Chapter 1
The Magic Elixir
Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
Veronica A. Shoffstall
Imagine you could buy a potion that promised to increase your vital energy, knock years off your face by causing you to smile and laugh more and that would generally transform your life for the better. There would be a stampede to buy it! Well, here’s the secret: loving yourself is the magic elixir. And we can all have it!
If you have chosen to read this book, it is because the title and subject resonate with you at some level. That part of you is your soul, which longs for expression through experience. Truth and authenticity are the song of your soul. The Universe longs to express itself through you, joyfully and abundantly, dancing you into a state of happiness.
The physics of cosmology tells us that the Universe was born infinite. Everywhere that is here now was there at the moment of the Big Bang 13.75 billion years ago. Space-time has been expanding and stretching ever since. Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star. We are literally made of stardust. Your soul also came from the Universe and is made of the same stuff, and has the same tendency towards infinite expansion and growth.
How Long Does It Take to Love Yourself?
It is possible to change your life in an instant, a day or a week, but sustaining that change is the real challenge. It is like the difference between starting a diet and staying on it until you achieve your goal. By the time you have achieved that goal, the plan is that you will have a new set of beliefs and behaviours that allow you to sustain the positive changes. I am hoping that you will be able to love yourself in less than fifty years. If not, it takes as long as it takes.
The Irish healer, Michael Doherty, wrote about how bio energy healing was effective in alleviating conditions for many people – however, afterwards, sometimes the client’s condition worsened again. 1 The reason for this is that a healer can only do so much, and then it is up to the client to make the positive changes to support that work. Without that “change work” the effect of the healing dissipates.
Why might we be unwilling or unable to make the necessary positive changes? Our routines are what make us feel safe, so change can be uncomfortable and there is a universal resistance to it. Sometimes it is also because we have “secondary gain” from illness or staying stuck. If we are on sick leave from a job that we hate, for example, we may subconsciously sabotage the effort to get well. We may be in unhealthy relationships that we know are not good for us, but we are afraid of change, because “The devil you know is better than the one you don’t.” Relationships like these depend on all parties staying the same. The unwritten rule is: nobody changes. If one person changes, it throws a spanner in the works.
Loving yourself is the first step on the road to living more consciously. This book is about the journey to your authentic, true self. When you become able to love yourself, you become your real, best, and highest self. When this happens, you will know it. You will know because you will feel much more calm and peaceful inside, for more of the time. You will feel comfortable in your own skin perhaps for the first time ever. You will feel more grounded, more contented, energetic and joyful. This is your natural state, and your soul has been singing you home to it, all of your life.
What Qualifies Me to Write About This?
I was not able to love myself for a long, long time. Now that I do, I feel great and with the zeal of a convert, I want everyone to feel as good as I do! I’m also more than fifty years old. I am a clinical hypnotherapist with sixteen years’ experience in the field of managing the self. I am also an energy healer for both people and animals, and a registered general and paediatric nurse. As a therapist, I am only interested in using techniques that work. Everything in this book has helped me and my clients.
When is a Good Time to Start?
A tourist asks a farmer for directions to the Grand Canyon. The farmer scratches his head, thinks for a moment then says, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here at all.” Unlike the tourist, we have to start from where we are. There is no perfect time to start the work of loving yourself unconditionally. There will never be a perfect time. There is no time to wait until the dishes are washed or the end-of-year tax return is done. This is it. Now. One of the great things about getting older is the sense of urgency that arises as the road ahead looks shorter than the one behind. We are spiritual beings in a human body, here to learn and understand. Our time in this body, this life, is finite. If you believe in reincarnation, then you may get a chance to go round again. Or not. What if this is your last lifetime? What if this is your last year in this world? Who would you spend it with? What would you do? What would you not do anymore? Would you look at the world with fresh eyes? How would your life be different? We shouldn’t wait for terminal illness to strike to ask these questions and be guided by the answers.
How Will Loving Myself Improve My Life?
Loving yourself is the key to spiritual transformation. The fruit of this self-work is joy and happiness. We begin to discover that we are not isolated after all. We discover that we are, in fact, connected and have support available to us. If we choose, we can go to bed happy and wake up happy. We can laugh at the cats chasing each other in the garden, energised by the wild wind. We can have fun with our children. We can laugh at the enthusiasm of a dog running like crazy in the park. We can be grateful for making a new friend at a dance class. It is always the simple, real pleasures that bring us joy or happiness and that joy emerges from the inside out. It doesn’t come with any material possession, status or trip. All those things are peripheral and fleeting. But excavating our authentic selves gives us access to great vitality and inner power. It strengthens and raises our vibrations. As that happens, our ability to attract the opportunities, people, and prosperity we desire and deserve becomes exponentially stronger. We become a magnet, bringing all these things to us through the power of our own joy and happiness.
