 10-day journey - Love by Ilana Cowland

can you love another if you don't love yourself of course you can't love another if you don't love yourself how can you possibly be worried about somebody else if you don't have the tools um to treat the first person in your life well however there's good news over here and that is that when the torah discusses love the torah says love shalt love by neighbor and then it adds a magic word as you love yourself the turret doesn't say love yourself and then learn to love your neighbor the torah says love your neighbor that's the commandment as you already love yourself that's the assumption we have self-love what we've done is we've created habits and patterns that have disconnected us from our innate and self-love we're going to run through a bunch of behaviors and patterns that many of us do and that really gets in the way of our own self-love and i want you to pick one just pick one that you do and pick the um suggested alternative behavior and see if over this month by by following the instructions you can minimize this contradiction to self-love okay i abuse my body okay people do this very often um and we're not kind to ourselves very often and then we get into like you're just not expecting to feel love so if you abuse your body um obviously you know you shouldn't but in the meantime at least do something kind to thank your buddy if you're taking yourself to the gym then buy yourself an ice cream um you know if you're working too hard um then schedule some nap time get yourself something nice give yourself a message do something to counter how much pressure you put on your body that says thank you to your body i have bad self-talk you know very often we say things to ourselves and i get caught because i have children so survivors like i'm so stupid because i forgot to take something out of the oven or whatever you know um my kids will like correct me they'll say mom you're not stupid and i'll say i know i'm not stupid but you said you're stupid i'm like i didn't you know stupid what i meant was it was stupid stick it um but we do this very often to the point where we start to believe ourselves a lifetime the bible says stupid you start to believe it so when you hear yourself saying something negative out loud offer a correction uh i'm not so stupid i'm just distracted um i i'm not a failure uh i'm learning out loud offer a contradiction that's easier on you told you until you learn to replace negative self-talk with something a little bit more um compassionate i guess i don't believe in myself enough okay i love this one because you know people who really don't believe themselves don't realize that they don't believe in themselves okay they just think that what they're believing is true when people feel that they don't believe themselves enough what it means is they understand already that they should believe themselves more so i don't believe myself enough actually is or i don't believe in myself that being being frustrated by a little bit you believe in yourself is already an indication that you know you need to be leaving yourself more that's self-love okay i wasn't told i was loved so i'm sorry kids ought to be told that they loved it builds the core and it's very painful and people weren't you know but what people didn't do is not only exist for what we do and if we haven't been told by the people who are responsible for our self-building that that uh that we are that we were loved that they love us then we need to take over that process and say okay that happened and that was them not taking their responsibility seriously but i'm taking over the responsibility i'm going to give myself the love that i need um even though the people who should have didn't [Music] i hate a part of my body you're thinking one part okay how many parts you want um so the body is served as a function our noses are there to smell not to look pretty our mouths are there to taste and to eat and to speak uh yeah our teeth are there to bite they don't have to perfect our eyes are there to see they don't have to be blue or whatever your preference is um we have learned to value our body for what society has told us it needs to look like without really paying attention to the fact that bodies are there for a function so if there's a part of your body that you don't like focus on the function you know if you hate your feet because they're too big love your feet because they walk you everywhere you know if you hate your your ears because uh they're the wrong size and say thank you to them um because they listen for you every day even though you're mean to them focus on the function it'll give you a better relationship with your body parts the voice of a parent is in my head nope the voice of a parent is not in your head the voice in the parent was in your head and now it's your voice proliferating your parents voice if you have a voice that is telling you things that are negative they are not in the room they are not talking to you they have voices in your head but it's your choice to not proliferate that so when you hear it wreck it treat it as a thought okay here it is again it's just the sky it's my thought it's just disguised as my mom or my teacher or my brother or so so okay oh it's gone okay thoughts are just thoughts don't give them more power than they deserve [Music] i'm too harsh on myself okay so it's okay to be harsh on yourself um as long as when you are being harsh on uh the things that you've done wrong you're also taking credit for the things that you've done right um when we only focus on the things that we're not doing enough of um then then we really fall into bad patterns but if we could say it's true that i didn't get to the uh to my thesis you know but i did do a lot of my exams uh you know so so we can actually create a balance in terms of how we're overall judging ourselves i'm anxious yep we get anxious and i'm not talking about clinical anxiety over here but when we get very very very over stressed our thoughts go crazier our heart rate goes our heart goes up if you find yourself having negative thoughts when you're very stressed simple exercise is identify those moments and take two minutes to breathe really [Music] it slows you down it slows your heart rate down it slows your mind down it slows your stress down and then you can recalibrate so when you're having anxiety moments take time to breathe i focus on my weaknesses your weaknesses are the flip sides of your strengths if you're disorganized it's also because you're chilled out and if you are uh you know i don't know forgetful it's also because you have a wonderful imagination and if you are over sensitive it's also because you're amazing paying attention to detail you can work on your weaknesses but recognize that they are sourced in your strengths and give yourselves credit for that and and recognize that there's advantages to our weaknesses i'm self-obsessed you're thinking self-obsessed i thought you were that lack of self-love yup low self-esteem brings self-obsession if all you can think about it is you it's because you're clamoring to give yourself something because you're um in such a bad place do something kind for others it'll take your mind off yourself and actually make you make yourself feel better about yourself and i can't say no don't say no say not now it's a great uh it's a great way to build our ability to protect ourselves from being overloaded by people who demand too much we have a wonderful wonderful and uh remember self love is innate we just gotta get back to we've got to get those bad habits out of the way and then we'll find that it was there all along [Music] you