3 rituals to deepen your self-love practice

3 rituals to deepen your self-love practice & simultaneously improve your existing relationships, business, career, health, or love-life

It’s no surprise, I hope, that the secret magic sauce we all need when wanting to improve our lives – no matter what area, is to go deeper into our self-love and self-worth practices.

Some of us have been on a self-love journey for a long time already and we realized that self-love is like an onion: we keep peeling off layers after layers, year after year, and getting much closer to our core essence. Only to find that our damn core is like:

“Surpriiiiise, I have many layers too, HA!”

And so we keep going. Sounds familiar?

Here are 3 self-love practices that will help you dig deeper and work through some more layers:

1) The “Just for today I release all worries” practice

As women, especially as old, empathic souls, it seems to me that we are naturally programmed to be worried about everyone and everything, all of the time.

Is it realistic to set an intention to never worry anymore? Or to listen to someone tell us:

“Hey, don’t worry so much?” Probably not. Just as “just calm down” never calmed anyone down. Ever! However, what helps is to sit down and to meditate:

• Take a few deep breaths in, still your mind as much as possible, and allow yourself to receive images for all the things (small & big) you have been worrying about: sick loved ones, your partner’s mental health, your mum’s worries that suddenly became your own too, your job, your finances, your body & your diet, your kids acting up, the world at large, social justice causes you’re fighting for, the environment or anything else you’ve been thinking about excessively.

• Place each one into a bubble and repeat: “Just for today I choose to not worry about you.”

• Observe how the bubble flows into the sky or how it pops and disappears.

• Do this until all your worries were placed into a bubble.

• Of a worry comes back because it’s all-consuming at the moment, place it lovingly back into a new bubble and repeat the sentence again.

• When you’re ready, take a few deep breaths in, exhale through your mouth and open your eyes.

2) The “I choose compassion over worry” practice

This is a beautiful practice in so many ways. We are not choosing to look away from our own pain, someone else’s suffering or the problems we co-created as human beings on a societal/institutional level.

We don’t look away from the fact that, right now, we might not look or feel our best. That we put on weight, or that our mental health has been deteriorating lately, which has us deeply worried.

How about, instead, we practice having self-compassion?

Self-compassion means we surrender to the “what is”. Yes, right now we truly do not look our best, let alone feel our best. But we surrender to the fact that this is how we are feeling in this moment in time, and we choose to love ourselves anyway.

We can hold multiple realities at once: the one where we don’t feel good right now and accept ourselves the way we are, and simultaneously we can hold space for wanting to feel and look better without the negative self-talk.

Holding the frequency of compassion for others:

When we witness someone else suffering, we can practice compassion too:

Of course, there are many different types of situations and some people’s suffering is self-inflicted. Ie continuously suffer from a burn-out because that person hasn’t learned to find their limits, to say “no”, to have strong boundaries in place.

Or someone who is not following the diet they should and suffer from food intolerances, allergies, bloating, mind fog, or more severe diseases because of obesity.

We can see how they are suffering and how they are not exercising their free will to put an end to it by making decisions that are empowering.

We can love them the way they are AND we can hold a vision, a prayer, that they may find themselves again and take decisions that are in their highest good.

We can have compassion for where they are at right now. Worrying about someone, especially excessively, won’t help anyone. On the contrary: I have been working with women who were worried about a parent, for instance, who was thriving on that “worry-energy”. That’s exactly what they wanted: the worry, the constant attention, being the center of attention. Being compassionate sometimes can mean that we become fierce when we speak our truth. It can sound like:

“You don’t want to feel better, mum, all you want is for people to feel sorry for you.”

And then there are situations where people suffer because of things that happened that was out of their control:

Ie someone who had a bike accident and is going through a lot of pain until their body is fully healed or a female friend who is suffering from sexual harassment, microaggressions, or racism at work. We empower ourselves and them by practicing compassion:

“I see you suffering. May your suffering end. May you take an empowering decision for yourself. May this situation unfold in your favour. I am here to hold space for you.”

The same holds true for your kids: Whatever your child is going through, practice having compassion for where they are at right now, while simultaneously holding the vision of them feeling better.

3) The repeating of empowering affirmations.

Here are some affirmations to help you anchor in the frequency of compassion on a deeper level. The more you read and affirm, the more they will be anchored into your subconscious mind:

I am compassion.

I am ready & allowing myself to receive compassion.

I am ready & allowing of being compassionate.

I honour people’s struggles, pain, and suffering and the difficult paths they are on without burdening myself with their pain.

I believe in the healing power of compassion & the calmness it transmits.

I am a deeply compassionate woman & surrender my worries now.

I visualise the people who are suffering in their brightest light, their highest version of themselves.

I visualise myself in my brightest light and in my highest version.

I surrender my expectations of how and when someone needs to feel better and have faith that it will unfold in divine timing.

I am self-compassionate and take care of my own needs.

I surrender to any and all pain I have been feeling.

I allow the healing power of compassion to find me and to be embedded deep within me.

By practicing these rituals, we not only start feeling much lighter ( I know I do!), we also improve our energy levels, our health, mental health, our relationships in general, and also our love-live. I have improved many of these areas in my life and have accompanied clients who started to implement these routines into their lives and started to feel much better.

Of course, there is so much more I can say about this topic and many more tools to share, but for now I hope you found one or the other practice you wish to implement more of into your daily or weekly routines.

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