So Loving Myself Will Solve All My Problems?
Sadly, no. But what it will do is allow you access to a goldmine of inner resources and strengths to cope with whatever life brings. When things are going well, it will allow you to feel joy. When illness, injury, loss, or traumas occur (and they will, because they are part of life) loving yourself helps you get through in one piece.
How Do We Become Unloving To Ourselves?
To avoid being against others, people have been taught to love others INSTEAD of themselves.
Virginia Satir, Family Therapist
There are a myriad of ways for us to lose ourselves and feel disconnected from our tribe, or our source. This can lead us to wrongly believe that we are unloved, unlovable, unsupported, unable to change and powerless. There are a million ways for us to lose our sense of self and our self-affection, if indeed we ever had it in the first place. Here are a couple of them:
The Culture of Fear
The culture of fear can be acquired in childhood, through negativity in the home, school, or society in general. Children are like sponges that absorb the atmosphere surrounding them, good or bad, and the first seven years are especially crucial in terms of shaping the adult that follows.
The cultural expectations and the messages delivered through the media and the internet have an impact on us. Young girls receive damaging messages about their bodies and early exposure to sexual matters. Young boys receive messages that discourage open expression of their feelings, and that promote violence as the answer to conflict. In Western culture, there can be an absence of meaningful tribal or social ritual which marks important rites of passage as we move through life stages. This weakens our tribal connections and makes us feel isolated. It undermines our ability to see ourselves as part of a community, each with a valuable contribution to make and to benefit from the safety net of social support.
In later life, we can begin to understand how our negative conditioning has shaped us and held us back. If it happened over the course of twenty years then we might reasonably expect it to take twenty years to undo the damage and fly free. And it may. But it doesn’t have to. What I’ve observed over the years of offering therapy is that when a person is ready, the old patterns can dissolve quite quickly. Awareness is what starts the process of change. It is like water dislodging a dam which then disintegrates with apparent suddenness, when in actual fact it may have taken years to reach that tipping point of change and dissolution.
The Early Rocky Road: What We Need and What We Get
The family crucible shapes us. As children, we do not need perfect parenting. All we need is for it to be “good enough.” Sometimes, despite the best efforts of our parents, there may be gaps in our ability to have self-respect, self-affection or self-love.
A child who is not secure in the love of a parent or guardian is vulnerable. A child who grows up in the chaos of violence, drugs, alcohol, bullying, abuse or poverty is at risk and likely to make poor choices. A child who lacks safe boundaries in childhood and teenage years is easily drawn towards alcohol and drugs as a way of trying to belong to the tribe. And we are hardwired to belong, because we have the ancestral memory that to be outside the tribe equates to death.
What we missed out on – or perceive we missed out on – usually becomes our life’s mission. Part of my life’s mission, for instance, is comfort, due to an absence of comfort as a child. This relates to physical as well as emotional comfort. Not only do I dislike being uncomfortable myself, but I hate seeing others in discomfort as well. Sometimes this has led me to veer away from facing problems head on and therefore as a result, prolonging them. I have had to learn to acknowledge this tendency, grasp the nettle and do what needs to be done, discomfort or not.
Roles and Masks
With work or family, we take on roles and can over identify with them. We may think that those roles are precisely who we are: parent, child, spouse, worker, and friend. We can do the activities that all these roles require but they are still not us.
Years ago, I studied drama. For one production, we were asked to make our own masks. My mask was of a bird. The eyes were deliberately set crookedly so that I would have to tip my head to one side to see out through it. In order to don the mask I had to exhale, bend my head over, put the mask on and come back upright. When you were upright, you had become the part you were playing. You inhabited the mask as if it was you. Believing that we are our roles is like wearing that mask for so long that we forget we created it ourselves. The truth is that we are much, much more than any role we play.
Dissociation
When a meteorite hit the earth and caused the end of the cretaceous period by causing an ice age, many of the plants that survived did so by encasing their precious seed in the shell of a nut for protection. In the same way, our lost selves are hidden, armoured, but still hoping to emerge and fulfil their destiny. They never give up.
In psychology, this process is called dissociation. It can be a wise strategy for the short term. In the long term, however, it causes us problems because we are missing part of our true selves.
In shamanism, it is called soul loss, the loss of power that stems from being divided from our bodies and our feelings. The lost part goes to non-ordinary reality to hide. In that non-ordinary reality, the lost soul part may not know when it is safe to return, or how to return, and that is the job of a shaman – to journey to non-ordinary reality and return with the soul fragment, through the process of soul retrieval. The lost part is then symbolically breathed into the body.
Parts of us may have gotten lost through trauma, abuse or neglect. When trauma happens, the mind can unconsciously split itself off, in the effort to try and survive. We may unconsciously disconnect our spirits from our physical bodies. As children, we are hostages to fortune; we have no choice but to physically stay where we have landed. But our spirits have choice. Many people who have been abused describe out of body experiences, where they could see what was happening – as if it were happening to someone else. We may also zone out by getting stuck into television, computers, books, drugs or alcohol. The unconscious motto is “Anywhere but here.”
Once we become aware that we are lost, the next step is to consciously decide to do something in order to feel better. If the trauma has been severe, professional help is best because otherwise it can be overwhelming. It is important to find someone trustworthy and competent to help us, someone with whom we feel safe.
Exercise: Sit and Breathe
Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.
Thich Nhat Hanh
For minor trauma, we can start the healing process by ourselves. One exercise is to choose to sit and breathe. The breath actually consists of three parts – the In Breath, the Out Breath and the tiny moment of rest between the two, which I will call the Rest Moment. Slow the breathing down, and breathe in and out to a count of four. Once you know how long a “four” breath lasts, stop counting and just focus on the breath. Notice it going in and going out. Then pay attention to the Rest Moment. The Rest Moment is very relaxing and it slows down the rate of thoughts. It also begins to open up a healing space inside of us. This exercise is very simple and powerful. But simple does not mean easy. The ego will do its best to derail our focus. It will say things like: “This is silly. How can this help? Did I put frozen peas on the shopping list? I can’t concentrate so this is not working.” The trick is to continually return to the breath once we become aware we are thinking about frozen peas or whatever it might be. That is the kernel of the practice. Just stay with it, no matter what. This sitting meditation practice opens the space inside of us for our frozen hearts to thaw. With the thaw, tears may come. That’s okay. Think of tears as the ice melting in our hearts. It is good to allow this process to be gradual, because it prevents a storm of emotion flooding and overwhelming us. We can learn to re-parent ourselves, to calm and comfort our inner distressed selves, to re-integrate those selves with the adults we now are. This is the work. It takes as long as it takes. It is soul work. We are retrieving our own souls, no less.
The Energy Battery
When we do not love ourselves, quite often our lives are full of struggle. We are tired. Our life energy and vitality levels are low. A useful concept is the Energy Battery. It is as if we have only one Energy Battery to get us through the day. So what fills our Energy Battery? What drains it? For example, the things that I have found that add to my Energy Battery are:
A good night’s sleep
Daily mindfulness
Surreal humour
Daily yoga
Daily journaling
Doing things I love or playing
Fresh air and exercise
Writing
Gratitude
Sunshine
Being out in nature
Holidays
Dancing
Regular contact with supportive friends and family
Good healthy vegetarian food
Drinking plenty of filtered water
Interaction with animals
Spiritual practice
Appreciation of my health, gifts and blessings
The things that drain my Energy Battery are:
My negative thoughts and fears left unchecked
Vexatious people
The news on TV, radio, internet or newspapers
Alcohol, wheat and sugary foods
Anxiety, stress or worry
Jobs I don’t like that I have put on the long finger
Clutter in the house
Nothing to look forward to
Too many commitments
Saying yes when I should have said no
Assessment: Where Am I Now?
There is a simple tool to let you know your starting point for your journey. It is the SUD (subjective units of distress) scale developed by Dr Joseph Wolpe in 1969.
Imagine there is a scale that goes from zero to ten. Zero represents contempt and self-hatred. Five represents some affection for the self, some acceptance of the self as it currently is. Ten represents loving the self unconditionally. Take a deep breath. Close your eyes and allow a number between zero and ten to pop into your mind. That is where you are at the moment. The goal is to gradually move as close to ten as possible.
I suggest that you keep a journal to document this journey that you have begun. It will help to show you how much progress you have made when you look back on it. So what are the things that fill or drain your Energy Battery? Write them in your journal, and then resolve to let in more of what supports you. And resolve to let go more of what drains you.